“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” as went the last line of dialogue in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and best describes my feelings reading the impressively fun new novel Agents of Influence by Dayton Ward.

Despite the move to a larger format of book in the last year — as well as the re-invention of the 24th century continuity to match that seen in Star Trek: Picard beginning with February’s Last Best Hope, this new Original Series tale could easily have been published in 2016 and would have fit right in.

And if it had been published prior to the renewal of the Star Trek novel license, it might have had a different name — Seekers 5 — because Captain Kirk and the crew of the USS Enterprise share the spotlight in this novel with Captain Atish Khatami of the USS Endeavor.

Captain Khatami and the Endeavor previously shared top billing on the Star Trek: Seekers line of novels, and the Endeavor crew were recurring characters during the popular Star Trek: Vanguard series.

Indeed, Agents of Influence remains steeped in the 23rd century continuity of the novels that have come before, serving to continue the stories of characters who premiered in Vanguard, were featured in Seekers… and now star in Agents of Influence.

Of course, this is not the first novel since Simon & Schuster renewed their novel license in 2018 to further some of those storylines: Christopher L. Bennett’s The Higher Frontier featured characters he had created for previous Star Trek novels set in the Motion Picture era.

However, Agents of Influence is the first novel of this new trade paperback line that confidently tells book fans that — despite all the change — where possible we may still see a lot of characters, stories, and plot developments we had seen developed in previous novels rear up again for further exploration.

Ward does an excellent job of ensuring that you don’t need to have read Vanguard or Seekers to enjoy Agents of Influence, but having just re-read Seekers 4: All That’s Left, I did find it to be a richer experience… and even though that novel came out in 2015, Agents of Influence picks right up where those characters left off.

Despite the USS Endeavor’s crew having a starring role in this novel, there is still a lot of fun Kirk, Spock, Sulu, McCoy, and Uhura action. The Enterprise is dispatched by Admiral Nogura to investigate the mysterious disappearance of the USS Endeavor, which had been sent to the edge of Klingon space in order to retrieve several undercover Starfleet operatives whose mission on the Klingon homeworld had reached an abrupt end.

Agents of Influence is a spy thriller wrapped in a disaster story, with gadgets, undercover intrigue, a race against the clock, betrayal, and a struggle for survival. The large cast of characters – the crews of both Enterprise and Endeavor – totally works, and provides a lot of fodder for intrigue and machinations (including one big twist I won’t spoil).

Though there is one plot point in the story that matches closely to last summer’s The Enterprise War by John Jackson Miller, it is not a retread and feels fresh and interesting because of everything else going on at the same time. With Agents of Influence, Ward has definitely taken advantage of the longer length afforded to the trade paperback sized books to expand the scale of the story he is trying to tell.

It is also fun to see more about how Starfleet executed its own intelligence gathering operations against the Klingons. We’ve seen a lot of the reverse; both Star Trek: Discovery and the classic episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” include Klingon agents operating in the Federation.

But this is one of the first times we’ve seen Federation agents operating in the Klingon Empire. And we get a lot of Klingon action in this novel, which capably weaves together the various interpretations on the race we’ve seen through the years. Oh, and did I mention that this novel also features the Orions for good measure?

Overall, Agents of Influence is a fun spy thriller, mixed with a disaster movie, and mixed with a good classic episode of the Original Series, which pulls together all those elements into a satisfying tale that will keep you invested from the first page to the last.

And if you spend any time on Star Trek Twitter or are a regular attendee at Star Trek Las Vegas, there are a lot of familiar names in this novel…. a lot of them.