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Thoughts on the future.
As he sat in the command chair of the Defiant, Sisko wondered how things had come to this. Yes, he'd managed to wrangle the Defiant away from Utopia Planitia, he only wished he felt optimistic about the mission he was sent on. Sometimes Ben Sisko wondered if Starfleet was realistic or even possessed common sense and his present orders made him think this mission was either going to be another disaster or it would be a resounding success; he might be a trained, professional and loyal Starfleet officer, but there were still times he wondered how far that loyalty could go.
Sisko did his best to be optimistic, but after what he had seen the Jem'Hadar do to him and Quark when they'd been taken prisoner and from the cockpit windows of the runabout in the ensuing battle/rescue, he wasn't going to be optimistic. Why was it that ever since the Enterprise had been thrown by Q into the path of that first Borg cube that nearly every single powerful species that appeared was a potential enemy? He knew he was being too harsh about his present view on Starfleet but ever since the disastrous First Contact with the Dominion, and their soldiers, the Jem'Hadar, and the destruction of the USS Odyssey he had asked himself if the people he worked for even understood the seriousness of the threat.
For the past year, ever since that mess with the Skrreeans which was the first time anyone in Starfleet or the Bajoran Militia had ever heard of the Dominion, and then again later when Odo and Dax encountered the village modeled on the Yaderan civilisation and the multiple messages sent towards the wormhole, telling Starfleet to stop exploring the Gamma Quadrant. Those incidents more than anything should have been enough, but no.
Sisko sighed mentally as he remembered the messages. He'd read through them, each one politely but firmly advising Starfleet and the Federations other exploration divisions to stop sending more and more ships into the Gamma Quadrant, but Starfleet had still allowed more traffic to go through, but Sisko had noticed the messages grow more and more intense to the point of threatening. He remembered Talak'talan, the first Jem'Hadar soldier he'd ever met, telling him the Dominion would no longer stand by and allow ships to violate their territory. Well, they'd certainly proven just how far they were willing to go when they'd rammed the Odyssey.
Sisko knew the Galaxy class wasn't invincible, especially after the destruction of the Yamato, but he'd never expected to see a Federation starship rammed head on in a suicide run. It was a sight he hoped never to see again, but something told him it would happen again and more Starfleet officers or an innocent crew who just happened to get themselves targeted by the Jem'Hadar, and he would see it again and again.
He hoped he never did. He sat back in his chair and waited as Dax piloted the conn station; Jadzia was a professional pilot, hell one of her former hosts had been a daredevil pilot and had probably used her experience to work out the controls, but they weren't that hard to figure out for a trained Starfleet officer. He cast a brief glance around the bridge to see how his crew was coping with their mission on this unusual ship. They seemed tense from what he could see; Kira's expression was studious in its attempt to mask her aggression, hardly unusual considering she was a survivor and seemed prepared to accept the possibility her world would once more be a rich target for a more powerful enemy.
O'Brien was a contrast to the former Bajoran terrorist, but then Sisko would've expected that kind of attitude from a man who'd experienced combat and Sisko knew the Chief was already doing his best to sort through the mess that was the Defiant.
He'd never expected to command the Defiant or even see it again until recently. One of the many things he'd done in the Utopia Planitia fleet yards as he was struggling to raise Jake after Jennifier's death was supervising the project in the wake of the Borg scare.
The thought of the Borg never failed to invoke feelings of rage, pain and grief in Sisko's soul, and now even after that meeting with the wormhole aliens when he'd first taken command of DS9 those feelings hadn't left him and he doubted they ever would.
It was the grief he'd felt then to fuel his passion that went into the project Starfleet had set up. The Borg threat had caused one of the biggest death tolls in Starfleet history, and they didn't want to be caught unawares like that again. Armed with the experience of the threat, and the knowledge their present defences and the debriefings from Jean Luc Picard who'd revealed more knowledge of Borg technology and tactics, Starfleet had decided to research the possibilities of building a fleet of ships to fight and defeat the Borg.
The Defiant was the end result. There had been other models for the first prototype warship; the Nova class for instance had been considered. It was small in comparison to the Galaxy and Intrepid classes, but it had been remodeled into a science vessel instead. Sisko wasn't sure if that had been a wise move, but it had been a good one since the Nova class had been conceived on the same design principles of traditional starships; two hulls, primary and secondary, two warp nacelles mounted ontop of pylons to protect the hull, and was therefore vulnerable. The Defiant was more practical with her more compact form, with her hull just one shape. And why shouldn't it work? There were dozens of starships and shuttlecraft out there in the galaxy that were made up of a single hull. But as time passed and the Borg threat appeared less urgent - something Sisko would never understand after those close calls and skirmishes where Starfleet officers and ships were destroyed or captured by the collective - and those damn design flaws of the Defiant had cropped up.
Starfleet had shelved the Defiant project officially, but unofficially there were still teams of engineers going over the ship, trying to make her more spaceworthy and combat ready but the Defiant had been a low priority until now. It just annoyed Sisko that once again Starfleet had been so short sighted, but realistically it was down to the comparative peace in the 24th century.
In the 22nd through the 23rd and early 24th centuries, Starfleet and the Federation had faced enemies - the Xindi, the Klingons and the Romulans, the Cardassians - but now they'd either gone, or they had established treaties with the Federation over the years. The result was peace, and in that time many things had changed; families were allowed to travel on ships because the Federation-Klingon conflicts were no longer happening, and the Cardassians had been pacified with the treaty of the DMZ. The Romulans had been doing god knows what since the Tomed Incident, and so Starfleet had gotten complacent.
Starfleet Headquarters, Starfleet, the Federation were full of people who had grown up without ever knowing the threat of war, and even the flag officers who had encountered the occasional skirmish with Orion pirates who were promoted to Admiral or higher and relegated to the desk jobs became complacent. They'd fallen into the trap like a wooly mammoth into a tar pit.
Ever since he'd returned from the first contact with the Dominion, the attempted infiltration by Eris, the destruction of the Odyssey and the death of her crew, Sisko had spent most of his time arguing with those same officers. More than a few of them had wanted to send a fleet of ships to protect Deep Space Nine and Bajor from a Dominion attack in the wake of Eris saying "You have no idea what's begun here" and getting no-where with the officers who had adopted an ostrich mentality.
Why? What was the problem?
They knew a ship could either have disappeared, destroyed, or crashed, and they knew there were hostile threats out there, so why stick their heads in the sand? They believed that if you left the Dominion alone, they'd leave you alone, but Sisko didn't think that would work. They didn't strike him as the type of people to suddenly and quickly forget a threatening promise like the one Eris had given before beaming out mysteriously if you just left them alone, but then again none of those desk jockeys had sat in the runabout and witnessed that Jem'Hadar ship ram a Galaxy class starship.
At least he'd been given the Defiant.
And a cloaking device. He'd never served never mind commanded a ship with a cloaking device before.
Sisko frowned as he thought about the cloak - it had been given too freely, but he doubted it was sabotaged. The Romulans hadn't sent any ships into the Gamma Quadrant, and so their only sources of information was Starfleet. The Romulans would be convinced Starfleet wasn't telling them everything about a threat of the scale of the Dominion, so they'd given them the cloak with agreement it would be used in the Gamma Quadrant to learn more about the Dominion.
Thinking about the cloak made him think about the Romulan observer. Subcommander T'Rul. In truth he wasn't sure what to make of her. He'd tried to engage her in conversation on the way back to DS9, but she was strictly business. She wasn't interested in making friends, like she'd bluntly made clear in the briefing room. It was impossible to think about T'Rul without thinking about Michael Eddington, their new Starfleet security officer.
Sisko was sure he'd been speaking English at Headquarters, and yet they all seemed to think that Odo just couldn't handle security. He had tried to argue with them at Starfleet security, even taking it to the head of that division herself, but nothing he did worked. The result - Starfleet had sent with him Lieutenant Commander Michael Eddington, and unlike T'Rul he was eager to make friends. Sisko wasn't sure he even wanted the man along; sure, he might be a Starfleet officer, but he didn't need any more troubles.
Troubles. Unbidden his mind and eyes turned back to Kira. She was tense in her seat. He couldn't blame her. She, like so many other Bajorans who'd suffered and died under the brutal occupation of the Cardassians, didn't trust easily. She had good reason to be annoyed with Starfleet for giving them only a single ship to take on the Dominion.
She also had little faith they'd succeed, she also felt they were being naive. And the worst part of it was Sisko believed she was right, Starfleet was being naive into thinking they could make peace with the Dominion. Those admirals hadn't seen what the Jem'Hadar were capable of, who was to say the rest of the Dominion was any better?
Sisko sat up straight when the bright light of the wormhole opening it's Alpha Quadrant terminus. As the Defiant passed through the wormhole's throat, he was once again taken aback. He remembered discovering this wormhole with Jadzia, learning it wasn't just stable, but artificial as well. He also remembered his meeting with the wormhole aliens, and every time he observed from his office or the promenade the opening of the wormhole, he wondered who those aliens were?
Were they like the Organians, a race who'd lived like humans only to evolve to a point they couldn't tell the difference between linear time and non linear time? Why did they create the wormhole and why did they make it stable?
Sisko watched as the ship left the wormhole, spitting them back out into the Gamma Quadrant, a journey that under normal conditions would've taken 70 years. He had no idea if this mission was going to work or not, but whatever the outcome it would shape the future.
The Borg encounter a few years ago had done that, and Wolf 359 had scared everyone. Now it seemed the Dominion would do the same thing as well.