Already wary of John Vornholt's writing, I was hoping this would change my mind...I was wrong. There is little or no action until the very end, and I was hoping it would be epic space battles, which I got from the cover. But the Enterprise is stuck in a starbase, and all the crew does is try to help some pathetic commander. And when they do finally show up, it's too obvious, and it was like an after-thought to add the rest of the crew in the story. The only two characters who really shined were Hasmek and Geordi, since they weren't used that much, and Vornholt couldn't screw them up. The whole Badlands part is pointless. I suggest to anybody that you read the Deep Space Nine series, because they're awesome in comparison. A war fits nicely into the Deep Space Nine universe, not The Next Generation universe.