Allegiance in Exile excerpt

Simon and Schuster have posted an excerpt from David R. George III's soon to be released Allegiance in Exile; the first novel in this year's run of TOS books. Here are the first few paragraphs of chapter one:

The red turbolift doors glided open with their characteristic squeak, revealing beyond them the circular enclosure of the Enterprise bridge. Captain James T. Kirk stepped out of the cab onto the raised, outer deck of the compartment. An olio of familiar noises rose to greet him: the background twitter that accompanied the operation of the main viewscreen; the feedback chirps emitted by control stations; the quiet, sporadic dialogue of the personnel present; and the slightly reedy sound of voices transmitted over the intercom. Beneath it all, binding it together, the low-level thrum of the impulse drive suffused the space.

Kirk stopped for a moment to take in the scene and observe his frontline command crew, all of them already at their positions. The captain normally arrived on the bridge before any of them, comfortably ahead of the start of alpha shift. Upon waking in his quarters that day, though, he’d tarried through his dawn routine, slowed by a heavy wistfulness.

But I didn’t feel that way just this morning, Kirk thought. Really, his pensive state of mind had arisen the night before. As he recorded the final log entry for the day, he realized that the stardate marked the end of his fourth year aboard Enterprise. That time as a starship captain had proven not only the most satisfying of his professional life, but also the most fulfilling from a personal standpoint. It unnerved him to consider that he’d already put eighty percent of Enterprise’s five-year mission behind him.

Moving to his right, toward an opening in the railing that rimmed the lower, central portion of the bridge, Kirk passed Uhura where she crewed the communications console. The lieutenant had served as a member of the ship’s senior staff for virtually the entire voyage, and although there had been some flux in personnel assignments and the command structure near the beginning of the mission, a similar constancy had held true since that time for most of his officers: Spock doing double duty as exec and the head of Enterprise’s science division, Scotty as chief engineer, Sulu at the helm, McCoy down in sickbay as chief medical officer. Even young Chekov had to that point manned navigation for three years.

As Kirk padded down from the outer ring of the bridge to its inner section, he shifted from reflecting on the reliability and longevity of his command crew to the interpersonal relationships that had grown among them. He felt closer to the members of his senior staff than he had to any other group of people he’d ever known; in important ways, they had become like a family to him. It gave him pause to wonder where they all would be a year and a day from that moment.

You can read the rest of the chapter on Simon and Schuster, where you can look forward enjoyable musing over 22nd century Vulcan exploration policy, and the introspective inner monologue of Captain Kirk, before the crew prepare a landing party in a close to the chapter that pleads you to launch into the TOS opening titles sequence.