by S. D. Perry
JUNE
• Shar’s three bondmates arrive on the station in a last-ditch attempt by his zhavey to get him to return to Andor. The attempt fails, though Shar vows to rejoin his bondmates when he returns from the Gamma Quadrant in three months.
• Under the command of Vaughn, and with Dax, Bashir, Nog, Tenmei, and Bowers among the crew, the Defiant sets out on its trailblazing mission into the Gamma Quadrant.
• Prylar Eivos Calan visits Yates on Bajor and gives her a jevonite figurine originally intended as a gift for Jake. He also informs Yates of the growing schisms in the Vedek Assembly resulting from the upload of the Ohalu prophecies.
• On DS9, Akaar formally informs Kira that a summit meeting will commence on the station to answer Bajor’s petition to join the Federation. Kira assigns Ro to oversee security on the station during the summit, despite Akaar’s reservations about Ro, relating to her rocky Starfleet career.
• Six days into their voyage, the Defiant makes first contact with the Vahni Vahltupali. The crew spends several days with the Vahni, during which a mysterious energy pulse shatters the Vahni’s moon, creating seismic chaos on the homeworld and killing some three thousand people before the Defiant can prevent further devastation. Those efforts cost the life of Ensign Gerda Roness. The Defiant tracks the pulse back to its origin, and discovers that the pulse is the effect of a vast alien intelligence pushing its way into the universe through an aperture on the surface of a dead planet. In order to save the Vahni, Vaughn facilitates the entity’s passage into this universe, an act which allows the entity to reorganize the matter of the dead planet into a suitable receptacle for its mind. In the process, the shuttlecraft Chaffee is destroyed, and Vaughn and Prynn reconcile.
• On DS9, Treir talks Quark into hiring his first dabo boy, a Bajoran man named Hetik.
• The Federation delegation meets with Shaakar. Among the members is Hiziki Gard, a member of the Trill ambassador’s entourage and security liaison for the delegates. After a few days of the summit, Shakaar announces publicly that Bajor’s renewed application for Federation membership has been approved. There are still weeks of talks to go through before the signing ceremony. Quark and Ro are the only ones not happy with the news, as Ro finds it unlikely that she’ll be accepted back into Starfleet when the Bajoran Militia is absorbed into it; and the Federation’s moneyless economy means Quark’s bar will have to close.
JULY
• The Defiant encounters an energy web created by a species called the Cheka, causing tremendous damage to the ship. They are aided by the Cheka’s enemies, the Yrythny, who take the Defiant to their homeworld to help the crew facilitate repairs. The Yrythny, it is learned, were genetically engineered in the distant past and possess a biological “turn key” the Cheka wish to exploit, but can only do so by harvesting the Yrythny’s gestational forms. Complicating the situation is a caste struggle within Yrythny society, bordering on civil war. While the Defiant goes offworld to obtain materials needed to develop a practical defense against the Cheka traps peppering that region of space, Dax remains on the Yrythny home-world with Shar, convinced that she can mediate the Yrythny’s internal disputes.
• Shakaar returns to Bajor to deal with various administrative issues in preparation for the signing ceremony. The delegates from the Federation remain in the system to continue working out the details of the transition.
• Macet and the Trager return to DS9 with Ambassador Natima Lang to formally initiate the normalization of relations between Cardassia and Bajor. As a symbolic gesture, they bequeath to Bajor the recovered art of the late Tora Ziyal, daughter of Cardassian Gul Dukat and Bajoran Tora Naprem, who dreamed in life of bringing her two worlds closer together. The art is put on permanent display in Garak’s old tailor shop on the station’s Promenade.
• Quark and Ro go on a date.
• Lower-caste Yrythny militants set in motion a plan to give the Cheka viable Yrythny eggs in exchange for weapons the militants can use in the violent overthrow of the Yrythny ruling caste. The plan also includes betraying the Defiant crew so the Cheka can obtain the ship’s cloaking device. The plan is thwarted, Dax mediates an imperfect but workable solution to the Yrythny’s caste-conflict, and a Yrythny lower-caste delegate who befriended Shar bequeaths him the gift of a number of nonviable Yrythny eggs, whose genetic turn key may offer a real solution to the Andorian crisis.
• Shakaar delegates the Cardassian talks to his second minister, Asarem Wadeen, who takes a surprisingly confrontational and obstructionist position in the negotiations. Kira investigates, and learns that Asarem actually wants a meaningful, lasting peace with Cardassia, but was ordered by Shakaar to scuttle the talks. Kira confronts Shakaar and is confounded by his increasingly uncharacteristic behavior, but cannot expose his duplicity without putting Bajor’s entry into the Federation at risk.
• Shathrissía zh’Cheen, one of Shar’s bondmates, grows increasingly despondent over Shar’s refusal to come home, and commits suicide aboard the station.
• The Defiant discovers a supremely ancient and mysterious alien artifact on the edge of a star system in the Gamma Quadrant, partly out of phase with the space-time continuum. Contact with the artifact connects an away team consisting of Bashir, Dax, and Nog with alternate realities in which their lives turned out differently. This results in a physiological “resetting” of those crewmembers: Bashir loses his genetic enhancements, Ezri rejects the Dax symbiont, necessitating its removal; and Nog’s leg, shot off during the Dominion War, grows back. Only by returning to the artifact, which is paradoxically called both a “cathedral” and “anathema” by two nearby civilizations in conflict over it, can the away team be restored. In the process they each gain a new level of self-awareness.
• In the Gamma Quadrant, the Even Odds reaches the planet Ee, where Jake meets a Trelian named Wex, who is seeking a local healer and spiritualist. Together they encounter Kai Opaka Sulan of Bajor, missing for seven years. Opaka interprets Jake’s arrival as a sign from the Prophets that she is to return to Bajor, and joins him aboard the Even Odds for the journey home.
AUGUST
• On Earth, Joseph Sisko, who has grown increasingly despondent over the loss of his son and grandson, collapses.
• The religious schism over the Ohalu prophecies continues to spread, and a group calling itself the Ohalavaru (Ohalu’s truthseekers) begins making appeals and staging public demonstrations in an attempt to force the Vedek Assembly to rescind the Attainder of Kira Nerys.
• Quark and Ro go on a second date. They resolve to leave the station and go into business together when the Federation changeover goes into effect.
• Vedek Yevir, troubled by recent events, looks for an unorthodox solution to the discontinued peace talks with Cardassia. Inspired by what he perceives to be a convergence of signs—the jevonite figurine passed on to him by Kasidy Yates, the example of Tora Ziyal, and a half-Cardassian child belonging to one of the Ohalavaru—Yevir convinces Gul Macet to take him to Cardassia. There he makes contact with the Oralian Way for the purpose of creating true peace through their worlds’ spiritualists.
• On Cardassia, Elim Garak leads Yevir and Cleric Ekosha of the Oralian Way into the devastated subbasement of one of the Obsidian Order’s old storage facilities. There Yevir recovers the last four of the Bajoran Orbs missing since the Occupation, with which Yevir wins the support of the Bajoran people in accepting his peace initiative with Cardassia.
• The signing ceremony to formally admit Bajor into the Federation is held on Deep Space 9. Before First Minister Shakaar can thumb the agreement, he is shot dead by Trill delegate Hiziki Gard, who flees the scene by beaming out, leaving the station in chaos.
• On Earth, Judith Sisko, half-sister of Benjamin Sisko, goes to New Orleans to help her father Joseph recuperate. She is joined at Kasidy Yates’s request by the O’Briens, who conspire with Judith to convince Joseph that he mustn’t allow his grief to consume him, and that he is soon to be a
grandfather again to a child that will need him. Joseph’s strength of spirit recovers, and he asks the O’Briens to take him to Bajor to be with Kasidy when her baby is born.
• On an uninhabited planet in the Gamma Quadrant, the Defiant discovers the crashed wrecks from a battle between a Borg ship and a Dominion ship. The Dominion ship has one survivor, a young Founder marooned since the ship crashed. Nog and Bowers eventually win her trust, and convince her to join them aboard the Defiant so they can take her back with them. The Borg ship, which is actually the assimilated Starfleet vessel U.S.S. Valkyrie, lost seven years prior, also has one survivor: the drone that was once Commander Ruriko Tenmei, Prynn’s mother. Vaughn becomes obsessed with trying to restore her immediately, and his judgment is called into question. Dax succeeds in helping him regain his perspective, but when Vaughn comes to believe that Ruriko is about to assimilate their daughter, he kills her with a phaser. The necessary act renews the rift between Vaughn and Prynn.
• In the aftermath of Shakaar’s assassination, Asarem Wadeen is hastily sworn in as the new First Minister of Bajor. A report from the U.S.S. Gryphon, which has been standing in for the Defiant during the latter ship’s mission to the Gamma Quadrant, gives Asarem reason to believe that Gard is on a cloaked ship to Trill. Kira is ordered to join the Gryphon in apprehending the assassin.
• Ro becomes convinced that Gard has not fled the station, but is in fact still somewhere on board. With Taran’atar’s help, she captures him, and it is soon learned that Shakaar was the host-victim of an alien parasite, a member of a species that once attempted to take over the Federation. Realizing that Gryphon’s pursuit is a deception, most likely engineered by another parasite on board with plans to retaliate against Trill, Akaar warns Kira aboard Gryphon, who incorrectly concludes that the parasite is Captain Elaine Mello, the ship’s C.O. Kira stages a takeover of the ship, only to learn that she has been deliberately misled by the ship’s first officer, Commander Alejandro Montenegro, the true parasite host. In the battle to regain control of the ship, Captain Mello is killed, but Kira succeeds in killing Montenegro and thwarting the parasite’s plan. Shortly thereafter, Kira is contacted by General Taulin Cyl of the Trill Defense Ministry, who informs her that he has information about the parasites, which are still a clear and present danger not only to Bajor, but the entire Federation.
• On DS9, a parasite enters the body of Gul Macet.
• In the Gamma Quadrant, the Even Odds is detoured by a troubled Tosk to a class-M planet in the Idran system, which Opaka senses is the source of a tremendous residual concentration of pagh, spiritual life-energy. Working together, Jake and Opaka trigger an ancient mechanism that retrieves from subspace the lost Eav’oq civilization, natives of Idran and followers of the Prophets, who fled into subspace millennia ago to escape the Ascendants, violently aggressive religious zealots seeking the location of the worm-hole. As the Eav’oq return, the Idran system instantaneously shifts three light-years back to its original position, with the Gamma terminus of the worm-hole now inside it. As Jake, Opaka, and Wex set out for the worm-hole in Tosk’s ship, the craft begins to break apart. The passengers are rescued by a Jem’Hadar ship commanded by the newest clone of the Vorta Weyoun.
• As the Defiant nears the Gamma terminus of the worm-hole, the crew is shocked to learn of the physical rearrangement of local space, and even more surprised when Weyoun’s ship makes contact to exchange the Founder aboard Defiant for Jake, Opaka, and Wex.
SEPTEMBER
PROLOGUE
SOMETHING WAS HAPPENING, OR HAD HAPPENED, OR WAS GOING TO HAPPEN. He couldn’t see it but he knew, and hoped that They would lead him to understand when it was time. He’d seen that They would.
There were aspects of him that knew time to pass, the way he’d always understood it. And there were other realities, beyond linear tempo, in which he easily achieved the kinds of comprehension that his highest mind had once blindly, vainly groped for. These realities were outside of his experience as corporeal, let alone as Benjamin Sisko, and he cherished them as the closest he could come to reaching a real awareness of Them, of Their vision. There were other places, far more of them, where he wasn’t even a child trying to learn, but a particle of an atom that was lost and always would be in a universe of complexities.
It had been strange at first, existing in the Temple, the awe he felt often bordering on terror . . . but he’d progressed, learned a kind of patience that only the nearly eternal could grasp, that kept the bulk of his consciousness focused. Patience and peace were linked more tightly than he had ever imagined, and mostly he was at peace. They had many questions, and were eager to understand. He wanted to learn, to teach and be taught. The possibilities were infinite.
But still . . . still, when he experienced himself as whole within the Temple, he remembered that the other reality kept grinding along without him, time passing, things changing. As wondrous, as amazing as his experience was, there was no warm hand to hold his own, no eager laugh to match his. No beloved to share his thoughts with, to be shared with in turn. These things, a thousand others, big and small—the smile in his boy’s eyes, a soft breeze at sunset, the good, rich smell of garlic in butter—these were home, and he wished for it. And now there was this something, this thing that no facet of him could see, that They couldn’t or wouldn’t explain. It was important. It was change, and though he didn’t know what it was, he knew that everything would be different when it was through.
He would watch. He would be patient. He would be ready.
1
Captain’s Log, supplemental.
We discovered the loss of the Gamma Quadrant’s subspace communications relay at the same time we became aware of the massive, apparently sudden shift of matter and space in the 1A-2E sections of the Gamma Quadrant’s Idran sector (see initial entry, Stardate 53679.4), which sensors suggest occurred eighty-five hours ago. Presumably, our relay was destroyed during said celestial event, which has effectively moved the Idran system approximately three light-years closer to the worm-hole.
Having maintained communication silence with DS9 since our encounter on undesignated class-M planet two weeks ago (coordinates available with clearance above Level 16), we were unaware of our inability to communicate with the station, or of the spatial shift which caused the relay loss until Ensign ch’Thane ran a standard frequency diagnostic, approximately one hour ago. Shortly afterward, we encountered a Dominion vessel, Starfleet classification 232. Weyoun, the Vorta commander—a clone whose predecessors were known to much of this crew—had no explanation for the anomalous event that altered the area around the worm-hole’s Gamma terminus. He seemed as mystified as us.
Our encounter with the Dominion ship was brief but amiable. An exchange was made—the female changeling recently retrieved left us to return to her people, and three of Weyoun’s passengers boarded the Defiant for passage back to the Alpha Quadrant: Opaka Sulan, former kai of Bajor, absent for approximately seven years; Wex, a female native to the Gamma Quadrant, of the Trelian species, traveling with Opaka Sulan; and Jacob Sisko, Federation citizen and son of Captain Benjamin Sisko. The younger Sisko has been missing from the Alpha Quadrant for five months. After making brief statements to myself and the crew of how they came to be on Weyoun’s ship, the trio offered an explanation of the spatial shift, which apparently coincided with the sudden corporeal appearance of a species called the Eav’oq (Idran system, see accompanying [obsolete?] chart). The Eav’oq are a sentient species native to a class-M planet of the Idran system, but have been absent for a lengthy span of time. Sisko and the others’ statements are now being officially recorded.
* * *
Vaughn paused, lightly tapping the recorder patch with the tip of one finger. The unexpected rearrangement of space around the worm-hole had been a startling discovery, was undoubtedly a scientific wonder that would be studied for generations to come . . . and yet he couldn’t work up any real interest, let alone enthusiasm. It was as though it was j
ust one awe-inspiring experience too many; with all that had happened during their months in the Gamma Quadrant, his mind, body, and spirit were simply saturated with miracles and emotional traumas; the dramatic rotation of local space . . .
. . . It just doesn’t matter. One more huge thing in this universe that doesn’t have anything to do with me.
Right, a part of him commented, searching to hurt. Everything has to be relevant to your life.
Wonderful. It wasn’t enough that he was miserable; it seemed he was determined to wallow in it.
Around him, the bridge hummed with muted mechanical life, the crew working quietly at their stations . . . but there was an anticipation in the air, no question. The bridge had settled back to work after the return of Jake Sisko and his traveling companions, once Nog and Dax had whisked the trio away to make statements, but the Defiant was now only minutes away from the worm-hole. His crew was more than ready to go home.
And why wouldn’t they be? Vaughn thought randomly. Home is where the heart is, after all.
The thought was a painful one. Back to the ship’s log, he decided, feeling morose and irritated with himself for feeling it. What else to say? Though he’d probably write a summary report back at DS9, this would be the last entry for their mission, their grand adventure into the Gamma Quadrant. A personal comment about our successes? A sum-up observation of the places we’ve been, the species and individuals we met and interacted with?
Three months. They’d been exploring the Gamma Quadrant for just over three months, with all its highs and lows; the gentle Vahni Vahltupali and what the Prentara had accidentally unleashed upon them, the tragic death of Ensign Gerda Roness, the Yrythny and Cheka, the D’Naali and Nyazen. All of the amazing places they’d been, the wonders and horrors they’d seen . . . and for him, all of it overshadowed by the events of a single moment, of a second that had changed him forever, a touch of his hand and the blast of a phaser . . .