Dawn of the Eagles

Star Trek Terok Nor: Dawn of the Eagles
© 2008 S.D. Perry and Britta Dennison
435 pages

The days are dark for Bajor. More than thirty years into the Occupation, the once-promising Resistance has very nearly been broken by a planet-wide surveillance system that restricts the movement of Bajorans on the surface.  Some of the rebellion's best leaders have fallen victim to it, and there seems to be little to do but hide in what few caves and similar sanctuaries that remain hidden from the Cardassian state's sensors.   And yet resistance festers, not only a  stripped Bajor but among the Cardassians as well.  Religious dissidents, ordinary citizens, and even members of the military are weary of the toll occupation has taken on Cardassia:  decades have been squandered in which Cardassia could have fostered a sustainable economy, wasted instead on the short-term remedy of taking Bajoran wealth. But now Bajor is largely ruined and the occupation nearly costing more than it provides -- in lives and finances.  Even the architect of despair, Gul Dukat, pays the price for his Pyrrhic victory,  increasingly isolated and made miserable by the fact that no one really appreciates him.  Dawn of the Eagles chronicles the downfall of the Cardassian occupation, completing this epic of Deep Space Nine's backstory. Mixing the familiar and the new, it is the story of a people's liberation; the Bajorans, from Cardassia; the Cardassians, from the depravity that Empire has led them to.

Like those before it, Dawn of the Eagle relies on viewpoint characters familiar from the show -- Dukat, Kira, Odo -- supported by original characters. Many of the threads continue from the preceding books , like the struggle of the resistance (mostly focusing on Kira's cell) against occupation. Others are new: Odo is a major character here, having left the science lab behind him to search for the meaning of his existence. His skill at mediating disputes, and potential as a weapon in Cardassia's pocket, attracts Dukat's eye, and eventually the lonely shapeshifter finds himself as Terok Nor's security chief,  ostensibly serving Cardassian interests but more often than not indulging a soft spot for the Bajoran oppressed.  Several of the more interesting characters are Cardassian women, all dissidents to one degree or another. One, Natima Lang,  appeared onscreen (...as a dissident, since Cardassia's government is perennially objectionable), but the others were more or less loyal to the state until their work forced them to confront the fact that they were helping perpetuate evil. (One, for instance,  is a disgraced weapons scientist who realizes the new project she's been assigned to involves the stealth sterilization of the Bajoran populace.).  That tension -- working through the question of how far one takes 'my country right or wrong'  -- makes for a compelling story, and truly sympathetic Cardassians.  This is a fitting end to the trilogy, making the miniseries tie together by ending with some of the same original characters and on the same Bajoran holiday that Night of the Vipers began with.  For Deep Space Nine fans,  this is a true preface and  wholly worth reading.

Night of the Wolves

Star Trek Terok Nor:  Night of the Wolves
© 2008 S.D. Perry and Britta Dennison
458 pages

Eighteen years ago, the Cardassian Union abandoned pretense and formally annexed the planet it had already manipulated and tricked its way into dominating.  Bajor has suffered greatly at the hands of the military dictatorship since, its economy cast into ruins as the Cardassians impose a kind of mercantilism that destroys the environment and shifts most resources to the Union.  Not content to complain and malinger in refugee camps, however, many Bajorans have taken to active rebellion. Hiding in the wilderness, they wage war against the oppressor -- and if collaborators get in the way, so be it.  Night of the Wolves, from the pen of an already-accomplished DS9 author, chronicles the Resistance's emergence as a serious threat to Cardassia's triumph. It is told principally through the lives of screen-established characters -- Gul Dukat, Kira, Ro Laren, Dr. Mora --  while incorporating a few new faces. The heavy use of canon characters, with subtle links to  Deep Space Nine's episodes, makes Night an ideal Trek series book, easily  read on its own regardless of its place in a trilogy.

While Night doesn't have the same climatic structure as Day of the Vipers, simply chronicling twelve years of the occupation in which both the resistance and players within it come of age, the depth it adds to established characters makes it a commendable read. The plot threads within don't intersect too much, but here we see both Kira and Ro's introduction to the resistance --and for Ro, her motive for seeking a life beyond Bajor, haunted by the fear of falling prey to the idea that the ends justify the means.  Here, too, is Odo's birth as a sentiment being, his coming of age within a Bajoran-Cardassian science lab.   The pages flew by for me, featuring as they did some of my favorite characters -- Dukat, Kira, and Ro Laren -- but even some of the new characters with stories independent of the DS9 shows took my interest. One of note is a Cardassian grad student who, after having an Orb experience while attempting to translate the writing on an artifact, travels back to Cardassia and discovers her people's life prior to the military takeover. Dukat is here in all his pre-Waltz ambiguous glory,  One matter of concern is the early introduction of some characters, namely Damar and Ziyal, and the fact that one character says "The middle of the occupation is no time to be having a child!".  Unless he's had an experience with the Orb of Time, which is lost, he probably shouldn't know he's in the middle of the Occupation. (To make matters worse, he's not even in the middle of the occupation; it's barely a third of the way through.)  This seems to make Ziyal far older than she appears onscreen, and Damar's career somewhat pathetic. Thirty years before we first see him onscreen, he was still a low-grade glinn worshiping the ground Dukat walks on?  That's Harry Kim-style career doldrums.

Though not as tight a story as Day, I liked it better --  such is the draw of its characters.

One interesting bit of story: Kira is literally the first Bajoran woman Odo sees. At one point she and her cell sneak into the science lab to do a little sabotage work, and he watches her from his goo tank. 

Day of the Vipers

Star Trek Terok Nor: Day of the Vipers
© 2008 James Swallow

When a Cardassian warship arrived at Bajor carrying the dead bodies of Bajoran traders, that should have counted as ominous. Bajor and Cardassia were distant neighbors without formal contact until the Cardassian military found a Bajoran merchant ship adrift and decided to return the dead home to be laid to rest.  Despite their seeming benevolence, however, within a decade's time the Cardassians had proven to be very strange friends, the kind who don't leave people alone and level guns at their head -- for their own good, of course. Terok Nor: Day of the Vipers begins a trilogy covering the fifty-year military occupation of Bajor,  being the story of a peaceful planet's woe, its seizure and plunder.

The Occupation formed the background of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. In its very first episode, the Federation was invited to Bajor to help pick up the pieces. A ferocious military resistance had sapped Cardassian resources and prompted them to leave, but creating peace between now bitter-enemies would not easy, not when the villains who perpetuated the occupation were for the most part still up and kicking. Chief among them in the series, and here in Day of t he Vipers, is Gul Dukat.  He begins not as a gul, but as a younger subordinate.  Although Dukat is not the only Cardassian viewpoint character, he is the one through whom we see most of Cardasia's foreign policy effected. Swallow creates an occupation arrived at through subtle measures, mixing in a few familiar faces with a host of new ones.  Dukat and his grey brothers do not arrive with a fleet of warships, roaring demands for surrender; they arrive as friends bearing gifts and ask for nothing but trade in return.   Swallow further develops traces established by Andy Robinson in his A Stitch in Time of Cardassia's culture before civilization collapse and military takeover created the Cardassia familiar to viewers through ST TNG and ST DS9.  Of particular interest is the use of religious Cardassians: though the Union is a predominately secular state, ruled exclusively by the military and its ethos, a small minority still hold on to Cardassia's pre-junta traditions. They come in handy; since the Bajorans are devout, the 'Oralians' serve as goodwill ambassadors of sort, even though Dukat and the other officers despise their traditional fellow nationals and work for their forceful extinction back home. When the Oralians and Bajorans hit it off, establishing an Oralian embassy of sorts on the planet. Cardassian culture gains a toehold on the planet, one used to great effect despite the acrimony between faith and state.  Bit by bit,  the Cardassians expand their influence on the planet, using the spectre of shared mutual enemies  to accustom the Bajorans to relying on the Cardassian military for protection and 'guidance'.  The full arrival of the Occupation proper doesn't arrive until the very end, and the last word -- "RESIST!" sets the stage for the birth of the Bajoran rebellion in Night of the Wolves.

I've long looked forward to reading this series, Deep Space Nine being my favorite of the Trek shows, and so far it does not disappoint, though the early inclusion of Dukat is strange given how long the Occupation lasted. (He's also the Dukat whom we're familiar with, as opposed to a younger man whose personality is still being formed.)   I thought the slow but subtle creep of Cardassia into Bajor was handled well, especially because it was executed not by one man with an evil plan but by several officers who had competing ideas on how best to expand their influence.  As bonus, we get a young Admiral Nechayev and a Welsh ridealong!