K.W. Jeter
Warped
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – 11
Inside Cover
After its blockbuster debut in January 1993, STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE immediately joined STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION® at the top of the ratings. Now that The Next GenerationTM has moved on to feature films, Deep Space NineTM is heralding a new era of critical and public acclaim for STAR TREK® on television.
WARPED is the first Deep Space Nine hardcover and the eleventh in an unprecedented series of epic STAR TREK hardcovers—a series of national bestsellers that has included recent smash-hits like The Original Series novel SAREK by A.C. Crispin and The Next Generation book DARK MIRROR by Diane Duane.
Highly respected science fiction novelist K.W. Jeter concocts a gripping tale that pits Commander Sisko against the most dangerous foe he has ever faced. As the story opens, political tensions on Bajor are once again on the rise, and the various factions may soon come to open conflict. In addition, a series of murders on the station have shaken everyone on board. While Security Chief Odo investigates the murders, Commander Sisko finds himself butting up against a new religious faction who plan to take over Bajor and force the Federation to leave Deep Space NineTM.
Odo soon traces the murders to a bizarre and dangerous new form of holosuite technology—a technology that turns its users into insane killers and that now has Commander Sisko's son Jake in its grip. As the situation deteriorates on Bajor, Sisko learns that the political conflict and the new holosuites are connected. They are both the work of a single dangerous man with a plan that threatens the very fabric of reality.
The plot is darker than anything Sisko has faced before, and to defeat it, he must enter the heart of a twisted, evil world that threatens to overtake the station. It's a world where danger lurks in every corner and death can come at any moment—from the evil within Sisko himself, from his closest friends, or even at the hands of his own son.
K.W. Jeter is the author of over twenty science fiction, fantasy and thriller novels, including the notorious DR. ADDER, the disorienting FAREWELL HORIZONTAL, and the somewhat baffling MADLANDS, as well as the STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE® novel BLOODLETTER. The New York Times Book Review called him an "...exhilarating writer who always seems to have another rabbit to pull out of his hat."
Mr. Jeter will next be writing BLADE RUNNER TWO: EDGE OF HUMAN, a sequel to Philip K. Dick's classic DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? By the time you read this, he and his wife will also have returned to God's country, specifically Portland, Oregon.
Blurb
Empty, lifeless space spread Sisko as he stepped onto the Ops deck.
Slowly, he turned from where he stood, his gaze searching. . . .
And finding. A chair before one of the consoles slowly turned, revealing the figure that had been sitting there. An image with his face.
His voice: "I've been waiting for you." A smile formed on the face of Sisko's mirror image, his echo. "For a long time."
Sisko nodded slowly, acknowledging its existence. He knew he should have expected it.
The echo's face—Sisko's face, transformed but still the same—was an emotionless mask, cold an inhuman, divorced from all feeling.
"There can't be two of us here. That's not possible." The echo's voice came from deep inside, as though the words were the result of long brooding. "You'll have to go."
The image's hand lifted and reached for Sisko's throat. . . .
Warped
To Sam Ward, Joyce Reynolds-Ward and Lew Ward
Historian's Note
This adventure takes place shortly after Kai Opaka answered the call of the Prophets, and before the events depicted in the episodes "The Homecoming," "The Circle," and "Siege."
WYOSS
CHAPTER 1
"Look—"
A hand darted into the water, through the ribbons of green weeds streaming in the current, into the darkness between the stones smooth as black pearls. A fist came back up, with flashes of silver wriggling from either side, a clear rivulet dripping from the elbow.
Jake Sisko regarded the fish in the other boy's grasp. As before—since the first time—he was filled with both admiration and a stomach-knotting unease at the other's lightning quickness. Too fast, he thought. Like a knife piercing the water without even a splash. That's not right.
The two boys hunkered knees-to-chest on the largest rock in the middle of the creek, the yellow sun above drying the wet marks their bare feet had left behind them. The water churned white a few inches away. Jake squinted against the glare, turning his gaze toward the tall-grass fields that rolled up to the stand of trees that served as a windbreak at the crest of the hill. Eucalyptus, his father had called them, crushing the sickle leaves in his big hand to release their sharp, penetrating scent. Jake's father had reached up and pulled away a strip of bark—it didn't hurt the trees, this type shed the long, twisting pieces like snakeskins—and given it to him as a kind of souvenir, one that he still had dangling on the wall of his bedroom.
"Look," insisted the other boy, thrusting the captured fish in front of Jake's face. The creature's round eyes were emblems of unreasoning panic, the pink-rimmed gills fluttering wide in the strangling air. Its mouth made an idiot O, as the boy's thumb traced the seam of its belly.
Jake wanted to tell the other boy to let the fish go, to throw it back into the water, where it could disappear into the shadowed refuge downstream. But he was afraid to. Not afraid—Jake's spine stiffened at the edge of the traitorous thought—but held by a dark fascination, as though standing at a cliff whose rim crumbled beneath one's toes.
He didn't even know the other boy's name. But then he didn't need to.
"Aw, we've done a fish before. They're nothing special." The other boy weighed the creature's fate and found it unworthy of further consideration. He tossed it away, not even watching where it broke the water's surface and flicked out of sight. He leaned over the side of the rock, shading his eyes to hunt for something better.
Jake felt the squeezing around his heart relax. In the distance, on the creek's other side, the grasses' feathery tops parted and settled together again as a hidden shape moved below them. He knew it was the big orange tabby with battered ears that lived on the mice from the barn beyond the hill. Or the barn that had used to be over there; the sway-backed shingled roof and gaping boards, with the mounds of dusty-smelling hay and withered, ancient horse turds inside, had gradually faded away, as though pushed from existence by this little world's new commanding presence. That was probably why the cat had to roam farther afield, to find something to eat. Everything here had changed, or was about to, Jake knew.
His companion leaned closer to the shadow on the water. Jake watched, keeping his own breath still. He didn't want to do or say anything that would draw attention to the cat on its solitary, preoccupied hunt. There were things that could happen to it—things that the other boy might do—that made Jake's stomach knot up again.
"I saw something down here. . . ." The other boy muttered as his hand brushed through the green weeds. A lock of hair dark as his eyes dangled across his brow. Oddly—another thing that Jake knew wasn't right—the other boy's shoulders were dusted with freckles, like the ones on his forearms beneath sandy red hair. It seemed as if those parts were all that was left of the boy who had lived in this world before, a redhead with a snub nose and a broad, open smile. The newcomer's smile was a twisting of one corner of a thin-lipped mouth, an expression filled with amusement at what its owner had glimpsed inside Jake's heart.