It's been a long time, but I remember really liking Synthesis. I didn't talk about this much as a Titan novel because it didn't really feel like one (as opposed to Revelation and Dust and Peaceable Kingdoms, which are respectively DS9 and TNG novels in all but name), so much as a novel that happened to have some Titan characters in it.
Thank you for this nuanced and thoughtful review. It's strange to think what lies between this book being published and where we are now. Thank you in particular for picking out that exchange between Garak and Mhevet, which increasingly seems the heart of the book to me.
The Fall: Peaceable Kingdoms by Dayton Ward Published: January 2014 Time Span: October 13-27, 2385 I've been trying to decide what I wanted out of this book. In some ways, The Fall is a loose mini-series; it's not like, say, Destiny, where you could publish the whole thing as one big book. But it is also not Typhon Pact; it's not just a set of books about a common situation, there's a sequence of plot developments that carry from book to book. The events of Revelation and Dust spark the events of The Crimson Shadow and A Ceremony of Losses; A Ceremony of Losses directly leads into The Poisoned Chalice; The Poisoned Chalice directly leads into Peaceable Kingdoms. At the end of The Poisoned Chalice, it's known that Ishan's chief of staff was responsible for the assassination of President Bacco, and Riker has reached out to Picard to try to stop it... It feels to me this book thus needs to escalate from the previous books. Ceremony of Losses featured Starfleet ships firing on each other; Poisoned Chalice made you think enemies could be anywhere and everywhere across the galaxy. But Peaceable Kingdoms seems to deescalate the tension of the two previous books. It doesn't just do the same things over again, but does them less interestingly. While in Poisoned Chalice we met and got to know Ishan adherents, here they're all distant figures wearing black hats. While those stories went all over the galaxy, in this one, it's mostly about Crusher scrambling around on a desert planet, and the Enterprise investigating a freighter. It feels small when we need big. If this is a test of values... one never actually feels that Picard and the Enterprise crew are doing anything other than an ordinary mission. Give me a Picard on the run or something. It's also, well, boring. I never felt any tension during the bits where Crusher and (Tom) Riker were trying to stay out of the way of the people trying to stop them from uncovering Ishan's identity, and the Enterprise seemed to aimlessly meander. I struggled a lot with the flashbacks, too. The way Ishan's big secret plays out is too easy; we learn it early on, and from then, the only tension-- such that there is any-- isn't anything about Ishan, but just if Crusher can deliver the information. I expected some kind of further development, but it never came. It doesn't help that the bad guys are just not very good. In one part, La Forge gets a tip from Sonya Gomez that the da Vinci transported a special operations team pretending to be engineers from one civilian transport to another, and it was obvious to her that they weren't engineers. If you are in special operations and so bad at pretending to be engineers, why use a Starfleet Corps of Engineers vessels as your transportation for no readily apparent reason? The big weakness at the heart of the novel, and thus The Fall, is Ishan himself. As I highlighted in my review of Crimson Shadow, it's weird reading The Fall in 2020, because it so clearly reads as a commentary on movements like Trumpism and Brexit in some ways, even though it was published 2013-14. The revelation that Ishan is actually a Bajoran collaborator who killed the real Ishan and took his place during the latter days of the Occupation... it reads like wishful thinking about Trump. I feel like there's a school of thought out there that Trump is some kind of Russian plant, and if we can just unmask him, this will all be over. But the scary thing about Trump isn't that he has some kind of secret (though admittedly he has pretty bad secrets), the scary thing about Trump is that he is exactly who he says he is. That Ishan should have this secret dark past is wish fulfillment and an easy out. Oh, you don't like this guy's policies? Well, conveniently for you, he's actually a murderer and a liar. But what if Ishan had been above board? Or at least clean enough not to get caught? What would our heroes have done then? I feel like that would have made for a much more interesting (if difficult) novel than the one we got. Continuity Notes: One reason I thought the Ishan story was fishy and too easy was that I felt like the novel was working so hard to convince that Ilona Daret was an old friend of Crusher's. There's this chapter where Picard and Crusher think about three different previously unseen adventures where they encountered Daret (pp. 26-7). My feeling was then whenever a Star Trek story tries to convince you a previously unseen character is such a pal, they're being set up for a betrayal (e.g., The Stuff of Dreams just a few books ago). Imagine my surprise when I looked something up on Memory Beta halfway through the novel and it turned out that Daret was in fact a preestablished character, from an insignificant anthology called The Sky's the Limit. No traitor at all, and not previously unseen, either. Except Dayton Ward spelled Daret's first name wrong. I bet the guy who wrote the original story was pissed. One of the flashbacks to Crusher and Daret is set on the Enterprise-D and includes Miranda Kadohata. Kadohata first appeared in the TNG relaunch novel Q & A, but it established that she had served about the Enterprise-D as well. Despite that, no work of fiction I am aware of had actually shown her on the Enterprise-D until now, some six years after she was introduced-- and some four years after she was written out! On p. 370, zh'Tarash says she will be serving out the remainder of Bacco's term... but didn't A Time for War, A Time for Peace and Articles of the Federation establish that the new president after a special election serves out a complete four-year term? I'm sure @Sci knows, help me out. Other Notes: People complain about Dayton Ward's tendency to recap; I didn't notice anything here, except in ch. 14, where Picard repeatedly thinks about things we know already from ch. 11. "In truth, the cargo run to the colony world was but one part of the ruse Admiral Riker had engineered as a means of giving Picard maneuvering room while the captain carried out a different, clandestine mission" (p. 122). Yes, I know, because I read about it not even 25 pages ago! Later in ch. 14, there's a page-long recap of things the reader already knows about Bacco's assassination if they've been reading this very book. I said the bad guys were not very good... but on the other hand Velk has to be a Palpatine-esque master manipulator for this plan to work. How did he know that if Bacco was killed, he could persuade enough people on the Council to select Ishan as president pro tem? I have come around to the idea that Andorian readmittance would be fast-tracked... I am less persuaded by the idea that an Andorian could become president so quickly. It seems like a big reach given how much anti-Andorian sentiment we have seen in previous novels. I might have missed something so I am hesitant to call this out... but is it a coincidence that Daret discovers incriminating information on Ishan at this exact moment in time? "Peaceable kingdom" is apparently a theological term, but I am shocked, shocked I tell you, to find out that it is also the title of a song by Rush. The Fall Overall: This five-book series contained one excellent novel, one highly enjoyable novel, and three novels that did little for me. It doesn't seem to be a coincidence, either, that the best of the five has the least connection to the main premise of the series-- the idea of an increasingly authoritarian Federation coming into conflict with Starfleet idealism seems like an interesting one, but the series did little to make this plausible or compelling. Weirdly, though The Crimson Shadow has little to do with the plot of The Fall, it probably is the only novel with something interesting to say about the themes of The Fall. None of the other novels really did much with the ideas of how institutions succeed and fail that Crimson Shadow spoke so eloquently too... but they should have. Peaceable Kingdoms ends with President zh'Tarash stating the Federation is going to get back to exploring things, and there's an interview with James Swallow that describes this as an out-of-universe goal of The Fall as well: "I think we’re going to go back to some of the more traditional mode of what Star Trek is, which is about going to the strange new worlds and exploring all the cool stuff out there." But, you know, if you think Star Trek fiction should be telling more stories about exploring space, you could just commission stories about exploring space. I'm not persuaded you needed to do a five-book political series to set up that there won't be more big political series! That's all for this set of five. Previous experience says I could be back in fourteen months for my next batch of five... or one month! But probably not one this time out: I'm about to embark on a different lengthy reading project, going through the entire forty-year history of the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip over on GallifreyBase.
I think it's fair to say that The Fall should have been more tightly-structured. As it stands, it tends up being a miniseries about how multiple lines of dominos start falling in totally different directions as a result of one event. That's not a bad premise, but I think it would have been more dramatically satisfying if the books had been more tightly interwoven. On the other hand, if the books had been more tightly interwoven, I'm not sure that would have allowed McCormack to write The Crimson Shadow or Mack to write A Ceremony of Losses, which I honestly believe are two of the greatest TrekLit novels ever written. So the series might have been more satisfying but the individual installments might not have had the chance to shine quite so bright. I mean, in fairness, because The Fall was written before the rise of Trumpism and Brexit, I think it had a different set of dramatic obligations than it would have had if it had been written in, say, 2017. (I suspect the authors were reacting to broad political trends they may have been sensing at the time that would later coalesce into Trumpism and Brexit [I remember comparing Ishan to Ted Cruz at the time], but none of them could have known that at the time.) At the end of the day, Star Trek is adventure fiction, and I don't think there's anything wrong with "the President is a traitor IN SPACE" as your resolution to that kind of story. But yeah, I think if they had written the books in 2017 I might not want that kind of resolution. Honestly, the idea of doing the Asshole President You Can't Prove Is Evil would have made for an interesting long-term arc... but this was also at a time when they wanted to shift the overall TrekLit focus away from space politics by having one last hurrah for that kind of major story. So I can understand not wanting to keep Ishan around after the fact. (It occurs to me that if they had wanted to keep a semi-antagonistic president as a long-term supporting character, they could have had Cort Enaren, Jas Abrik, or Bera chim Gleer take over. Any one of these characters were more militant and sometimes unreasonable, and that could have nicely clashed with the more idealistic takes of Our Heroes.) Spoilers for Star Trek: Picard and a minor bit of speculation about TrekLit characters' roles in the new canonical 2380s: Spoiler: The Fall in the wake of Star Trek: Picard Side-note: In the wake of Star Trek: Picard, it seems pretty clear that The Fall is probably no longer compatible with the canonical events of the 2380s, not unless you squint and fudge things a lot. (In particular, The Fall's thematic conclusion of the renewal of Federation progressivism after defeating Federation regressivism contradicts Picard's depiction of Federation regressivism holding sway after the Mars Attack.) Nonetheless, I find myself often imagining that the Federation Council passed the synth ban and rescinded the Rescue Fleet because of Ishan's influence and over the objections of President Bacco. As far as I'm concerned, she subsequently resigned in protest to found an NGO dedicated to raising as many private ships to help rescue the Romulans as possible, with Ishan Anjar taking over as President. You rang? #Lurch Okay, so, here's the thing: TrekLit has been a bit fuzzy about this from the start. Like, Articles established that the special election held to replace Hiram Roth after he died was the first in Federation history, but Ra-ghoratreii's time in office didn't seem to be bound to Roth's term -- he just got three terms that aligned with the pre-existing 4-year cycle. Articles established that Presidents Pro Tempore serve 30-day terms, while Revelation and Dust established that Presidents' Pro Tempore terms had been increased to 60 days. (I assume that's as a result of the Borg Invasion, but that's unstated.) A Time for War, A Time for Peace never explicitly established whether Bacco's terms represented a new 4-year cycle or a completion of Zife's 2377-2381 term -- but then Articles of the Federation followed all of 2380 without mentioning a Federation presidential election, so presumably it meant a new 4-year term starting in late 2379 and ending in late 2383. The major novels set in 2383, however (Plagues of Night, Raise the Dawn, and Brinkmanship) never feature an election that year, though. But Revelation and Dust subsequently established that Bacco ran for and won re-election in 2384, a full year off from a four-year term if her term started in 2379 -- but, 2384 would have been the correct election year if the cycle had been uninterrupted and Bacco had been elected in a normal rather than special election. For clarity, the original presidential term cycle before the events of A Time to Kill, as established in A Time to Kill, Articles, and other subsequent works, would have been: 2372: election year; Min Zife of Bolarus defeats incumbent President Jaresh-Inyo of Grazer and Betazed Governor Rel Obertag 2373-2377: Min Zife's first term; events of Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Insurrection, DS9 Seasons Five through Seven; VOY Seasons Three through Seven; Dominion War; Borg-Species 8472 conflict 2376: Min Zife wins re-election; events of the early DS9 Relaunch novels 2377-2381: Min Zife's second term; events of Star Trek: Nemesis, early VOY Relaunch novels, continuing DS9 Relaunch novels before the time jump, early post-NEM TNG novels, A Time to... miniseries 2380: election year; in canon, events of Star Trek: Lower Decks Season One 2381-2385: Next presidential term 2384: election year 2385-2389: Next presidential term; in canon, events of Star Trek: Picard backstory (Mars Attack, Synth Ban, destruction of Romulus) 2388: election year 2389-2393: Next presidential term 2392: election year 2393-2397: Next presidential term 2396: election year 2397-2401: Next presidential term; in canon, events of Star Trek: Picard Season One 2400: election year Anyway, if we're looking for an in-universe justification, I would say that the only real explanation for any of this fuzziness would be if the Articles of the Federation allow the Council to adjust the lengths of terms of office in response to extraordinary circumstances. Revelation and Dust explicitly establishes that the term lengths for Presidents Pro Tempore were changed, and I can only assume that Bacco was allowed to stay in office an additional year as a result of the chaos stemming from the Borg Invasion (but that's speculation on my part). Perhaps those three major changes -- lengthening Bacco's first term to synch it back up with the original pre-Zife cycle, extending President Pro Tempore terms to 60 days, and establishing that Presidents elected in special elections would finish out the terms of the previous President instead of starting new terms of their own -- were all passed as a package deal? I mean, that's just standard vote-whipping. Nothing magical there -- people figure out if they have enough votes for this or that bill all the time in real legislatures. I can see it. First off, I really like the fact that the Federation is such an egalitarian society that anyone from any Member World, even a newly-admitted one, can run for President. Second, I think it's pretty clear that while there's widespread anti-Andorian sentiment, it's not predominant within the Federation. And thirdly, zh'Tarash was the leader of the party that opposed Andexit, so a lot of Federates would find that appealing -- "We're gonna reconcile with Andor by literally putting one of them in charge again, the one who never wanted to leave!" And also if she were smart, she probably took pains to maintain positive press coverage for herself in the Federation media even while the Andorian Empire was independent, Just In Case. And yes, I have, today, 9 years and 10 months after the publication of Typhon Pact: Paths of Disharmony, dubbed the secession of the Andorian Empire from the United Federation of Planets "Andexit." Although, the story of Cardassian fascism growing as a reaction to the rise of Cardassian democracy is a good parallel to the idea of the rise of Federation regressivism. I wonder if perhaps one way to tie together The Fall more tightly might have been to depict Ishan and the True Way as part of a wave of regressive nationalist movements across more powers? In real life, Trump and Brexit didn't just happen in isolation -- over the past decade, comparable movements have won major support in the German Bundestag (Alternative für Deutschland [Alternative for Germany, AfD]), French presidential elections (Marine le Pen and the Rassemblement national/Front national [National Rally/National Front]), the Swedish Riksdag (Sverigedemokraterna [Sweden Democrats, SD]), the Greek Parliament (Chrysí Avgí [Golden Dawn]), and the Austrian Parliament and presidential elections (Freiheitliche Partei [Freedom Party, FPÖ]); and comparable movements have outright taken over in Poland (the de facto Prawo i Sprawiedliwość [Law and Justice, PiS] Party dictatorship), Hungary (Viktor Orbán's de facto Fidesz Party dictatorship), India (Prime Minister Narendra Modi is part of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata [Indian People's] Party and the Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh [National Volunteer Organization], one of whose members assassinated Ghandi), Brazil (President Jair Bolsonaro is an outright fascist who has said the Brazilian military dictatorship should have killed more people), Ecuador (President Lenín Moreno literally establishing an extra-constitutional council to purge supporters of former President Rafael Correa), and Bolivia (former de facto Interim President Jeanine Áñez having come to power after a white supremacist coup and leading a de facto government that engaged in widespread political repression before being defeated in the elections this year due to lack of far-right organizational unity). I could imagine a version of The Fall that deals with similar regressive movements cropping up on Qo'noS, Romulus, Ferenginar, Gornar, and on Federation planets. Of course, the scope of such a series would have been much larger and that much harder to resolve in the context of Star Trek's action/adventure genre. I think they all spoke to these themes to some extent, and personally I think A Ceremony of Losses spoke to those themes very insightfully as well. But I agree that Revelation and Dust, The Poisoned Chalice, and Peaceable Kingdoms spoke to those themes with less insight. I think they did, to be honest. By 2013, TrekLit had become dominated by politically-oriented storylines that were essentially deconstructions of the traditional Star Trek formula. They had so dominated the novel line that I agree that if the line were to pivot back to a more traditional ST paradigm of space exploration far away from the "metropolitan center," then that transition demanded an in-universe story arc to bring a sense of resolution to that era of the TrekLit line. Whether or not The Fall succeeded in that particular goal is subjective, but I think that a transition story was needed.
I have much the same feelings as you about The Fall as a project – interesting concepts, variable in execution. When I was breaking down the stories to force-fit them into a 22-episode season of TV (it's a thing I do) however, I decided that instead of The Fall being a crossover of three different Trek series, the whole thing was really just a Deep Space Nine story at its heart. Two out of five are DS9 books already, the two nominally TNG books are set on Cardassia and a Cardassian prison colony, and one of the TNG books and the Titan book are both built to significant extent around a DS9 guest character. Plus the whole story is rooted in the Occupation, which is a DS9 milieu, and this kind of political intrigue story is more DS9's style than any of the other series. Consequently I "rewrote" the entire series in my head to make it a 22-episode season of DS9 (season 15 in my reckoning). Sisko is the one who goes to deal with Garak in Crimson in place of Picard and then goes back to Earth for Akaar's assignment in Chalice in place of Riker, Dax and Ro's storylines from Revelation and Ceremony are fine as they are, then Tenmei takes command of the Lionheart instead of Vale in Chalice, and the Crusher mission in Kingdoms is given to Odo and Candlewood. Obviously that means some of the character material would have to change but I don't think the plot or themes would be irreparably damaged. 5 books x 4 eps per book = 20 eps, add in Lust's Latinum Lost as the season's Quark episode, and flesh out the Robinson-at-the-Tzenkethi-border subplot from Sacraments of Fire, and there you go, 22 eps of DS9. .
Thanks, Sci. It's genuinely nice to hear from someone who liked these books more than me... even if I do find your enjoyment of Revelation and Dust utterly baffling. I don't think tighter serialization would help. I like the dominos thing-- the last three books each hand off to each other, but focus on largely completely different casts of characters. I think really the issue is Peaceable Kingdoms doesn't do anything that the two previous books don't do. It's the same domino we've already seen fall! (to stretch this metaphor to its breaking point) Yeah, I'm not very into the political turn of Star Trek fiction. I think partly because the politics take over the story... but they're not complicated enough to entirely convince, because then the books would be something totally different. They're sort of in the uncanny valley. (It occurs to me that if they had wanted to keep a semi-antagonistic president as a long-term supporting character, they could have had Cort Enaren, Jas Abrik, or Bera chim Gleer take over. Any one of these characters were more militant and sometimes unreasonable, and that could have nicely clashed with the more idealistic takes of Our Heroes.) I knew you would know. Thank you! Well, I wouldn't say standard vote-whipping. Bit of an awkward conversation for Velk to have with half the Federation Council. "Well, if, uh, hypothetically Bacco would die, would you vote for Ishan?" Then he tallies up the votes he can count on, realizes he only has 48%, and has to call up the True Way. "Hold on guys, call the whole thing off!" That would have been potentially interesting. The Struggle Within was my second-favorite Typhon Pact novel, and I thought its depiction of a liberalizing effect on the Tzenkethi was interesting; one could imagine a regressive backlash to that. I dunno, I always like those moments in tv shows and comics where you can see a change of direction happen overnight. Just start the next TNG book with Bacco sending Picard an e-mail: "Dear Jean-Luc, everything the Borg wrecked has been sorted out, the Typhon Pact is all smiles, go out there and find some weird squid aliens and get into a moral dilemma or something."
You mean the Kinshaya, right? Later books established that there was a regressive backlash and the old regime reasserted itself. (Or rather, a subsequent book by DRGIII overlooked the fall of the Kinshaya theocracy, and the Prey trilogy then reconciled the discrepancy by establishing such a backlash.)
Ugh, yes. I almost checked, and then I thought, "no, surely you are right." The Stuff of Dreams had the Kinshaya theocrats on the out and plotting a comeback. Which DRG3 book overlooked Struggle Within?
You wrote at the time that you partially based the story of the Kinshaya democrats on the example of the protesters in Egypt during the Arab Spring. Sadly, the regressive backlash and re-consolidation of power by the Kinshaya ruling class rather accurately parallels real developments in Egypt, where the military subsequently overthrew the first and only democratically-elected Egyptian President and installed one of their own as de facto dictator. Egypt and the Kinshaya are both essentially right back to where they started.
Uh, whichever one later in the whole Typhon Pact/Fall continuity mentioned the Kinshaya. I forget whether it was the DS9 duology or Revelation and Dust.
See, for me, part of the problem with The Fall as a series was that it felt like The Crimson Shadow and A Ceremony of Losses didn't actually need to be part of the series to work. It would have been relatively simple to re-write them as totally separate works. Whereas for me, the political books are my favorites. *shrugs* See, I figure that holding a vote on who becomes President Pro Tempore must be a standard quarterly thing. Because realistically, in a crisis, you can't assume that you can always convene a session of the Council in order to make the appointment; it would be more sensible to hold a vote on who becomes PPT at regularly-scheduled intervals, and then if a president dies unexpectedly you've got a Councillor ready to step up and take over right away. So I figure that PPT votes would be a routine thing that Ishan could horse-trade on, and around which he and Velk could organize their conspiracy. Yeah. I'm not sure if this idea is something the authors could have reasonably thought about in 2012-2013, though; a lot of the worldwide regressive backlash happened as a direct or indirect result of the Syrian refugee crisis, for instance, and that didn't really start in earnest until circa 2015. So I don't know if real-world events at the time would have been enough to suggest such a plot development to them. Well, different strokes for different folks.
Yeah, I wrote the story in a time of optimism, before the backlash had set in. In retrospect, it was plausible that the same thing would happen with the Kinshaya.
Looking back over this thread, I just wanted to pop in and say to @Una McCormack that your depiction of the Venette in Brinkmanship was really lovely -- especially the way they are basically a genuinely egalitarian, eco-socialist society! It's a lovely comment on the Federation's image of itself as egalitarian even as its culture remains committed to many of the hierarchies that characterize present-day white supremacist cisheteropatriarchical capitalism (how's that for a mouthful?).
I'm impressed! Thank for this, and for the review, which I hadn't seen. I think that was the book where I finally decided just to make all the protagonists female. And I'd been wanting to try to depict that kind of society for a long time (did you notice their knitted spaceships?). I'm not sure how well their involvement with the other powers goes, but they are certainly strong and intact at the end of the book. Ezri was important here. I'm glad you liked the Efheny story too, which is a personal favourite of mine, if rather bleak. I didn't create Dygan, btw, IIRC David R. George created him. But the character was perfect here, and then very much so later in The Crimson Shadow. Thank you for the lovely review.
Just to be clear, @Stevil2001 is the fellow who actually reviewed Brinkmanship -- I just quoted his review after re-reading the thread because I wanted to mention that I liked the Venette as space eco-socialists. And yes, I did notice that almost all the major players in Brinkmanship are women -- Ezri, Beverly, Efheny, Ilka, Alizome, Bacco, Corazame, and, unless I'm mistaken, the Cardassian and Venette representatives as well. Really, the only major characters I can remember who are male are Picard, Dygan, Peter Alden, and Gardner. It is, without advertising itself as such, one of the more genuinely feminist Star Trek novels I can remember. I did not notice the knitted spaceships! I must go back and re-read this novel, clearly!
Ooh, sincere apologies both! I was answering in a hurry and saw the capital 'S'! Thank you! Yes, the Cardassian delegate is also a woman. And the POV Tzenkethi enforcer Inzegil. The Venetans are all named after some of my favourite feminist sf writers.
Thank you, Una! And thanks for the clarification on Dygan. He fits so well in Brinkmanship and The Crimson Shadow, it seems like he must have been created for them!
*looks to see if Brinksmanship is available from my library* Knitted spaceships are definitely a concept I need to investigate!
I've also finished Peaceable Kingdoms today (but for the first time, and I read the german version). I'm still trying to get all the members of Active 6 together, especially who of them it was in some chapters. The members were (according to memory beta): Miguel Aguilar (human) Jacob Barrows (human leader) Contera Hilbis (bajoran) Fredil Pars (bajoran female) Loras Galir (bajoran) Tobias Paquette (human) Haruka Tomashiro (human) Chapter 16: 2 unnamed Bajoran attack Crushers team. One ist dark-haired, the other blond. The blond man gets his knee injured. I have no idea, who they are. If these 7 persons are the full team, it must be Contera & Loras. Chapter 23: Another attack by one bajoran. Later it is clear, that this must be Contera Hilbis. Chapter 24: The team finally is introduced. We learn, Barrows is the leader, Paquette the engineer. We also see Contera & Fredil. Contera must be the guy from chapter 23. Chapter 26: Tom Riker kills two men, one human, one bajoran. We later find out, they were Contera & Aguilar. The battle in the caves, chapters 34 - 36: 34: Barrows is by himself, the others in 2-person-teams. Contera & Aguilar are missing, obviously killed in chapter 26. There is a team of Paquette & Fredil. Another team of Loras & Tomashiro gets stunned by Tom Riker. 35: Barrows fights Crushers team.... and a few other members of his group appear. First, 2 men attack from behind, but run away. Then there are 2 others. Later, Tom is shot by someone, while Daret fights someone else, who stabs him with his knife. Any idea, who they all are? I thought, Paquette must be one of them. But where is Fredil? 36: Crushers team is captured. Only Barrows is named, and it looks like there are 3 of his henchman, probably the men from chapter 35. Any idea, who (of the 7 known persons) the unnamed members of Active 6 in chapters 16, 35 and 36 are? And how big is this group? First I thought of about 6 people, then 7 were named, but there must be more.