In today’s episode, Captain Sisko has to give up some of his finest staff for an espionage mission the day before a nerve-wracking peace conference. But it’ll be worth it if they can unlock the secret to making milk no longer do a body good. Is Captain Janeway a fashion trendsetter? How many kinds of prisons are there, really? And why does Bashir have to ask Garak how to do his own job? All this and more in The Heart of the Warrior, the book that makes Dobby a free alien.

The Heart of the Warrior
Author: John Gregory Betancourt
Pages: 274
Published: October 1996
Timeline: Season 4, between “Return to Grace” (4×14) and “Sons of Mogh” (4×15)
Prerequisites: General knowledge of the Jem’Hadar and Dominion presence in the Gamma Quadrant

The day before a landmark peace conference between the Cardassians, the Maquis, and the Federation is scheduled to commence, Worf, Kira, and Odo are dispatched on a top-priority mission to the Gamma Quadrant. An informant from a lab on Daborat V, a Jem’Hadar base world, has discovered design plans for a retrovirus that can walk back the Jem’Hadar’s violent tendencies and reliance on Ketracel-white, which would effectively neutralize them as a military threat. Starfleet wants the assigned team to infiltrate the base and rescue the informant’s partner, who has the virus specs.

Despite the painful staff shortage, the show must go on back at the station. The Valtusians, a fairly generic Roswell-lookin’ bunch of aliens, are the architects of the conference, but Dr. Bashir’s homemade DNA analyzer—a precaution to suss out changelings—offends their “intensely private” sensibilities. The hand-touching taboo is quickly smoothed over, but that’s hardly the end of the problems. Bajoran protesters are up to their typical rabblerousing, today’s leader being Werron, a vedek fresh off of nearly twenty years of silent meditation. He and his coterie have a beef with the presence of Gul Merrak, whom they call “The Butcher of Belmast” in reference to atrocities they claimed he committed during the Bajoran occupation. Werron’s eagerness for an audience with Sisko leads him to encroach on the captain’s personal quarters, and he has a sort of dark aspect about him—but is his grievance a legitimate one?

Back in G.Q. space, the Jem’Hadar take the recon team’s shuttle aboard their gigantic vessel. Odo puts on a Founder performance to buy Worf and Kira some time to don their cloaking belts (a new piece of tech in beta, with a whopping eight minutes of battery life) and hide out in the walls, where they meet Snoct Snead, a small being that the Jem’Hadar hunt for sport in a catch-and-release fashion to keep their skills sharp. Though skittish and timid, he might be able to help them reach the informant. But Odo finds himself, as ever, tempted by the changelings to pursue a life away from the solids. Can he resist their siren song, finish the mission, and get himself, his mates, the informant, and the retrovirus specs back to the Alpha Quadrant in one piece?

Despite the title, The Heart of the Warrior is not a very Worf-centered episode. Certainly he plays a significant role, but this is more of an ensemble story. If anything, the only reason it seems to be titled that way is to alert readers to the fact that we’ve finally (thank goodness!) made it out of the “between seasons 3 and 4” limbo created by the double whammy of the pre-series commissioning of so many stories and a jam-packed release schedule, which prevented the books from doing anything meaningful regarding the Dominion even as that arc began to swiftly become the dominant aspect of the show. With Worf on board, we’re finally unmoored from that frustrating purgatory.

The difference is immediately apparent. Though early DS9 has its moments, it doesn’t start picking up major steam until the Dominion show up and start throwing their weight around. Even average episodes are elevated by the shifts in stakes and tone. The Heart of the Warrior is no exception. It’s a book of adequate quality with a handful of significant issues, but being part of the later seasons makes it a richer read all by itself. The DS9 of the books finally feels more like how I remember the DS9 of the show in my mind. This is a moment I’ve been waiting for, and I’m glad it’s finally here.

I could have done with it being a little tighter, however. The Heart of the Warrior does disappointingly little with a couple of characters that might have made decent villains. Lieutenant Colfax, aide to the admiral of the week, is the kind of unctuous prat who often turns out to be up to no good, but he disappears as soon as his lone purpose is fulfilled. Philip Twofeathers, the conference’s Maquis representative, also gets a raw character deal. He’s keen to see if Quark’s reputation for shady deals is earned, but that ultimately goes nowhere. A Native American Maquis villain is a very intriguing concept—one imagines a person descended from people who had their land taken from them now having his own land taken, and the repeat of history just sort of breaks him. But that isn’t what this character is. What he is is somewhat unclear, but I think there’s a better story out there for him than this one.

The Heart of the Warrior is also one that, as sometimes happens, loses track of page count and ends up scrambling to wrap things up in a nice bow. Worf, Kira, and Odo’s final escape back to the Alpha Quadrant takes all of two pages, and the conclusions to the other threads don’t top that by much. Overall, despite the dangerous covert operation that requires three senior officers, this is a rather low-stakes story, albeit an agreeable one. But if even a jankier novel like this one can get a solid boost from the show’s second-half vibe, I look forward to what lies ahead.

MVP & LVP

• This week’s MVP is Odo. Sure, another “the changelings try to convince him to leave the solids” plot is kind of a snoozer, but being able to short-circuit the Jem’Hadar merely by being who you are comes in so handy. How do Worf and Kira get anywhere without that?
• My LVP pick this week is Bashir. In one scene, he suspects Vedek Werron of being a changeling, which means he needs a DNA sample off of him. Of course, he can’t just walk up to him and say that, so he needs to figure out a way to get it on the sly. Should be easy enough, right? You’d think he’d have a trick up his sleeve for this moment, for all the secret agent games he plays. So then, why does he have to ask Garak how to clandestinely procure a DNA sample from someone? After bumbling through a few ideas with no success, he goes for the direct approach anyway—and screws that up too! Hey Sloan, are you sure this is the guy you wanted for your Section 31 stuff?

Stray Bits

• “The admiral, of course, sat at the head of the table. She had her brown hair pulled back in the severe bun that was becoming popular among high-ranking Starfleet women.” — I like to imagine this is a subtle, regulation-friendly tribute to Janeway after Voyager goes MIA, though I guess Admiral Nechayev could be a 24th-century fashion icon as well. Who’s to say she’s not? (p. 26)
• Sisko imagines unwinding with some baseball: “Perhaps a half hour [sic] game of catch with his son Jake, or in a holosuite with the 2106 Brooklyn Dodgers…” — Interesting that the Dodgers will apparently return to Brooklyn sometime in the next 85 years. It probably isn’t the craziest prediction you could make. (p. 40)
• “He was a Bajoran named Vertan, officially Odo’s third in command, but second until Lieutenant Commander Rodington returned from leave.” — Say who now? Rodington? D—do you mean … Eddington? Man, that is a Dangerfieldian level of no respect right there. (p. 117)
• Worf tries to figure out what to do about a changeling, p. 197: “What would Captain Picard do? Better still, what would Captain Sisko do?” — Great question, and also my preferred hierarchy as well. I think this calls, ironically, for a Geordi meme:
  1In case you’re the kind of person who notices these things, I am in fact very particular about using the color-corrected version of the template whenever I make Geordi memes.
• “It was odd, Odo noted, how uniform prisons seemed to be across the galaxy. They fell into two categories. If you came from a high technology, you used force fields. If you came from a low technology, you used metal bars.” — A fascinating observation I will probably never be able to not think about whenever I see any kind of jail situation in a sci-fi show from now on. (p. 242)

Final Assessment

Average. The Heart of the Warrior has some glaring problems, but it’s an agreeable enough book overall, and anyway, it just feels too dang good to be out of the “between seasons 3 and 4” doldrums. It could stand to tighten up a lot of its loose screws, but it’s far from the worst way to spend your Trek time.

NEXT TIME: The life and times of Captain Janeway, as told in Mosaic