While mostly unremarkable, I appreciated the way it depicted real, deep cultural misunderstanding between alien races — not a lot of Trek does that.

This is a fairly early entry in a series of books that has expanded the on-screen exploits of the crew of the space station Deep Space Nine under Commander Sisko and his command crew of Major Kira Neris, Jadzia Dax and the rest. In being such an early book we are treated to a set of arguments and testing of powers that had largely been written out of the on-screen stories by the second series.

Major Kira still reckons that the Provisional Government on Bajor deserves some respect and desires to see the Federation actually start delivering on its promises to defend Bajor against the marauding Cardassians, a threat that has suddenly grown more urgent as political chaos on Cardassia intenifies and an alien starship appears to attempt to take over the station's computers as it searches out how to find the souls of its dead crew ( )

That was weird. It started with Cardassians and then somehow a sentient ship got brought into the mix, then there were more Cardassian politics. Add in the fact that everyone from Quark to the Cardassians to Kir and the Bajorans wanted to claim ownership of the ship (for a variety of reasons) it's a story that's chock full of action.

I did think that the author didn't quite get the Kira character correct, made her a bit too abrasive. Other than Kira most of the characters were very much like the real ones on the show, which does not always happen.

The Cardassian politics stuff was a bit confusing. One of the reasons was that some of the Guls/Captains names seemed too similar. Not to mention Sisko gets all this information about what's going on on the Cardassian's home world and he just believes it? Why does he believe the Cardassians, but not any of the others, it gave me pause.

It was a fine novel, but nothing special. Three stars, no more, no less. ( )