Before the Dominion War and the decimation of Cardassia. ..before the coming of the Emissary and the discovery of the wormhole...before space station Terok Nor became Deep Space 9™...there was the Occupation: the military takeover of an alien planet and the violent insurgency that fought against it. Now that fifty-year tale of warring ideologies, terrorism, greed, secret intelligence, moral compromises, and embattled faiths is at last given its due in the three-book saga of Star Trek's Lost Era... A seemingly benign visitation to the bountiful world of Bajor from the resource-poor Cardassian Union is viewed with cautious optimism by some, trepidation by others, and a calculating gleam by unscrupulous opportunists. What begins as a gesture of compassion soon becomes something very different. Seen through the eyes of participants on both sides -- including those of a young officer named Skrain Dukat -- the personal, political, and religious tensions between the Bajorans and the Cardassians quickly spiral out of control, irrevocably shaping the futures of both worlds in an emotionally charged and unforgettable tale of treachery, tragedy, and hope. James Swallow is a New York Times , Sunday Times bestselling author, a BAFTA-nominated screenwriter, and the only British writer to have worked on a Star Trek television series. His Star Trek fiction includes The Ashes of Tomorrow , The Dark Veil , Fear Itself , The Latter Fire , Sight Unseen , The Poisoned Chalice , Cast No Shadow , Synthesis , Day of the Vipers , The Stuff of Dreams , Infinity’s Prism: Seeds of Dissent , and short stories in Star Trek Explorer , Seven Deadly Sins , Shards and Shadows , The Sky’s the Limit , and Distant Shores . His other works include the Marc Dane thriller series and tales from the worlds of 24 , Doctor Who , Halo , Warhammer 40,000 , and more. He lives and works in London. ? Star Trek®: Terok Nor: Day of the Vipers Prologue The priest’s hand rested on the small, carved handle that controlled the pitch of the window’s nyawood shutters. A slight turn of the wrist would be all it required to close them firmly against the lessening day outside, but he hesitated, peering through the slits at the city streets ranged below. The smell of smoke was more pronounced now, and the faint acridity made his nostrils twitch. The scent was already in the room with him, different from the wisps that issued up from the cairn of glowing stones in the chamber’s fire pit. Outside, the fires that raged were uncontrolled and full of lethality; in here, deep within the fusionstone halls of the Naghai Keep, he was safe. The thought drew up the corners of his lips in a brief, bitter smile, his blandly handsome face turning away. Safe. The term was such a relative concept, a fragile construct stitched together by fearful men and women who marked out pieces of their world and declared them inviolate, as if they could wall off danger and forbid it to trespass. Gar Osen, vedek of the Prophets, could declare himself safe inside these walls, but he knew that the granite battlements and copper-studded gates were no more than paper to an aggressor who was determined to breach them. To think of oneself as safe from anything was foolish; a person could only truly exist in degrees of jeopardy, spending their life balancing the chances of death against moments of comparative peace. The bitter smile turned grim and stony. Beneath the windows of the keep, far out past the ring wall and the ornamental public gardens beyond, into the city of Korto itself, Gar’s gaze ranged over the shaded boulevards of the municipality. The fading day was prematurely dark with oily gray rain clouds rolling in from across the Sahving Valley, as if the weather itself were attempting to draw a veil over what was happening down on Korto’s thoroughfares; but he had no doubts that the same sequence of events was taking place all over Bajor, in the cities of Ilvia, Jalanda, and Ashalla, across the spans of the planet from Musilla to Hedrikspool and every province in between. He imagined he would see the same thing, hear the same sounds if he could stand at similar vantage points in those places. A woman’s scream, sharp as the bark of a tyrfox; the long rumble of a building collapsing; air molecules shrieking as disruptors split them asunder; and the regular pulsing drum of gravity-resist motors. Gar saw a trio of shapes nosing slowly over the Edar Bridge, shield-shaped things that looked like legless beetles, shoving stalled skimmers out of their way with arcing force bumpers. Each had a spindly cannon on a pintle mount that tracked back and forth, tireless and robotic. For a moment, he wished for a monocular so that he might be able to get a better look at the armored vehicles, but there was little need. The priest knew exactly what they were. If he looked hard enough, he could just about make out the insignia painted on the sloping, gunmetal-colored hulls