Star Trek 912: Fallen Heroes

912. Fallen Heroes

PUBLICATION: Star Trek Deep Space Nine #5, Pocket Books, February 1994

CREATORS: Dafydd ab Hugh

STARDATE: 47234 (between Season 1 and Season 2)

PLOT: Quark buys a Gamma Quadrant artifact that sends him and Odo three days into the future, a future in which everyone has been killed by the artifact's owners. Slowly, they piece together what happened and how they can go back and prevent it from happening. With the help of a surviving Jake Sisko, they manage it, but with Odo out of commission, it's up to Quark to convince Sisko he's doing the right thing. He returns the artifact to the aliens and collapses the catastrophic timeline.

CONTINUITY: Emergency lighting has been fixed since the blackouts in The Big Game (DS9 #4).

DIVERGENCES: The language is harsher than in any episode, but then so is the violence. Sisko battles to get the Ops turbolift doors open, except there are no doors there. Odo briefly takes on humanoid features.

SCREENSHOT OF THE WEEK
REVIEW: Damn, this thing is dark. Dark, but excellent. Despite the necessary reset button, Dafyyd ab Hugh creates an engaging thriller, both tense and literate, rare in the so-called "numbered" novels. The book intercuts nimbly between Odo and Quark's discovery of the massacre and the courageous and doomed actions of the other characters a couple days before. It's very filmic that way. Each character's point of view is also better represented than even on the tv show, with unique cultural and psychological differences. The deaths of the main characters are violent, which may put off some, but aesthetically beautiful. Keiko's is particularly moving, though everyone's death is meaningful and revelatory. The finale, with Odo testing his boiling point is properly epic, going a long way to redeem the resolution in which Quark basically just has a few short words with the aliens. But you quickly realize that the book is about the massacre and the ultimate sacrifices of the heroes, not about defeating the alien invaders.