Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Fearful Symmetry (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) (Mass Market Paperback)

by Olivia Woods (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
In our universe, a Cardassian sleeper agent--Iliana Ghemor--was once surgically altered to resemble and replace resistance fighter Kira Nerys, future Starfleet captain and hero of the planet Bajor's liberation. That plan never reached fruition, and the fate of the agent remained unknown...until now.

Robbed of the past sixteen years, Iliana Ghemor is back with a vengeance. Over a decade and a half of imprisonment and abuse by her former masters has brought her to the brink of madness, sustained only by the twisted belief that she is, in fact, the real Kira Nerys. She has already made one near-successful attempt on the real Kira's life, but instead of assuming the identity of the woman she was intended to replace, Ghemor has set her sights on the most unexpected target of all: Kira's other double, the malicious Intendent, Bajor's iron-fisted ruler in the alternate reality commonly known as the "Mirror Universe." But far more is unfolding in the Mirror Universe than Ghemor realizes, and the heroes of Deep Space Nine somehow must stop the false Kira without derailing the delicate flow of history that must unfold if both universes, and countless others, are to survive.

Parallel stories set in both universes reflect and build upon each other in this Two-in-One "Flip Book," the continuation of both the ongoing DS9 saga as well as the Mirror Universe line of books.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Prologue

Seven days ago

The world receded behind an infinite vista of radiant white, until all that remained was the beating of his heart -- the steady rhythm that kept him anchored to his life on the linear plane. He found his hand, long brown fingers flexing above his open palm, just as he had done during his original encounter with the Prophets. And like that first time, he came to understand that he was not alone.

But he had intuited from the start that this was not to be another meeting with the wormhole entities. His sudden need to experience the Orb that had guided him here had come from his vague sense of a different sort of connection, one deep in the center of his being...something that transcended even the most intimate relationships of his linear life. As his awareness continued to spread outward, he started to recognize those who were already assembled here: seven others who had, like him, been drawn by necessity to this place that was not a place, at a time when there was no time. He walked forward into a circle of Emissaries.

A gathering of men named Benjamin Sisko.

They looked at one another across the whiteness, men from different universes; each one, like him, born by design, and each of whom in time -- despite how differently their lives had unfolded -- had met his destiny on a world called Bajor.

Ben felt the void at once, a cold and yawning emptiness very close by, like a missing piece of his soul. To his immediate right, there was a break in the circle. Someone was missing.

"I take it," he said, "that we're here to do something about the hole in our ranks."

"Not us," said one of the others. "You."

Ben's gaze fixed upon the speaker, a clean-shaven civilian wearing the formal attire of a Federation diplomat, and as their identical eyes met, his counterpart's life and the world from which he came were suddenly an open book: Ambassador Sisko of the UFP Diplomatic Corps, who had lost his wife Jennifer on Cardassia Prime during a suicide attack by Kohn-Ma terrorists, even as he was trying to negotiate the withdrawal of Cardassia's military forces from Bajor....

Ben heard his heart beating faster. He focused on the sound, followed it back to his true self, realizing that it would be all too easy to become lost in the alternate lives arrayed around him. "I don't understand."

"He was your responsibility," someone else said. Ben turned and focused past the break in the circle, where another counterpart was gesturing toward the vacant space between them. What appeared to be a dagger was sheathed in the sashlike belt of his gaudy metallic uniform: Fleet Captain Sisko, the military governor of Bajor under a Terran Empire that never fell, the livid scar across his right, sightless eye the only legacy of the father who had betrayed him. "It was your task to reach him, to convince him to take his place among us."

"What are you talking about?" Ben asked. "I never even met our counterpart in that reality. How is anything about him or that universe my responsibility?"

"You ignored the signs," the imperial said.

"What signs? Every crossover was their doing, except for the first one, and that was entirely by accident!" As he spoke, the events of that original contact came back to him: Nerys and Julian's runabout mysteriously malfunctioning as it entered the wormhole, out of control until it emerged, inexplicably, in the alternate universe of the Intendant.

Then he paused, comprehension slowly dawning...along with the terrible realization that he had been blind to a pattern that had been there before him all along.

"It wasn't an accident at all," Ben said. "The Prophets wanted our two universes to connect."

"You're starting to understand," said another civilian, this one full-bearded and wearing a blue laboratory jumpsuit: Dr. Sisko of the Daystrom Institute, whose discovery of the wormhole years after the terrible accident that had claimed the life of his sister had led, not to strife, but to a new renaissance of art, science, and philosophy -- and to a spreading social revolution in which the free exchange of knowledge and ideas was catalyzing a gradual dismantling of the familiar galactic nation-states in favor of a loose but stable interstellar sprawl. "Every other crossover was initiated by their side, just as you said," the scientist continued. "And more tellingly, they all occurred by transporter. But your Kira and Bashir's runabout went through the wormhole to get there and back that first time, and you never stopped to consider the possibility that it wasn't a random event, or that your two universes seemed unusually permeable in the Bajoran system after that first event. You never wondered why no one in that universe ever opened their Temple Gates, despite the presence of a Sisko in that continuum. Not even after you learned the truth about your origins...that Benjamin Sisko does not exist by accident, in any universe."

"The Sisko of the Intendant's dimension," Ben realized. "He was supposed to have become their Emissary."

"That's the only reason any of us exist," said still another counterpart, his uniform an odd amalgam of Starfleet and Militia design: Colonel Sisko of the Celestial Union -- from the universe where Bajor was the nucleus of a vast planetary alliance that stretched from Cardassia to Earth -- who had discovered the wormhole at the height of a savage and protracted war with the Tholians...a conflict that had claimed the lives of both his parents. "We're each born onto a path we're meant to walk," the colonel continued, "but his life -- his reality -- made him the most reluctant of us, the one least open to accepting the role we're all meant to fulfill."

"Cowardice" was the judgment of Admiral Sisko, widower and hero of Wolf 359, whose Federation had long ago absorbed the Klingons, the Romulans, the Cardassians, even the Tzenkethi and the Breen. "The fear to believe in ourselves has always been our greatest enemy. That was where you came in."

"You're telling me I was supposed to have gotten through to him somehow."

"Not alone," said Sisko of the Borg, his mechanically aided voice reverberating as it passed through his dull gray lips. "Never alone. But it was your job to keep your eye on the ball." Ben repressed a shudder at seeing the fate he knew he himself had only narrowly escaped. But his revulsion was tempered by fascination -- that in a universe where the collective had overrun Earth and then pushed on through the Federation toward Bajor, the Prophets' plan for Benjamin Sisko had still come to fruition, even for one so wounded in body, mind, and soul.

"But why me?" Ben wanted to know. "You all seem to have understood my task when I didn't even know I had one. Why wasn't it one of you?"

"Because next to him, you were the slowest of us to accept who you really are," came the answer from the Sisko whose life seemed most like his own...until the death of his only son aboard the Saratoga, a loss from which he never recovered. Broken and consumed by grief, it destroyed his marriage, his career, and almost his will to live. But time and destiny eventually swept him to Bajor, and thus to the truth, as they had for every other Emissary. "Helping him would have helped you to reach a better understanding of yourself much sooner, to think outside your comfort zone, so you could have better prepared your Bajor for the trials ahead."

And there it was -- as it had been during the throes of the rapture that had led to his rediscovery of B'hala, and again during his tutelage in the Temple -- a fleeting glimpse of the pattern that held the Tapestry together, spanning past, present, and future...now coupled with the real possibility that he himself was responsible, because of actions he had failed to take, for putting it all at risk.

"What happens now?" he a