CHAPTER 1

LIKE THE thirty-three fragile beings within her battered hull, in less than a minute the Starship Defiant would die.

Wounded. Space-tossed. Twenty-five years from home. Her decks littered with the bodies of those who had not survived her journey. And for those who still lived, her smoke-filled corridors reverberated with sensor alarms warning that enemy weapons were locked onto her, ready to fire.

Beyond her forward hull, the U.S.S. Opaka accelerated toward an attacking wing of three Starfleet vessels. But adding to the confusion of all aboard the Defiant, that warship, which was defending them—inexplicably named for a woman of peace—appeared to be a Starfleet vessel as well.

The Opaka was almost a kilometer long, and though her basic design of twin nacelles and two main hulls was little changed from the earliest days of humanity's first voyages to the stars, each element of the warship was stretched to an aggressive extreme, most notably the two forward-facing projections thrusting out from her command hull like battering rams. Now, as she closed in on her prey, needle-thin lances of golden energy pulsed from her emitter rings. Existing partially in the other dimensions of Cochrane space, those destructive energy bursts reached their targets at faster-than-light velocities, only to be dispersed into rippling patterns of flashing squares of luminescence as they were broken apart by whatever incomprehensible shields protected the three attacking Starfleet vessels.

In response, the Opaka launched a second warp-speed volley—miniature stars flaring from her launching tubes. The sudden light they carried sprayed across the Defiant's blue-gray hull—the only radiance to illuminate her so deep in the space between the stars, for there was no glow from her warp engines.

Wisps of venting coolant began escaping from the Defiant's cracked hull plates, wreathing her in vapor. Within the ruin of her engine room, at the source of the leaking coolant, the hyperdimensional stability of her warp core seethed from instability to uselessness a thousand times each second.

The ship had no weapons. Diminished shields. No propulsion. The most limited of life-support, and even that was rapidly failing.

But seconds from destruction, caught in a battle of a war that belonged only to her future, the Defiant, like her crew, was not finished yet.

“Choose your side!” Captain Thomas Riker screamed from the Defiant's bridge viewer.

And within this exact same moment, Captain Benjamin Sisko was frozen—twenty years of Starfleet training preventing him from making any decision under these circumstances.

Somehow, when Deep Space 9 had been destroyed by the opening of a second wormhole in Bajoran space, the Defiant had become enmeshed in the outer edges of the phenomenon's boundary layer and, like an ancient sailing ship swept 'round an ocean maelstrom, she had been propelled into a new heading—almost twenty-five years in her future.

The year 2400, Jadzia Dax had said.

Which meant—according to Starfleet general orders and to the strict regulations of the Federation Department of Temporal Investigations—that it was now the responsibility of all aboard the Defiant to refrain from any interaction with the inhabitants of this future. Otherwise, when Sisko's ship returned to her proper time, his crew's knowledge of this future could prevent this timeline from ever coming to pass—setting in place a major temporal anomaly. Thus the source of Sisko's paralysis was simple: How could his ship and crew return from a future that would never exist?

With the weight of future history in the balance, Sisko could not choose sides as Riker demanded. Whatever this War of the Prophets was—and Sisko wished he had never even heard Riker say that name—he and the crew of the Defiant had to remain neutral. Starfleet and the FDTI allowed them no other option.

Sisko straightened in his command chair. “Mr. O'Brien. All power to shields—even life-support!”

Almost immediately, the lights in the bridge dimmed and the almost imperceptible hum of the air circulators began to slow. At the same time, Sisko felt the artificial gravity field lessen to its minimum level, and understood that his chief engineer had chosen to reply to his order through instant action in place of time-wasting speech.

Then the Defiant was rocked by a staccato series of explosive impacts unlike any Sisko had ever experienced.

“What was that?” Dr. Bashir protested to no one in particular. He was holding his tricorder near Jadzia, checking her head wound once again.

“Shields from sixty-eight to twelve percent!” O'Brien reported with awe. “From one hit!”

Sisko had already ordered the main viewer set to a fifty-percent reduction in resolution so that no one on the bridge—especially O'Brien and Jadzia—might inadvertently pick up clues about future technology simply by seeing what the ships of this time looked like. But the display still held enough detail to show the attacking Starfleet vessels flash by. The three craft, each twice the Defiant's length and half its width, were shaped like daggers, the tips of their prows glowing as if they were nothing more than flying phaser cannons.

“Worf!” Sisko said urgently. “What are they firing at us?”

“Energy signature unknown!” Worf's deep voice triumphed over even the raucous, incessant alarms. “Propulsion systems unknown!”

Now the Opaka streaked by in pursuit. The viewer flickered with flashes of disruptive energy as once again the hull of the Defiant echoed with the thumps of multiple physical impacts.

“Worf?” Sisko asked. Under the circumstances, it was a detailed enough question for the Defiant's first officer.

“Sixteen objects have materialized on our hull,” Worf answered without hesitation. “They are attached with molecular adhesion. Sensors show antimatter pods in each.”

“Contact mines,” Sisko said, pushing himself to his feet. “Beamed through what's left of our shields.”

Jadzia called out to Sisko from her science station. Her hair was still in uncharacteristic disarray. The medical patch on the side of her forehead obscured her delicate Trill spotting. But nothing could disguise the apprehension in her tone. “We're out of our league here, Benjamin. I think the mines were beamed in from those three ships, but I can't make any sense of their transporter traces. For what it's worth, they probably could've punched through our shields even at one hundred percent.”

Major Kira didn't look up from her position at the helm. “The three attackers are on their way back. The Opaka's still in pursuit.”

Worf spoke again. “Sir, I am detecting a countdown signal from the mines on our hull. They are programmed to detonate in seventy-three seconds.”

Sisko grimaced, trying to understand the logic of that. “Why a countdown? If they can beam antimatter bombs through our shields, why not set them to go off at once?”

Commander Arla Rees had the answer. “It's what the other captain said.” The tall Bajoran spun around from her auxiliary sensor station. “ ‘Every ship is needed for the war.’ He said he wasn't going to let the Defiant get away.”

Sisko struck the arm of his chair with one fist. “Of course! The other side wants us, too, and they'll only detonate the mines if—”

He and everyone on the bridge involuntarily flinched, shielding their eyes from the sudden flare of blinding light that shot forth from the viewscreen faster than the ship's overtaxed computers could compensate for. At precisely the same instant, the deafening rumble of an explosion erupted from the bridge speakers as the Defiant's sensors automatically converted the impact of energy particles in the soundless vacuum of space into synthetic noise, giving the crew an audible indication of the size and the direction of the far-off explosion.

“One of the attackers . . .” Kira said in disbelief. “It dropped from warp and rammed the Opaka.” She looked back over her shoulder. “Captain, that ship had a crew of fifty-eight.”

Now at Sisko's side, Bashir murmured under his breath, “Fanatics.”

Sisko tried and failed to comprehend what such desperate action said about the Starfleet of this day.

“Forty seconds until detonation,” Worf warned.

“Captain,” O'Brien added, “our transporters are off-line. I can't get rid of the mines without an EVA team, and there's just no time.”

Time, Sisko thought. And that was the end of his indecision. As a Starfleet officer, he couldn't risk polluting the timeline. But as a starship captain . . . his crew had to come first.

“This is the Defiant to Captain Riker, I am—”

The stars on the viewer suddenly spiraled, and the Defiant's deck lurched to starboard, felling everyone not braced in a duty chair, including Sisko.

“Another ship decloaking!” Worf shouted as three bridge stations blew out in cascades of transtator sparks. “We are caught in its gravimetric wake!”

“Dax!” Sisko struggled to his feet. “Stabilize the screen!”

The spiraling stars slowed, then held steady, even though all attitude screens showed that the Defiant was still spinning wildly on her central axis.

Then, with the same dissolving checkerboard pattern of wavering squares of light that Sisko had seen envelop the Opaka, the new ship decloaked.

Again, Sisko had no doubt he was looking at a ship based on advanced technology. But in this case the vessel was not of Starfleet design; it was unmistakably Klingon—a battlecruiser at least the size of the Opaka. Yet this warship's deep purple exterior hull was studded with thick plates and conduits, with a long central spine extending from the sharp-edged half-diamond of the cruiser's combined engineering and propulsion hull to end in a wedge-shaped bridge module.

“Whose side is it on?” Sisko asked sharply, even as Worf reported that he could pick up no transmissions of any kind from the vessel. But Jadzia caught sight of something on the Klingon's hull and instructed the Defiant's computer to jump the viewer to magnification fifty and restore full resolution.

At once, Sisko and his crew were looking at a detailed segment of the warship's purple hull. Angular Klingon script ran beneath the same modified Starfleet emblem Tom Riker had worn on his uniform— the classic Starfleet delta in gold backed by an upside-down triangle in blue.

“It has to be with the Opaka,” Kira said.

Worf's next words unnerved Sisko. “And her designation is Boreth.”

The Opaka was named for a Bajoran spiritual leader—the first kai Sisko had met on Bajor. And Boreth was the world to which the Klingon messiah, Kahless the Unforgettable, had promised to return after his death. The Starfleet of Sisko's day did not make a habit of naming its ships after religious figures or places. Something had changed in this time. But what?

“Thirty seconds,” Worf said tersely.

Sisko faced the viewscreen. “This is Captain Sisko to Captain Riker and to the commander of the Boreth. My crew stands ready to join you. We require immediate evacuation.”

“Course change on the two remaining attackers!” Kira announced. “Coming in on a ramming course!”

Sisko clenched his hands at his sides. He didn't understand the tactics. What about the antimatter mines? Their adversaries could destroy the Defiant without sacrificing themselves in a suicidal collision.

Sisko turned abruptly to O'Brien. “Mine status?”

“Only nine left! Seven . . . five . . . Captain, they're being beamed away!”

“The Boreth,” Sisko said. That had to be the answer. But why?

He looked at Jadzia. “Any transporter trace?”

“Still nothing detectable, Benjamin.”

“Ten seconds to impact with attackers!” Kira shouted. “The Opaka is firing more of those . . . torpedoes or whatever they are . . . five seconds. . . .”

Sisko reached for his command chair. “Brace for collision!”

And then, as if a series of fusion sparklers had ignited one after the other across the bridge, Dax, Bashir, and Worf—

—vanished.

One instant Sisko's senior command staff were at their stations. Then, in the center of each of their torsos a single pinpoint of light flared, and as if suddenly twisted away at a ninety-degree angle from every direction at once, the body of each crew member spun and shrank into that small dot of light, which faded as suddenly as it had blossomed.

“Chief! What happened!”

O'Brien's voice faltered, betraying his utter bewilderment. “I . . . some kind of . . . transporter, I think. It—it hit all through the ship, sir. We've lost fifteen crew. . . .”

Sisko strode toward Jadzia's science station, but Arla reached the Trill's empty chair before he did.

“The attackers have gone to warp, sir. The Opaka is pursuing. The Boreth is holding its position.”

With an arm as heavy as his hopes, Sisko finally allowed himself to touch his communicator. “Sisko to Jake.”

No answer. Sisko's stomach twisted with fear for his boy.

Arla looked up at Sisko.

“My son—he was in sickbay,” Sisko said in answer to Arla's questioning glance.

“Communications are down across the ship,” Arla offered.

And then a far-too-familiar voice whispered from the bridge speakers, with pious—and patently false—surprise.

“Captain Sisko, I cannot tell you what a privilege it is to see you once again.”

Sisko forced himself to raise his head to look up at the viewer, to see the odious, smiling speaker who sat in a Klingon command chair, a figure clad in the unmistakable robes of a Bajoran vedek.

“Weyoun . . . ?”

“Oh, Captain, I feel so honored that you remember me after all this time,” the Vorta simpered. “Though I suppose for you it is only a matter of minutes since you were plucked from the timeline and redeposited here.”

Sisko stared at the viewscreen as if he were trapped in a dream and the slightest movement on his part would send him into an endless fall.

No, not a dream, Sisko thought. A nightmare. . . .

Because Weyoun's presence as a Bajoran religious leader on a Klingon vessel with Starfleet markings meant only one thing.

Sometime in the past twenty-five years, the war had ended.

And the Dominion had won.