A Trekkie’s Unofficial Book Summaries Volume Three by Geoff Canham - HTML preview

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Star Wreck

 

The Generation Gap

Leah Rewolinski

 

Captain Smirk and his crew come out of retirement and join Captain Jean-Lucy Ricardo and his crew (much to the latter's distaste). The starship Endocrine gets pulled off course to the planet Cellulite 1, where they find a group of dieters in suspended animation, but they are revived by the smell of a Twinkie that Westerley Flusher dropped. The Cellulites hold the Endocrine in a tractor beam, demanding chocolate. Smirk wants to break away from the planet, but Ricardo believes they have to set right a breach of the Prime Time Directive. Smirk and his crew take the cup section of the ship and head off at warped speed 5. While Smirk and his crew go partying around the galaxy, Ricardo and crew are forced to cut back on power usage elsewhere to maintain shields and resist the tractor beam. Smirk and crew finally tire of partying and rejoin with Ricardo's group. Westerley suggests getting the Cellulites back into their diet chambers, and they achieve this by sedating them. The Endocrine makes its escape.

 

The Attack of the Jargonites

Leah Rewolinski

Captain Ricardo's Endocrine is called back to Earth but, before they get there, they discover Smirk's old ship emerging from a wormhole. While Smirk and his crew try to get their ship going, Ricardo continues towards Earth, but Smirk gets there first after Ricardo has to divert to get a new battery for the android, Dacron. By this time, Earth has been taken over by the Jargonites but Smirk tricks them into boarding his ship by saying that he and his crew need coaching in team building, and the like. Smirk then initiates "The Drastic Solution" and, as the countdown to destruction continues, Dacron engages the Jargonite leader in a discussion of ethics, which causes the Jargonites to dissolve into their component parts: warm fuzzies. Unable to stop the countdown, Smirk and his first officer, the Vulture Smock, beam off just before the ship is destroyed. For saving the Earth, both crews are "rewarded" with joint occupancy of the remaining starship Endocrine.

 

Time Warped

Leah Rewolinski

 

While resetting the clocks, Piker accidentally creates a time warp, through which a video of the crew’s activities is lost. The video gets carried across time, creating a Wrekkie fandom, complete with conventions, etc. The two crews split into three groups, the Pros (led by Smirk) who are all for the hero worship, the Cons (led by Ricardo) who are against, and the Neuts (led by Data). The Pros and Cons build time machines to either indulge in, or try to prevent, the Wrekkie movement, and the Neuts end up building their own time machine to rescue the other groups when they get lost in time. Finally, the Pros and Cons are converging on the correct time period, but Data realizes this will cause a time rift. The Neuts, therefore, also head off for the same time period and manage to preserve the timeline. They all return aboard a working model of the original Endocrine constructed by a local Wrekkie chapter. Smock and his crew remain aboard the working model, and Ricardo and his crew return to their Endocrine.

 

Live Long and Profit

Leah Rewolinski

 

Starfreak decides to stand down one of the Endocrines and lay off half of the combined crew, due to a budget shortage. The retained crew, with Captain Ricardo, are given the mission of locating and claiming the Fountain of Youth. Captain Smirk and the rest of the laid-off crew decide to try to beat them to it, to prove their worth to Starfreak. Although Smirk knows where to locate the fountain, they follow Ricardo on a misguided trip, first to the Fountain of Love, then the Fountain of Truth. The effects of these waters on the two away teams leads to problems, including a love triangle involving Captain Smirk, Deanna "Dee" Troit, and the android Dacron. They finally arrive at the planet of the Fountain of Youth, from which the bartender, Guano, smuggles out several barrels of the water, before the two ships are driven away from the planet by a Romanumen wartbird. Realizing that she now has the only available supply of the water from the Fountain of Youth, Guano arranges to let Starfreak have it in return for funds to keep both Endocrines and crews in operation.

 

The Undiscovered Nursing Home

Leah Rewolinski

 

Captain Smirk and crew abscond with their Endocrine rather than be retired to a nursing home. Captain Ricardo and crew are given back their ship with orders to bring Smirk and crew back. Smirk and crew retake the planet with the Fountain of Youth from the Romanumans and build a theme-park - Juven Isle - the happiest place in the universe. All water is from the fountain. Ricardo and crew don't recognize the rejuvenated original crew, so Admiral Ruth Less calls in Commander Crisco to capture them. The oldest crew he sees is baldheaded Ricardo and Co., and he has them sent to the nursing home. Smirk later tells Crisco the truth, but Crisco has no love for Ricardo, who was involved (as Low Cutie) in the Bored attack that killed his wife, so he agrees to build the pipeline to Starfreak and Smirk pipes a small regular quantity of the special water. Crisco is rewarded with command of Geek Space Nine but is somewhat apprehensive at the prospect. Q-Tip had been looking for driving lessons from Ricardo, ends up managing Elvis (Dacron), and finally offers to get Ricardo and crew out of the nursing home, but they've grown to like it there.

 

Geek Space Nine

Leah Rewolinski

 

Smirk, Ricardo and their crews are sent to come up with a cure for the dullimia affecting the inhabitants of Geek Space Nine. The Endocrine crew members assigned to coach the space station staff in being more multidimensional start disappearing from the guest quarters (except for Ricardo - who has been housed in a storage room, and Smirk - who has been spending all his off-duty hours in Jazzy Faz's quarters). The android, Dacron, discovers that the crew have been sucked into the Talent Void (TV for short), which is also determined to be the cause of the dullimia. Since Dacron is the most multifaceted character among them, he is sent to rescue the missing crew. By the time he has rescued the last one, even Dacron has a reading of "superficial" on the Dimensionality Meter, but they all slowly recover, and the suspense of the rescue brings out other character traits in the station's crew, curing their dullimia.

 

Space: The Fido Frontier

Leah Rewolinski

 

Laika has somehow survived aboard Sputnik 2 and has drifted through the wormhole into the Gummi Quadrant. Ricardo and his crew are given the mission of bringing her back, as she is wanted for the Classic Creatures exhibition at the Milwaukee Public Museum. Smirk and his crew had retired again, but they decide to take on the challenge of recovering the dog first and, on their way, they talk Major Vera Obese into acting as their guide. Smirk’s efforts at courting her get him numerous injuries, but nothing more. After initially getting lost, Ricardo returns to Geek Space Nine and talks Dodo into guiding them, saying that Laika is another shapeshifter. After a few misadventures, including an encounter with a Carcinogen ship (which Major Vera blows up) they locate Laika, and she gets brought aboard Ricardo’s ship. When Dodo realizes Laika isn’t a shapeshifter, he sabotages the mission and arranges Laika’s escape during a live TV broadcast. Positive viewer reaction to the drama results in Smirk and Ricardo each being given their own TV shows, which they then set about planning as they consider the crew of the V-Ger, who are due to replace them as Starfreak’s exploration ship.