Foundations, Part 1

Star Trek SCE (ebooks) Novellas #17

by Dayton Ward, Kevin Dilmore

Beginning an all-new trilogy that tells the origin of the S.C.E.! The U.S.S. da Vinci answers a distress call from a ship careening out of control after going through an ion storm. While researching similar events from the past in an attempt to find a solution, Lieutenant Commander Duffy comes across a piece of history.... One hundred and twelve years before the heyday of the da Vinci, Montgomery Scott took an assignment to the Romulan Neutral Zone to work alongside the crew of the U.S.S. Lovell and her staff from the Starfleet Corps of Engineers. But this S.C.E. is much different from the modern version‹a down-and-dirty team of technicians given the worst jobs in the fleet. When the repair of one of the Neutral Zone outposts goes horribly wrong, Scotty and the nascent S.C.E. team must work together to keep the outpost in one piece....

Genres: Star Trek, Science Fiction, Ebooks, Fiction, Technology, Space, Adventure

ebook

First published June 14, 2002

About the author

Dayton is a software developer, having become a slave to Corporate America after spending eleven years in the U.S. Marine Corps. When asked, he’ll tell you that he left home and joined the military soon after high school because he’d grown tired of people telling him what to do all the time.

Ask him sometime how well that worked out.

In addition to the numerous credits he shares with friend and co-writer Kevin Dilmore, he is the author of the Star Trek novels In the Name of Honor and Open Secrets, the science fiction novels The Last World War and The Genesis Protocol, and short stories which have appeared in the first three Star Trek: Strange New Worlds anthologies, the Yard Dog Press anthology Houston, We’ve Got Bubbas, Kansas City Voices Magazine and the Star Trek: New Frontier anthology No Limits. Though he currently lives in Kansas City with wife Michi and daughters Addison and Erin, Dayton is a Florida native and still maintains a torrid long-distance romance with his beloved Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Reviews

[Vic Page · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

Maybe not the greatest Trek premise, but enjoyable. It felt like a pretty good episode of the show. The most annoying part of it was how tenuous the connection is between the two timelines - otherwise, it'd be a four star.
Anyway, I'm always up for some good, moral and hardworkin' Trek characters. Definitely not complaining.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Template book, but I enjoyed it well enough.

[Margo · Rating 5 out of 5]

They didn't go kaboom!

[Chad · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first SCE novella to read. It's a nice little story, at least as much that a first part of a trilogy can be. The flashback to Scotty's time was why I'm reading it now, while the "normal timeline" period part of the story are from mostly new characters to me. I look forward to getting there and reading more of those when I get there. But, overall, I enjoyed the story itself, good start.

[Nicky2910 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Star Trek: S. C. E.: #17 Foundations, Part 1 by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore This is the opening part of a trilogy where Duffy finds inspiration for an engineering problem in the log entries dating a century back when Scotty first worked with the Corps of Engineers on the USS Lovell (see Vanguard).
 
And actually, the glimpse back to the crew of the Lovell was the highlight of this story so far because I really enjoyed them in the Vanguard-saga. Otherwise it's a pretty straight-forward retelling of "We have a problem, let's come up with a genius solution", so nothing really noteworthy - and it took me quite some time to gather up enough enthusiasm to actually finish the technobabble-part. And that's not a good sign despite the good characterization. Apart from the characters themselves, the setting in the past is another nod back to TOS-times with one of the asteroids/outposts surrounding the Romulan Neutral Zone (Balance of Terror).
 
I hope this trilogy will pick up speed a bit in the next part - and I hope to get another glimpse at the SCE of the 23rd century.

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Da Vinci finds a very old spaceship that cannot slow down. To help the crew look into the history of the Engineering corps, including a mission that Scotty went on to save an outpost. The flashback is well written and its nice to see Scotty before the Enterprise. A good read.

[De · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good beginning to the SCE's origins and it was neat how the origin story tied into the 24th-century SCE's mission in the framing story.

[John Barclay · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fun simple tale and the start of a whole lot of things in the mythology. Well written, but not exceptional. It feels like this is three books that could well be one longer book and be better.