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  To Kirsten Beyer, a woman of fierce talents and abilities, a brilliant collaborator, and, most important of all, a wonderful friend

  Historian’s Note

  The primary story of this novel commences in March 2386, not long after the events of the Deep Space Nine novels Ascendance and The Long Mirage. Finally freed from patrolling the sector around Deep Space 9 in the aftermath of the assassination of Federation President Nanietta Bacco, Captain Sisko and his Robinson crew finally set off on their mission of exploration into the Gamma Quadrant.

  Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it.

  —Reinhold Niebuhr

  Prologue

  Catalyst

  Brilliant light erupted from the improvised device, engulfing the man holding it as the explosion tore through his body. The detonation also felled the men and women standing beside Rejias Norvan, dropping them broken, burned, and bloodied to the ground. The blast triggered another device elsewhere in the crowd, and then another, and then still more. Explosions rent the perpetual night, great bursts of yellow-red fire that stood out dramatically beneath the cold black skies of Endalla.

  From a safe distance, Radovan Tavus watched the chain of destruction unfold across the surface of Bajor’s largest moon. Waves of flame rolled over those assembled like a fiery tsunami, its debris shrapnel, leaving death and devastation in its wake. When the conflagration had run its course, charred and battered bodies littered the ground. Beneath the slain Ohalavaru, the dull, uneven gray expanse of Endalla had been transformed by the intense heat into a smooth span of ebon glass.

  A grim stillness settled over the landscape. The sudden quiet pinned Radovan where he stood. He stared at the gruesome tableau, unable to move in that moment any more than the hundreds of dead laid out before him.

  But then Radovan saw motion. Near the flashpoint of the firestorm, an arm reached into the air. Attached to a body in a scorched environmental suit, it trembled for a moment before thrusting forward and down, as though seeking purchase.

  Radovan hadn’t even allowed for the possibility of survivors, but seeing one penetrated his shock. He rushed forward and into the grisly scene. He lost sight of the moving arm and the body to which it belonged, but he continued in that direction. He threaded his way through the field of singed and mangled corpses, stepping past inert bodies until he reached the blackened, twisted remains of Rejias Norvan. Radovan barely recognized the charismatic leader who had led an extremist Ohalavaru sect to Endalla in search of concrete evidence proving the veracity of the Ohalu texts.

  Just past Rejias, the arm reached out again. Radovan looked over and saw the figure in the environmental suit, their helmet off. He recognized the man struggling to pull himself along, dragging his other arm behind him, useless. The man writhed fitfully across the ground, showing none of the dignity with which he typically carried himself, and yet the Emissary’s grueling attempt to haul himself across the lunar surface possessed a certain desperate nobility.

  Radovan looked ahead of Benjamin Sisko, searching for the dying man’s intended goal. He saw only lifeless Bajorans, scorched heaps of inanimate flesh and bone rendered wholly equal by death. One carcass resembled the next. They all—

  Wait, Radovan thought. There—

  One of the fallen differed from the others—from all the other dead bodies strewn about the blast zone. Radovan headed in that direction, navigating through the killing field until he arrived at the apparent object of the Emissary’s attention. So much smaller than any of the other cadavers, it obviously belonged to a child.

  Not a child, Radovan corrected himself. A toddler.

  He crouched beside the prone, unmoving husk and didn’t wonder why Benjamin Sisko labored to reach it in what would surely be the final moments of his life. Still, Radovan reached out and pushed at the toddler’s side. The body rolled over easily, revealing a face somehow untouched by the explosions—a face known to all of Bajor. Nearly three and a half years earlier, the birth of Rebecca Jae Sisko had coincided with the return of the Emissary from the Celestial Temple after his mysterious sojourn there. Based upon ancient writings, the Ohalavaru deemed her the Avatar, and they looked upon her as a new hope for the people of Bajor, an augur of a growing collective awareness that would usher in clarity and a joyous future for their society.

  The little girl stared up unseeing at Radovan. In death, she wore an expression not of repose, but of fear and surprise. Radovan saw the encumbrance of more years in her countenance than Rebecca had actually lived. It unnerved him in a way he could not articulate. He had never known what to make of the Ohalavaru claims about the Avatar, and her dying at such an early age confused him even more. He gazed at her frozen features and wondered about the capricious nature of existence.

  And then Rebecca Sisko blinked.

  Radovan shot to his feet so quickly, he almost overbalanced. He managed to catch himself, then watched as the toddler looked up at him and opened her mouth. In the instant before she spoke, Radovan expected that he would hear a deep, adult voice, like that of some cursèd entity—a Pah-wraith or a fire demon—that had seized control of the Avatar’s dead body. Instead, he heard the small, plaintive voice of a little girl.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked. Her eyes burned brightly.

  Too brightly—too perceptively—for someone so young, Radovan thought. “I . . . I . . .” he stammered, unable to formulate a reply. Even in his everyday life, he had a difficult time determining how to live and what to do next; he could not possibly expect to fathom what Rebecca Sisko wanted of him.

  That’s when Radovan felt a hand settle on his shoulder. He whirled around to see that Benjamin Sisko had reached his destination and climbed to his feet. Up close, the Emissary looked as dead as all the corpses cluttering the ground about them. Half of Benjamin Sisko’s face had been burned away, the bone of his skull visible in places through his seared skin. His blackened tongue protruded past his teeth like a piece of charred meat. One of his eyes had turned to jelly.

  “What are you going to do?” the Emissary demanded.

  Radovan opened his mouth to scream—

  • • •

  —and bolted upright in bed. His heart thundered in his chest. A layer of sweat covered his body. His head pounded.

  Radovan pulled his legs up to his chest and rested his arms atop his knees. He sat quietly that way in the darkness, attempting to calm himself. He reached up to his temples and slowly kneaded them, trying to overcome the feeling of his head being compressed in a vise. The memory of a shriek seemed to echo in his ears. Had he cried
out in his sleep? He didn’t know, but he thought—he felt—that he probably had. He idly dropped one hand to the top of his shoulder, to where, in his nightmare, the mortally wounded Benjamin Sisko had touched him. Radovan’s hand found only his own bare skin.

  Bare? That seemed wrong. Radovan always wore nightclothes to bed—typically underwear and a lightweight short-sleeve pullover. Why had he—

  “You all right?” came a groggy voice out of the shadows beside him. Radovan threw the sheet back and hurled himself to his feet—even as some of the particulars of the evening percolated up in his mind. He remembered the woman in his bed, who had insisted on coming home with him after the Ohalavaru rally.

  Radovan wanted nothing more than to fully rouse the woman—Winser Ellevet—and send her away, but he understood the bounds of propriety enough to know that he could not do that. Instead, he told her, “Go back to sleep,” his own voice rough with slumber. He could not lie and claim that all was well—he’d never been particularly adept at conjuring falsehoods—but he knew how to avoid telling the truth. He held still, hoping that Winser would not completely waken. She said nothing more, and after a few seconds, Radovan heard her roll over. He continued to wait in the dark, motionless, until her breathing slowed and deepened, signaling her return to sleep. He then padded quietly across the unlighted room, feeling for the open door to the en-suite refresher. Once inside, he slowly swung the door closed, though he left the light off. After finding his robe by touch, he hurriedly pulled it on and cinched it closed. The utilitarian fabric covered his nakedness but did nothing to relieve him of his shame.

  With his head still aching, Radovan opened the ’fresher cabinet and, out of habit, reached to the top shelf. His fingers found the various medications, palliatives, and painkillers used to treat his mother in her final year, which he’d taken with him when he’d cleared out her home. Realizing his mistake, he moved his hand down to the bottom shelf and felt around for the mild analgesic he kept there. He was not suffering from one of his migraines, but it had been a poor decision to accept Winser’s invitation to a tavern after their post-rally dinner. Radovan rarely drank, and the throbbing in his head—coupled with his allowing Winser to come home with him—reminded him why. He opened the bottle of medicine, fumbled for two tablets, then let them dissolve under his tongue.

  Finally feeling more like himself, he went back out into the bedroom and crossed to the other door, which he closed behind him. He moved down the short hall, past a closet to one side and the guest ’fresher on the other, to the living area of his flat. Light from the streetlamps outside seeped in through the gray curtains hanging along the front windows, sending a ghostly cast across the indistinct shapes of the furniture populating the room.

  Radovan chose not to activate the overhead lighting panels. He skirted the small table and chairs by the replicator, then sidled behind the low wooden table in front of the sofa. He sat down heavily, exhausted—not just from his interrupted sleep, but from the emotions roiling within him. It seemed impossible that he had brought a stranger to his home in the first place, much less a woman who currently slept in his bed.

  Radovan had first met Winser Ellevet almost a year earlier, at a local meeting of the Ohalavaru in the city of Johcat. Open to the public, the gathering had specifically invited people curious about the writings of Ohalu and the modern movement that had arisen around his ancient teachings. Radovan questioned many aspects of life on Bajor, and he had been drawn to learn about the relatively new sect because it diverged from the mainstream. He had never fit in anywhere, and although he hadn’t expected to find a place among the Ohalavaru, he’d wanted to see if he could realize even the smallest comfort in their beliefs.

  It was because of Mother, Radovan thought. Her death had been a source of both sorrow and relief, of both loss and liberation. After a lifetime spent playing the dutiful son, and several years ministering to his mother’s ever-increasing healthcare needs, her passing had changed everything—freeing him from his arduous responsibilities while also robbing him of the most important person in his life.

  “You weren’t just set free,” the counselor he’d briefly consulted had told him. “You were set adrift.”

  At the first Ohalavaru event Radovan had attended, he hadn’t found succor, but he had found Winser. Or rather, she had found him. She had approached him at the refreshments table. She spoke to him easily, as though they already knew each other; more than that, she acted as though they had been in the middle of a conversation. She asked what he thought so far of the meeting, and also his general opinion of the Ohalavaru. Despite his impulse to excuse himself and withdraw, he carefully answered her—truthfully giving voice to some of the questions he still had, but also trying not to say too much. For all he knew, she could have been a believer in the tenets of Ohalu, sent to gauge his viability as a possible convert. Radovan did not care to be judged.

  Winser listened to what he had to say, then offered some of her own opinions. Uncertain about the Ohalavaru, she echoed many of Radovan’s own concerns. Despite his usual inclination to flee from public encounters, particularly those with strangers, he ended up talking with Winser for quite some time.

  A month after that, at the next Ohalavaru meeting, Winser had arrived midway through the first speaker’s address. She sat down next to Radovan, and later, she accompanied him to the refreshments table, where they once more conversed at length. At one point, she asked him if he might like to continue their discussion after the meeting, perhaps at a restaurant or a tavern. Radovan considered himself an average man—at least in appearance—but he realized that Winser was flirting with him. Although he did not find her a great beauty—she carried a few too many kilos on her small frame—her attention flattered him. At the same time, it made him uncomfortable, and so he politely declined her invitation.

  Radovan had continued to attend various Ohalavaru gatherings, at which he’d often seen and spoken with Winser. From time to time, she invited him out. Eventually, during a particularly intriguing conversation about rumors of a possible Ohalavaru expedition to Endalla, Radovan acquiesced. He shared a meal with Winser at a local eatery, which went well enough that he subsequently had dinner with her after several other meetings.

  And then we both went to Endalla, Radovan thought. The experience had been intense, though his bad dream that night did not accurately reflect what had actually taken place. Afterward, once they returned from the Bajoran moon, Winser asked him to join her for dinner apart from any Ohalavaru assemblies. Wanting to make sense of the events on Endalla, and feeling that he could talk to her about it, Radovan met her several times for meals.

  He had done so that night. After they finished their dinner, Winser suggested they not end their conversation, but take it to a tavern. For the first time, Radovan said yes.

  Why did I do that? he asked himself. And why had he chosen to order even one cocktail, let alone several? Drinking had clearly clouded his judgment, otherwise he would never have allowed Winser to come home with him. He could barely recall their trip back to his flat, and the memory of her coaxing him into bed ended with an awkward tangle of bare flesh. Radovan didn’t think they had consummated their relationship, possibly because he’d been physically unable to do so—either as the result of the alcohol he’d imbibed, or because of his general disinterest in such encounters.

  Except I wanted company, didn’t I? Radovan’s nightmare had not been the first he’d experienced; interrupted sleep had become the norm over the past months. Since returning from Endalla, his bad dreams had escalated in intensity, with that night’s phantasm the most horrifying.

  His heartbeat slowing to a normal pace, his headache receding, Radovan sat in the darkness and pondered the shock that had woken him. His bad dreams typically faded quickly, leaving him drained but with no recollection of what his sleeping mind had wrought. That night, though, the memory of his nightmare persisted.

  The images that had risen in his mind had clearly been born o
ut of the terrible events he had witnessed four weeks earlier on Endalla, but they did not match the reality of what had taken place. Radovan didn’t understand why—why his subconscious would twist his awful experiences into something even worse. It made no sense to him.

  I’m missing something, he thought. Something about Endalla or the Ohalavaru.

  Radovan knew that sleep would not come just then, no matter how much he needed it. He shifted on the sofa and lay down, wanting to at least rest his tired body. Rather than attempting to relax his mind, he instead focused his thoughts, reflecting back on the incident that had spurred his nightmare.

  • • •

  Radovan peered through the port of the small civilian space vessel as it descended toward the barren surface of Bajor’s largest moon. Two years prior, an isolytic subspace weapon had ripped away Endalla’s thin atmosphere and obliterated its ecosystem. From his home on Bajor, Radovan could readily distinguish the transformation of the natural satellite; what had once been a brown-and-green sphere adorning the night had become an ashen pockmark in the sky. Viewing it from up close made the devastation even more apparent. Though Radovan had never before visited Endalla, he had throughout his life seen images of its surface, showing basic plant life and the various scientific settlements that had taken root there. From his seat aboard the spacecraft, he gazed out instead at a sterile, desolate landscape, an empty terrain shaded from a palette of grays and blacks.

  “It’s the color of gravestones,” said Winser Ellevet. She leaned toward the port from where she sat beside Radovan. “It looks like parts of Bajor after—” Her voice caught, as though she might break down, but then she completed her thought. “After the Cardassians left.”

  Radovan nodded. He didn’t trust himself to say anything for fear of what he might reveal. He could not quite define his relationship with Winser; though he wouldn’t deem her a kindred spirit, he recognized her unease in social situations, and in that way found her a nonthreatening acquaintance. Whatever he called their association, Radovan wanted for the moment to preserve it. He could tell that seeing the destruction of Endalla up close affected her, but beyond a simple observational interest, Radovan felt nothing.