“Reese and Ekoor both have got a lot of healing to do,” Sisko said quietly. Ezri was going to have her work cut out for her.

  Odo nodded. “So do we all. This war is going to leave scars on just about everyone.”

  With nothing to add to that, Sisko began walking toward the exit. Kira and Odo followed him out onto the Promenade.

  “I think you were wrong about one thing, Captain,” Kira said.

  “And what’s that?” Sisko wanted to know.

  “You really aren’t anything like Reese. Or Ekoor. You aren’t capable of fixating on horror the way they did.”

  Sisko remembered sitting beside Jake inside the escape pod. He had watched through the transparent aluminum window as the Saratoga exploded, immolating the corpse of his beloved wife, the mother of his son.

  He offered Kira a rueful smile. “Far be it from me to undermine your faith in the Emissary, Colonel.”

  Standing beside Sisko just outside the dreamlike re-creation of his family quarters aboard the Saratoga, the Jennifer-alien gently placed a hand upon his shoulder.

  Looking into the rubble-filled room, Sisko saw an image of himself as he had been on that horrible day. Hranok, the Bolian tactical officer, handed the unconscious form of young Jake Sisko to other crew members who were on their way to the ship’s escape pods. Hranok soon began grabbing Sisko’s struggling earlier self by the shoulders, trying to manhandle him out of the room.

  Jennifer lay pinned beneath a tangle of metal debris, just out of the other Sisko’s reach. According to a quick tricorder scan Hranok had taken moments earlier, she was already dead.

  Hranok was shouting to the other Sisko that it was time to leave. The Saratoga rumbled and shook, clearly in its death throes. The heavily battle-damaged Miranda -class ship was only minutes away from a warp core breach. Sisko stood and watched the Bolian as he lifted his younger self off his feet.

  “Damn it, we just can’t leave her here!” the other Sisko said, struggling and crying out incoherently as Hranok half-carried, half-dragged him out of the room.

  A realization struck Sisko as he quietly regarded the wormhole alien who stood beside him, wearing the form of the beloved wife whom Locutus had slain.

  “I’ve never left this ship,” Sisko said, finally coming to grips with his unmet need to put paid to his grief, lest it devour him.

  “You exist here,” the Jennifer-alien said.

  “I exist here.” He watched as the Bolian led his other self down the corridor toward the escape pods.

  Sisko advanced into his family’s quarters. He could deny it no longer. He knew he had to leave this place behind. He had to move on, or join Jennifer in death.

  But not just this second, he thought, kneeling beside Jennifer’s lifeless body, which still lay pinned beneath a twisted pile of wreckage. He took her hand.

  “I don’t know if you can understand,” he said to whichever wormhole aliens might be present and listening. “I see her like this every time I close my eyes. In the darkness. In the blink of an eye, I see her. Like this.”

  The Jennifer-alien stood nearby, regarding him impassively. “None of your past experiences helped prepare you for this consequence.”

  Overcome with emotion, Sisko slowly shook his head. “And I have never figured out how to live without her.”

  “So you choose to exist here,” the Jennifer-alien said, approaching him more closely. Sisko found it unnerving to hold his dead wife’s still-warm hand while conversing with a living alien who so closely resembled her.

  “It is not linear,” she observed.

  “No. It’s not linear,” he said as hot tears distorted his vision and streamed down his cheeks.

  He looked to his right and saw that the Jake-alien was watching him, his youthful face a mask of concern. The simulacrum of his son reminded Sisko forcefully that he needed to live in the present if either he or Jake were to have a future.

  Very gently, he released Jennifer’s limp hand, rose to his feet, and turned toward that future. There could be no looking back.

  Sisko, Kira, and Odo walked on quietly together for a few minutes longer, until Kira and Odo went off on their own. Sisko was happy to let them go so that they could exchange their own private farewells. Perhaps they would be saying good-bye permanently. Once Odo left for the Founder homeworld, who knew when he’d be coming back this way?

  Sisko strolled the Promenade by himself, letting the crowd of passersby swirl around him. He felt unaccountably contented as he watched the ceaseless torrent of diverse humanoids, their individual movements and motivations as unpredictable and unknowable as the outcome of a baseball game. In addition to its usual panoply of habitués, the busy arcade also thronged with weary and wounded Starfleet personnel, along with Klingons and Romulans. The sense of shared joy at the war’s end was palpable. He knew it couldn’t last.

  So much is ending now, Sisko thought with an exultation that surprised him. He remembered that he was due within the hour at the holosuite in which Vic Fontaine’s Las Vegas program ran perpetually, to toast his senior officers and whatever lay ahead for each of them. He knew that he might not see some of them again—like Worf and Chief O’Brien—for quite a while. But nothing ends without beginning something else.

  His thoughts turned toward Jake, then to his new wife Kasidy, and the child that was now growing within her. He smiled to himself as he visualized the house they planned to build near the Yolja River in Bajor’s Kendra Province, and the life they were going to share there. A private Shangri-La on twelve hecapates of virgin land.

  As he walked past the Bajoran shrine, Sisko thought again of how close Reese and Ekoor had come to reigniting a transquadrant war. All in the name of requiting the brutality of that war’s aggressors.

  There but for the grace of the Prophets go I, Sisko thought as he moved across the thronging Promenade toward Quark’s.

  The Dominion War Timeline

  compiled by Keith R.A. DeCandido

  Some entries have bracketed indicators: DS9=episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. LOD=story in The Lives of Dax anthology. PC=story in Prophecy and Change anthology. TDW=story in Tales of the Dominion War anthology (this volume). CB=comic book (published by WildStorm). SNW#=story in whichever Strange New Worlds anthology indicated by the number #.

  Novel/eBook/comic book prefix abbreviations: TNG=Star Trek: The Next Generation. DS9=Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. SCE=Star Trek: Starfleet Corps of Engineers. NF=Star Trek: New Frontier.

  2373

  • The Dominion takes control of Deep Space 9, marking the more-or-less official start of hostilities. The station is returned to its original name of Terok Nor. However, before abandoning the station, Starfleet mines the wormhole entrance, preventing Dominion reinforcements from coming in from the Gamma Quadrant. (“Call to Arms” [DS9])

  • A Vorta named Sejeel and a garrison of Jem’Hadar set up a communications and supply depot on a pre-warp planet near Federation space called Illarh. Unknown to them, Captain Gilaad Ben Zoma is undercover on Illarh as a scientific observer, and is able to feed intelligence on the Dominion activity to the Enterprise, leading to the depot being eliminated. (“What Dreams May Come” by Michael Jan Friedman [TDW])

  2374

  • A team from the Enterprise prevents the Dominion from constructing an artificial wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant. (TNG: The Dominion War Book 1: Behind Enemy Lines and Book 3: Tunnel Through the Stars by John Vornholt)

  • The U.S.S.Valiant, a training ship out with a crew of cadets, is trapped behind enemy lines when the war breaks out. Captain Ramirez and the senior staff are killed in battle with the Cardassians at El Gatark, and the trainee crew, led by Cadet Tim Watters, continue to fight the Dominion from behind the lines for eight months. (“Valiant” [DS9])

  • Captain Benjamin Sisko and the Defiant continue to fight the war, with Lt. Commander Worf serving under General Martok on the I.K.S. Rotarran and serving as liaison between the Klingon Defense Force and Starfleet. The Federation and Klingons suffer major losses at Tyra, losing almost a hundred ships; one of the ships that survives is the U.S.S. Lexington. (“A Time to Stand,” “Rocks and Shoals,” “Sons and Daughters,” “Behind the Lines,” and “Favor the Bold” [DS9]; SCE: War Stories Book 1 by Keith R.A. DeCandido)

  • Major Kira Nerys leads a Bajoran resistance movement on Terok Nor that includes Security Chief Odo, Jake Sisko, Quark, Rom, and Leeta, among others. They are able to disrupt activity on the station, use an anonymous news-feed to sow confusion among the Dominion overseers, and get coded messages to Starfleet, though Rom is ultimately caught and imprisoned following a failed sabotage attempt. (“Rocks and Shoals,” “Sons and Daughters,” “Behind the Lines,” and “Favor the Bold” [DS9]; “Three Sides to Every Story” by Terri Osborne [PC])

  • The U.S.S. Lexington and the U.S.S.T’Kumbra are part of a task force that manages to hold the Setlik system, though the losses are great. (SCE: War Stories Book 1 by Keith R.A. DeCandido)

  • A Changeling spy acquires the codes to bring down the minefield blocking the Bajoran wormhole, but her efforts to bring those codes to Terok Nor are sabotaged by the Beta XII-A entity, which feeds off negative emotion, and wishes to prolong the war for its own purposes. (“Night of the Vulture” by Greg Cox [TDW])

  • A task force led by the Defiant retakes Terok Nor, with help from Kira’s resistance group, which now includes Gul Skrain Dukat’s daughter, Tora Ziyal. Just prior to this, the Cardassians managed to dismantle the minefield, but Sisko convinces the Prophets to stop the invading Dominion reinforcements. The station is rechristened Deep Space 9 and returned to Federation/Bajoran control. Ziyal is killed by Glinn Corat Damar; Weyoun, the Female Changeling, and Damar escape; Dukat is captured. Jake writes Ziyal’s eulogy, delivered by Kira at her funeral. (“Sacrifice of Angels” [DS9]; “Three Sides to Every Story” by Terri Osborne [PC])

  • Worf and Lt. Commander Jadzia Dax get married on Deep Space 9. (“You are Cordially Invited…” [DS9])

  • Starfleet brings a group of genetically enhanced humans to Deep Space 9 to consult on the war effort. (“Statistical Probabilities” [DS9])

  • Quark, Rom, and Nog lead a team of Ferengi to rescue Ishka—mother to Quark and Rom and paramour of Grand Nagus Zek—from Dominion capture on Empok Nor. (“The Magnificent Ferengi” [DS9])

  • Dukat, now consumed by madness, escapes Starfleet imprisonment. (“Waltz” [DS9])

  • A shrunken runabout helps stave off a boarding party of Jem’Hadar on the Defiant. (“One Little Ship” [DS9])

  • Starfleet Intelligence stops an attempt to assassinate the Klingon ambassador to Farius Prime. (“Honor Among Thieves” [DS9])

  • Worf and Dax fail to retrieve an undercover Federation operative within Cardassian Central Command; the operative is killed. (“Change of Heart” [DS9])

  • Continuing to operate in Sector 221G—being held in reserve in case the war goes badly for the Federation—the U.S.S. Excalibur comes across a planet whose inhabitants have been exterminated by the Redeemers. The crew employs time travel to prevent the tragedy, but overshoot their own time period by eighteen months when they make the return trip. (NF: Once Burned by Peter David; NF: Double Time by Peter David, Michael Collins, & David Roach [CB])

  • The Enterprise attempts to get the Gorn to join in the war effort, and find themselves in the midst of a coup d’état on the Gorn homeworld. (TNG: The Gorn Crisis by Kevin J. Anderson, Rebecca Moesta, & Igor Kordey [CB])

  • Section 31 attempts to recruit Dr. Julian Bashir. (“Inquisition” [DS9])

  • Betazed falls to the Dominion. (“In the Pale Moonlight” [DS9]; “The Ceremony of Innocence Is Drowned” by Keith R.A. DeCandido [TDW])

  • Romulan Emperor Shiarkiek is assassinated. While Ambassador Spock secretly investigates the murder, Sisko and Elim Garak manipulate the Romulans into abrogating their nonaggression pact with the Dominion and entering the war, allied with the Federation and the Klingon Empire. (“In the Pale Moonlight” [DS9]; “Blood Sacrifice” by Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz [TDW])

  • Jake and Cadet Nog wind up on the Valiant. Nog joins the crew as chief engineer. Most of the ship’s complement is killed in an ill-advised attack on a Dominion battleship. Only Jake, Nog, and Cadet Dorian Collins survive. The former two return to DS9, the latter goes home to Sector 001 to recover. (“Valiant” [DS9]; “Dorian’s Diary” by G. Wood [SNW3])

  • Dax and Bashir, along with Romulan Subcommander T’Rul are assigned to work on a scientific “think tank” called Project Blue Sky, an attempt to find new ways to fight the Dominion. (“The Devil You Know” by Heather Jarman [PC])

  • Allied forces take the Chin’toka system. (“Tears of the Prophets” [DS9])

  • Now an emissary of the Pah-wraiths, Dukat attacks Dax and closes the wormhole. Jadzia dies, but the Dax symbiont is preserved and sent back to Trill on the U.S.S. Destiny. Sisko takes a leave of absence and returns to Earth, leaving Kira in charge of the station. (“Tears of the Prophets” [DS9])

  2375

  • A Vulcan ship is found and brought to Deep Space 9 by the Enterprise, with the entire crew infected by a Dominion bioweapon. The combined resources of Bashir, Dr. Beverly Crusher, and the Enterprise’s Emergency Medical Hologram are required to solve it, with long-distance aid from Dr. Leonard McCoy, unexpected aid from a Romulan intelligence agent posing as one of Bashir’s nurses, and a treatment by a twenty-second-century Denobulan physician named Phlox. (“Mirror Eyes” by Heather Jarman & Jeffrey Lang [TDW])

  • Due to an emergency on the U.S.S. Destiny, the Dax symbiont is implanted in Ensign Ezri Tigan, who becomes the latest Dax. (“Second Star to the Right…” by Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens [LOD])

  • The U.S.S. da Vinci, along with the Appalachia and the Sloane, repair a communications relay and maintain a Federation hold on the Phicus system, and also neutralize a Dominion prototype weapon. (SCE: War Stories Book 2 by Keith R.A. DeCandido)

  • Odo uncovers an “underground railroad” of Cardassian war refugees spearheaded by Thrax, his predecessor as station security chief. (“Foundlings” by Jeffrey Lang [PC])

  • The Enterprise, Defiant, and three other ships, with the aid of the Betazoid Resistance, liberate Betazed from Dominion control. (TNG: The Battle of Betazed by Charlotte Douglas & Susan Kearney)

  • Shinzon and a batallion of Remans are sent on a suicide mission by the Tal Shiar to destroy a base held by the Dominion before either the Dominion or the allied task force being sent to retake the planet find the Tal Shiar’s cache. Shinzon manages to survive the mission, and make off with a variety of material that the Tal Shiar think is now destroyed. (“Twilight’s Wrath” by David Mack [TDW])

  • Colonel Kira prevents the Romulans from establishing an armed base in the Bajoran system. (“Image in the Sand” and “Shadows and Symbols” [DS9])

  • The Rotarran, crewed by Martok, Worf, Chief Miles O’Brien, Quark, and Bashir, win a victory dedicated to Jadzia. (“Image in the Sand” and “Shadows and Symbols” [DS9])

  • Sisko, with the help of Jake Sisko, Joseph Sisko, and Ezri Dax, finds the Orb of the Emissary on Tyree and reopens the wormhole. He then returns to Deep Space 9 and retakes command of the station; Ezri becomes the station’s counselor. (“Image in the Sand” and “Shadows and Symbols” [DS9])

  • A “defective” Weyoun clone tries to defect to the Federation, and reveals that the Founders are suffering from a disease. (“Treachery, Faith, and the Great River” [DS9])

  • Dahar Master Kor wins a victory over the Dominion, sacrificing his life in the process. (“Once More Unto the Breach” [DS9])

  • Deep Space 9 crew members aid in holding the outpost at AR-558, though Ensign Nog loses a leg in the battle. Nog recovers at Starbase 235, along with Reese, another of the soldiers assigned to AR-558. (“The Siege at AR-558” [DS9]; “Requital” by Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels [TDW])

  • Nog slowly recovers from the trauma of losing his leg. (“It’s Only a Paper Moon” [DS9])

  • A Vulcan suffering from post-traumatic stress starts a methodical killing spree on Deep Space 9. He is ultimately stopped by Dax. (“Field of Fire” [DS9])

  • Bashir is caught up in a Section 31 scheme to get rid of Romulan Senator Cretak, thus placing Koval higher in the Romulan hierarchy. (“Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges” [DS9])

  • Worf’s ship is ambushed in the Badlands. Dax tracks him down in a runabout and rescues him. They are subsequently captured by the Breen, who turn them over to their new allies, the Dominion. (“Penumbra” and “Till Death Do Us Part” [DS9])

  • Sisko buys land on Bajor and marries Captain Kasidy Yates, despite warnings from the Prophets that the marriage is a mistake. (“Penumbra” and “Till Death Do Us Part” [DS9])

  • Frustrated by growing Cardassian losses and unconscionable concessions made to the Breen by the Dominion on Cardassia’s behalf, Damar helps Worf and Dax escape confinement and return to the Federation. The pair bring intelligence of both the Breen alliance and of Damar’s shift in loyalties. (“Penumbra,” “Till Death Do Us Part,” and “Strange Bedfellows” [DS9])

  • The Breen announce their alliance with the Dominion by attacking Earth, destroying much of San Francisco. The Enterprise and the Columbia are involved in the aftermath of the attack. (“The Changing Face of Evil” [DS9]; “Eleven Hours Out” by Dave Galanter [TDW])

  • While returning from an inspection tour, McCoy and Captain Montgomery Scott’s runabout breaks down, and they must take refuge at a netural repair station, just as the Breen attack Earth. (“Safe Harbors” by Howard Weinstein [TDW])

  • The Dominion retakes Chin’toka, with the Breen utilizing an energy-dampening weapon against which the allies have no defense. The Defiant is among the ships destroyed. (“The Changing Face of Evil” [DS9])