STAR TREK: DS9 - The Lives of Dax Read online

  “Tracing Dax’s footsteps through the centuries has the unmistakable feel of sitting around a campfire under the spell of a master storyteller. ... Intelligent, thoughtful and—no less important—fun.”

  —Heather Jarman,

  author of This Gray Spirit

  (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine—

  Mission: Gamma, Book Two)

  “Reaps its potential brilliantly.”

  —Trekweb.com

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  This book consists of works of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 1999 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved. Originally published as a trade paperback in 1999 by Pocket Books

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  ISBN: 0-7434-5682-3

  First Pocket Books mass market paperback printing January 2003

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  Contents

  Introduction

  EZRI

  Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens

  “Second star to the right ...”

  LELA

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Jill Sherwin

  First Steps

  TOBIN

  Jeffrey Lang

  Dead Man’s Hand

  EMONY

  Michael Jan Friedman

  Old Souls

  AUDRID

  S. D. Perry

  Sins of the Mother

  TORIAS

  Susan Wright

  Infinity

  JORAN

  S. D. Perry

  Robert Simpson

  Allegro Ouroboros in D Minor

  CURZON

  Steven Barnes

  The Music Between the Notes

  JADZIA

  L. A. Graf

  Reflections

  EZRI

  “... and straight on ’til morning.”

  About the e-Book

  “In nine lives I’ve been a little of everything.”

  —Ezri Dax

  “The Siege of AR-558”

  Introduction

  DAX

  Our baby ... would have been so beautiful.

  And with that, Dax exhales her last breath and dies.

  STRANGE AS IT may seem, that was how it started. Back in April 1998, I read Ira Steven Behr and Hans Beimler’s moving script, “Tears of the Prophets,” the finale for the sixth season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, confirming the rumors that had already been spreading for months. I read those words, and that’s when I knew the book you now hold was going to happen.

  Jadzia died, and something in the back of my mind just clicked.

  But why do a book about Dax? I mean, let’s face it, she doesn’t fit into the usual formula for a successful Star Trek book—she’s not a captain, she’s not bald, and she doesn’t have pointed ears. The skeptics I encountered were beside themselves: How could I possibly expect people to be interested?

  And it wasn’t as if Jadzia’s demise meant I could do with the character as I pleased. When “Tears of the Prophets” aired, I knew the death of one Dax would mean the birth of another. We all did, didn’t we? She was a Trill, for cryin’ out loud—that was the thing that most defined her, that she (or he; we still didn’t know at that point) would be back. It would be a different host, of course—the ninth—with the memories of all the previous hosts, male and female, going back nearly four hundred years. Each new personality was different from the one before it, each new life always striving to distinguish itself from the last. I started to wonder about the periods in Star Trek history those hosts had lived through, the things they might have done, the familiar faces they might have encountered. And then I grinned like an idiot.

  “Why Dax?” Are you kidding? Why not?

  How could I ignore the storytelling possibilities implicit in the Dax character? The opportunity not only to flesh out its past lives, but to explore the ways in which they’ve always played a part in the Star Trek universe?

  And then came the clincher—the inspiration that would, I was certain, make the project truly unique among Star Trek books. This wasn’t going to be a biographical novel, with one voice trying to capture the entire scope of Dax’s life. I mean, think about it: Dax is a living anthology—a collection of stories. The book would be one too.

  So I went forward, and on the way Deep Space Nine’s audience was introduced to a new Dax. Ezri came on the scene as the ninth host, and to the delight of Star Trek fans everywhere, myself among them, she proved as popular as Jadzia—precisely because, true to the nature of Dax, she was completely different from Jadzia! Wonderfully brought to life by Terry Farrell, Jadzia had been a strong, confident presence, someone who’d spent her entire adult life preparing herself to process the diverse lives embodied by the Dax symbiont. Ezri, masterfully portrayed by Nicole deBoer, was just the opposite; having been forced by circumstances to become joined to Dax, she was completely unprepared at first to balance the combined personalities of eight previous lives. We only got to watch her struggle for a year, but what a year it was.

  We caught glimpses of the other hosts over the years, too, most notably Joran and Curzon. Every once in a while the show would drop a tantalizing new detail about one of the others, but for the most part they were little more than names and professions. It was enough to create a rough time line, and from there, the book just took off.

  And it’s entirely fair to say that this collection wouldn’t have been possible without the innovative ideas that never stopped coming from the talented writers and producers of Deep Space Nine, who gave us such incredible characters to build upon. So to Rick Berman, Michael Piller, Ira Steven Behr, Ronald D. Moore, Hans Beimler, Rene Echevarria, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, David Weddle, Bradley Thompson, Peter Allen Fields, and the many others who helped to shape Dax along the way ... I gratefully raise my glass to you all.

  I was also privileged to gather together a talented group of professional authors who, as I’d hoped, proved to be as eclectic as Dax’s hosts, and as enthusiastic about the project as I was. The tales they wove are thrilling, touching, suspenseful, funny, provocative, even chilling at times. But you needn’t take my word for it. Read their stories. Experience them for yourselves. More than anyone else, they deserve the credit for this book, because right from the beginning, they believed in it. They saw the possibilities.

  And that, after all, may be the truest spirit of Star Trek.

  Marco Palmieri,

  New York City,

&nbs
p; July 1999

  EZRI

  “She’s a Dax. Sometimes they don’t think. They just do.”

  —Benjamin Sisko

  “Penumbra”

  Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens

  Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens first sat at the Replimat ten years ago to eavesdrop on Odo and Quark as part of their research for The Making of Deep Space Nine, the first of four behind-the-scenes books they have written about Star Trek film and television productions. They are also the authors of three classic Star Trek novels, including the groundbreaking Federation, as well as the epic DS9 trilogy, Millennium, about the catastrophic discovery of the Bajoran system’s second wormhole. In addition, the Reeves-Stevenses are co-writers with William Shatner for the ongoing series of bestselling novels chronicling the continuing adventures of Captain Kirk after his “apparent” death in Star Trek Generations.

  The Reeves-Stevenses’ other novels include the Los Angeles Times bestseller Icefire—hailed by Stephen King as “the best thriller of its type since The Hunt for Red October”—and Quicksilver, which Publishers Weekly proclaimed “a warp-speed technothriller.” The Reeves-Stevenses are also the authors of the classic sf/fantasy crossover trilogy The Chronicles of Galen Sword, available from Babbage Books, and are supervising producers and writers for the hit syndicated sf/fantasy series, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

  “Second star to the right ...”

  Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens

  SHE WAS LOST. Surrounded by the precariously stacked, cast-off debris of an antique alien city. Beneath unfamiliar stars and a single bloated moon. Her feet swelling from the stored daytime heat of the sand and gravel she had crossed, from the endless walking, from the ridiculously contorted shoes Julian had insisted she wear. It was enough to make a person say End program and go back to her quarters and—

  “No,” Ezri Dax said aloud.

  She was many things. Many to the power of nine, she thought. But she wasn’t a quitter. Well, Tobin was a bit of a quitter when it came to dealing with Raifi. And Audrid always believed she could have done more to save Jayvin. And Torias ... well, okay, Ezri reluctantly admitted to herself, Torias wouldn’t have gotten lost in the first place. But there was that time when ...

  “Aggh,” she said to break the relentlessly unpredictable connective thread of interaction and reflection that stitched together all the lives she had lived, that at least a part of her had lived. “I’m doing it again.”

  She sighed, breathing in the night’s cool desert air, shivering as she hugged her sleeveless arms to her chest. The tiny disks of reflective plastic sewn to the fabric of the long, midnight-blue gown she wore—almost wore—scratched the flesh of her arms. Across her exposed back, there was only a chill breeze on far too much bare skin. One more time she wondered why she kept letting Julian talk her into these bizarre historical costumes and adventures from Earth’s past.

  She shook her head determinedly, as if that’s all it would take to clear more than three centuries’ worth of cobwebs, then put her hands on her hips and, with renewed resolve, looked about the graveyard of oddly angled broken glass and twisted metal. She deliberately ignored the dainty, indigo-sequined evening bag dangling from her wrist. Somehow, its triviality seemed especially inappropriate, considering the seriousness of her situation.

  “Okay ... ,” she addressed herself firmly. She looked up at a towering construction of colored glass tubes and wire and metal to her side. In the soft light of the full moon, she could see it formed a caricature of a humanoid male with a vacant grin and narrow mustache, wearing a circular black hat with a disklike brim, one hand held up in an eternal wave of greeting—or a warning to go no farther. “... I saw you from the front gate,” she said to the impassive giant, “and you were on my ... left.” Ezri peered into the dark labyrinth of other twisted tangles of glass and metal, thin rods and shafts jumbled and interlocked in what Jadzia might recognize as enormous metallic crystals grown at random. “So the gate should be somewhere in that direction ... on my right.” She gazed above the ragged black silhouettes that formed a fractal horizon of debris in that direction, but the desert air was so clear she could detect no distant glow of the blazing lights of the city she sought. The stars were as stark and bright in every direction. The space between them as impenetrably black. Wherever she was, wherever she had to go, her surroundings were offering no clue as to what her direction should be.

  “I just have to ...” Ezri faltered, having utterly failed to convince herself of her logic.”... go straight down there and ... ugh, why do I even pretend I know what I’m doing?”

  She kicked viciously at the gravel beneath her, sending up a pale cloud of dust in the moonlight, at the same time thoroughly wedging a small, sharp stone under her cramped and crushed-together toes.

  “Aggh,” she said again as she hopped awkwardly on one foot, trying to twist off the open-toed shoe to free the stone.

  But hopping on gravel in a high-heeled shoe was next to impossible. And when confounded by the long tight gown she wore, not even all of Emony’s gymnastic skills could come to Ezri’s rescue.

  With a strangled cry of frustrated rage, Ezri toppled backward, braced herself for the impact of sharp gravel along her bare back—

  —then gasped in surprise as a pair of strong hands caught her and gallantly restored her to her feet.

  “Julian?!” she said as she spun around to face her rescuer, arms already reaching out to embrace him.

  But the blinding smile that greeted her didn’t belong to the chief medical officer of Deep Space 9. “Sorry to disappoint ya, doll.” It was Vic Fontaine. A holographic simulation of a quintessential Las Vegas nightclub singer from Earth, circa 1962 A.C.E. He gave her a wink.

  Ezri dropped her arms. Vic smiled as if he could sense the change in her mood.

  “I was going to ask what a broad like you’s doing in a dump like this,” Vic said, “but I think I get the picture. The boyfriend’s a big no-show, am I right, or am I right?”

  Ezri shifted uncomfortably on the gravel, one foot still in bondage to its shoe, the other resting uncomfortably on the rough stones. “Actually, Julian doesn’t know I came up here.”

  Vic shot her a sideways look. “What? You two lovebirds have a spat?”

  Ezri shook her head, almost lost her balance again. “No. We had a date, down on the Strip. .. .” She waved her hand around, vaguely trying to indicate the direction of Las Vegas, three simulated kilometers in ... some direction or another from here, but gave up. She had no idea where the city was anymore. “But he got called into emergency surgery.”

  “Son of a gun,” Vic said. “Hasn’t been a lot of that since the Big One.”

  Ezri nodded. The station had been quiet in the past few weeks since the Dominion War had finally ended. Life had been almost normal, or at least it appeared to be when filtered through Jadzia’s memories. Ezri herself had been on the station for just less than a year, and only knew it in its wartime state of operations. And in the aftermath of war.

  But even Ezri knew the end of the war hadn’t brought total peace to the station. Colonel Kira was still brooding over Odo’s departure, and was stubbornly refusing most of Ezri’s offers to provide counselling. Instead, as the new commander of the station, she seemed to be sublimating all her frustrated emotions into convoluted plans to catch Quark red-handed at something—anything illegal, or even questionable. But at least all that attention had given Quark a new purpose in life. Except for those two weeks when the Ferengi barkeep had fled into hiding on Bajor after some bio-acceleration concoction he had peddled had succeeded in growing hair on every part of Morn’s body except the prune-faced alien’s head, Quark had been the station’s sole source of excitement.

  There’d be more excitement to come soon, though, Ezri knew. What with Kasidy Yates expecting Captain Sisko’s baby and half the religious leaders on Bajor debating the significance of that birth in light of the mysterious rash of new visions being
experienced by those who used the Orbs. On top of that, the Cardassian reconstruction effort was finally hitting its stride and even Bajor was contributing supplies and personnel to restore that battered world, making DS9’s loading docks work at full capacity, twenty-six hours a day. And—

  “You’re shivering,” Vic said.

  Ezri came out of her reverie as the hologram wrapped his black sports jacket around her bare shoulders. “I did it again,” she said crossly.

  “Ya gotta give me more than that to go on, doll.”

  “Rambling,” Ezri said. “It’s ... I think one thought, and that makes me think of another, and it’s not as if I only have one lifetime of memories to remember, I’ve got eight, so ... so everything I think reminds me of something else, and the next thing I know ...” Ezri paused, distracted by a sudden recollection of how Curzon had once had a similar conversation with Ben Sisko at Utopia Planitia. It was late at night, after Sisko’s shift was over. Curzon had added healthy dollops of Saurian brandy to the raktajino. “I hate raktajino,” Ezri said to Vic’s bafflement. But Jadzia had enjoyed the beverage. Which made Ezri remember one night when Jadzia and Sisko had been talking late at Quark’s, after Sisko’s shift was over. ... “Aghh!”

  “Don’t tell me,” Vic said kindly. “Rambling.”

  “Especially when I’m upset.”

  “Such as, when a certain young doctor gets called off for emergency surgery on a Saturday night.”

  Ezri studied the hologram, suddenly confused. “It’s not Saturday ... is it?”

  Vic shrugged with a patient grin. “Hey, doll. It’s not Saturday, this isn’t Las Vegas, and it’s sure not 1962. There’s a holosuite wall not ten feet in front of you. But why spoil a beeyootiful evening with cold hard facts?” He offered her his arm. “C’mon, you look like you need to take a load off.”