In today’s episode, when a 5000-year-old Defiant pops up on Antiques Roadshow, Sisko takes no joy in verifying the certificate of authenticity. But if he can’t stop a nasty case of space termites from gobbling up everything in the Alpha Quadrant, he’ll find out exactly how he ended up on the rocks. Has spinal meningitis got Morn down? Is the Hainish Cycle canon? And is the Bronto Burger back on the menu? All this and more in Time’s Enemy, the book that asks: what if we take the wormhole and push it somewhere else?

Time’s Enemy
Author: L.A. Graf
Published: August 1996
Pages: 338
Timeline: Like a hilariously increasing number of DS9 books, between seasons 3 and 4
Prerequisites: First Strike and The Soldiers of Fear precede it, obviously, but this one is more its own thing and I think you could probably read it without having first read those

Admiral Hayman summons Sisko, Dax, and Bashir to Starbase One to review a data record and offer an opinion on it. Seems a hefty waste of time and resources, sez Sisko, to call three officers all the way to near Earth for something like that. That is, until he realizes what the data is telling him, which is that it’s from a battle that the ship it was recovered from lost.

That ship being the Defiant.

Under Sisko’s command.

Having correctly answered the million-dollar question, Hayman takes them over to the bonus round, where she shows them the remains of the Defiant, found in a comet’s ice buildup by a mining expedition in Earth’s Oort cloud. It’s been frozen nearly five thousand years, and its destruction yielded only two human survivors, Sisko and Bashir—the latter of whom hung on long enough to preserve the Dax symbiont in a brine solution. That brine bath might just save the galaxy’s bacon, because astoundingly, the symbiont is still alive and able to offer a little help. With its assistance, they learn that the Defiant entered the wormhole and got thrown five millennia into the past, where they encountered the beings that ultimately destroyed them. Checking the data against some of O’Brien’s readings, they also learn that the next time they take the Defiant to warp will be the last.

Meanwhile, back at DS9, Kira is dealing with something a little less mind-bending than meeting her own internal organs, but dangerous nonetheless: Bajoran terrorists looking to take out the station with a plasma bomb. The campaign’s leader is Pak Dorren, a resistance fighter of Kira’s day of whom Kira disapproves, mostly due to an incident where Pak screwed up building a fusion bomb and glassed an entire valley, killing a ton of innocents in the process. Also, the wormhole is burping up asteroidal fragments, and an alarming number of ships are being found and drifting into port that have been sheared open and show no life signs or even traces of core radiation, but only Odo seems to think this is important.

It doesn’t move Sisko’s meedle much either, since he’s got way bigger fish to fry when he returns to the station. He tries several measures to avert the temporal disaster, like taking different crew members on the Defiant for the next wormhole run and leaving Bashir and the Dax symbiont behind at the station. But T’Kreng, the Vulcan scientist who Ubered them back, is a bit more interested in her own once-in-a-lifetime chance to study the wormhole than in staving off the complete annihilation of the Alpha Quadrant, and when she takes her research vessel into the wormhole, the imminent cataclysm Sisko was trying to prevent kicks into motion. At first, T’Kreng really annoyed me, but it’s important to be reminded that even Vulcans aren’t immune to making rash or even outright stupid decisions. Plus, it’s funny enough to immediately know T’Kreng made a huge mistake, but it’s even more hilarious later when more details come to light and the true scope of just how badly she broke stuff is revealed.

On the Gamma Quadrant side of the wormhole, they find T’Kreng’s ship, the Sreba, sliced open and devoid of life signs except for an officer in stasis, whom they beam over and revive. Then, while trailing some Jem’Hadar ships while in cloak, they finally get a peek at the adversary in action, a relentless, vacuum-traveling horde of space bugs called viroids that can evolve and adapt by absorbing and using the DNA and cerebral cortices of organisms they consume. The wormhole aliens have already told Sisko by this point how they’re going to save the wormhole by moving it through time; it’s just up to him to keep the huge burst of energy that destroys it from making it in, while Kira on the other side must reluctantly team up Pak Dorren to keep the station in one piece on their end.

The first two Invasion! novels focused directly on the terror-inducing motley jumble of species collectively known as the Furies and their first two attempts to reclaim the Alpha Quadrant (the area of space they call “heaven”) from the nebulous foes they call “the conquerors”. After a short detour, we’re back for the thrilling pair of concluding novels. In keeping with the order of series, the third installment gives us the Deep Space Nine side of the story, Time’s Enemy, which bucks the trend by going off in a direction that … isn’t unrelated, per se, but does keep you wondering what it has to do with anything that came before it until near the end, and only limns a satisfying connection in the final pages. That’s not to say it isn’t good. In fact, it’s the best of them so far.

It doesn’t speak well for the Invasion! saga’s basic structural soundness that a story that gets so far away from its foundational premise so easily wipes the floor with the others. Whether intentionally or not, L.A. Graf have hit on an excellent point here. The intensity may be there, but at heart, the Furies are a very basic kind of scary—borderline spoopy, I would argue—and, ultimately, an identifiable and knowable fear. By contrast, the antagonists of Time’s Enemy, such as they are, are eldritch, implacable, and impossible to communicate and reason with. In other words, an enemy perfectly tailored to hit several of Star Trek‘s specific blind spots.

Another great strategy Cercone and Ecklar employ to great effect here is to build a ton of momentum fast and early by front-loading the first chapter with shocker after shocker, leaving no time before one “whoa!” moment to recover from the previous one. That stores up a lot of good will that carries the book nearly to the end all on its own. It does threaten to get somewhat esoteric with the time travel shenanigans, but—mild spoiler, perhaps—we never actually visit the dire bad ending that the Dax symbiont warns of, so despite the early possibility of watching it play out, the whole story ultimately stays rooted firmly in the present. Getting away from the aliens the miniseries is nominally supposed to be about seems like a counterintuitive move, but their desire to not want to have four books of the same thing yields potent fruit, and if I’m being honest, the Furies are not terribly compelling villains outside of a handful of individuals from First Strike. The decision to swap them out for a different antagonist was certainly a bold one, but in this case, I think they managed to trade up.

MVP & LVP

• My MVP for this one is Dax—both of them. The symbiont hangs on for over five millennia to deliver her urgent warning of things to come, and then Jadzia ends up being the ultimate hero of the day in a truly bizarre spectacle that gave me strange but not unwarranted flashbacks to A Wind in the Door, the second Wrinkle in Time novel. She goes super hard in this one.
• The LVP of this book is Quark. It just doesn’t have a lot for him to do, and frankly, I appreciate that they didn’t try to shoehorn it. For a while, I was going to give it to T’Kreng, but she managed to redeem herself, which is no small feat considering how truly and deeply badly she nearly ruined everything. It’s bad enough to rate a spoiler footnote. That T’Kreng, she’s a wacky one.1So you know as soon as it happens that the Vulcans taking their research ship into the wormhole against Sisko’s wishes is a massive mistake, but you don’t get a proper sense of just how dumb it is until page 226, when it’s revealed that the viroids, with their aforementioned ability to use the DNA and cerebral cortices of the prey they consume, gained the brain power and specialized knowledge of fifteen Vulcans when they ate everyone on the Sreba. That allowed them to figure out how to detonate the wormhole with exactly enough precision to bring the rest of their comrades to the present and devour the entire Federation—which was not even their original goal! Vulcans don’t do anything by halves, and evidently that includes getting the entire universe killed.

Stray Bits

• As befits a book written by an all-female collective, Time’s Enemy is packed to the hilt with strong-willed women. I can count at least eight such characters off the top of my head. The degree of agency they all have is remarkable. It’s a tour de force and a triumph on that level for sure.
• Speaking of strong women, there’s a lovely homage to Ursula K. LeGuin in here. Ansible technology is cited as the basis for all interstellar communication, and Dax uses it to communicate through time as well with her symbiont self.
• T’Kreng has won two Zee-Magnees Prizes. Too bad neither of them were in the field of good manners! High-yooooo!
• O’Brien to Bashir, page 184: “And you keep a couple of hours free the next time Keiko visits the station. There’s a Billy the Brontosaur holoplay Molly’s been dying to see at the multiplex.” — I was going to say about this passage that I didn’t buy that they would be using the thoroughly debunked term “brontosaur” in the 24th century, but then just for kicks I decided to look it up, and it turns out that Brontosaurus is in fact once more a tentatively valid genus as of 2015! There are some in the field of paleontology who remain unswayed, but nevertheless, there’s a good lesson there, kids: be sure to update your knowledge base from time to time. Science is always learning and changing its mind; you can, too.
• “Almost two years ago now, Bashir had requisitioned a pair of light-cargo antigravs after he, Odo, O’Brien, Kira, Maile, Yevlin, Gerjuoy, and Sisko spent the better part of an afternoon serving as lift-and-carry team for a narcoleptic Morn while Bashir muddled his way through inventing an appropriate Vegan choriomeningitis treatment regimen for Morn’s species. According to the medical texts, Morn shouldn’t have been able to contract the disease at all; Bashir had gotten an excellent paper out of the experience. He’d also gotten the antigravs.” — Who doesn’t love a good antigrav anecdote? I know I do. Although I’m not sure how Morn qualifies as “light cargo”. (No offense.) (p. 252)
• “[Sisko] shot to his feet, the coiled-spring tension in his gut winching even tighter than before. Jake was on Bajor. Two hundred million other people were on Bajor—and he could only think of one or two who deserved to be swallowed by an exploding singularity.” — Got a pretty hefty LOL out of me. (p. 259)

Final Assessment

Excellent. L.A. Graf strike gold by distancing their story from the Furies and mining the so-far less explored lore of their so-called “conquerors”. Although its temporal hijinks seem early on like they’re going to get pretty byzantine, it never strays from the present, and does a great job at keeping you wondering how Our Heroes can possibly topple such an eerie eldritch threat as the viroids. If you were to only read one Invasion! novel, this one stands up well enough on its own legs to make it the easy choice.

NEXT TIME: The Invasion! saga wraps up with The Final Fury