Captain Picard must decide whether to sacrifice a world in order to save the galaxy.

A mysterious cosmic force is destroying the very fabric of subspace, rendering warp travel and interstellar communication impossible throughout scattered regions of the galaxy. Even worse, these "dead zones" are spreading rapidly, bringing the entire Alpha Quadrant to the brink of a new dark age. Only Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the Starship Enterprise™ stand a chance of reversing the decay by tracking the disruption to its ultimate origin. Beyond the boundaries of the Federation, deep in uncharted space, Picard and his treacherous Romulan allies have discovered the source of the crisis: a vast alien mechanism suspended between a black hole and a nearby inhabited planet. The ancient device is all that prevents the imperiled planet from disappearing into the voracious black hole, but its cataclysmic effects are eroding subspace at speeds faster than light. Now Picard faces a wrenching dilemma: must he sacriÞce an entire world to save the galaxy?

Starbse 27 has gone dark, functions grinding to a halt as its energy source mysteriously fails. A province on Bajor reverts to pre-cardassian power plants - where it can. Three Vulcan cargo ships are lost with all hands aboard. The mysterious dead zones continue their expansion, creating havoc throughout civilised space. Communication, transportation, medical facilities, replicators - without this technological infrastructure, the United Federation of Planets will descend into primitive chaos. On board the Starship Enterprise is the one man who may be able to halt the deadly decay. T Sart, an egomaniacal war criminal whom Picard and his crew suspect of treachery and lunacy, plans to save both the universe and his own career by manoeuvering Picard into a position of weakness even as the two men work together as allies. He leads Picard to a planet on the edge of a black hole from which the decay appears to emanate. There, Picard and the Enterprise must hijack technology beyond their comprehension to save the lives of billions - and prepare themselves to sacrifice millions on the planet below.

Lieutenant Melora Pazlar, first seen in the Deep Space Nine episode that bears her name (Melora), is the only Elaysian in Starfleet. Stationed on board the USS Enterprise, six years after her short-lived romance with Dr Bashir, she receives a desperate call for help from her crystalline, multi-species homeworld. When subspace contact fails, Captain Picard sends the Enterprise to investigate, only to find the ship nearly torn apart by a dimensional rift and stranded, badly damaged, below the shields that protect the carefully constructed planet. With both escape and rescue impossible, Picard and crew set out to discover the cause of the rift and the strange, cancerous growth in the crystal choking the planet itself. A Federation ship attempts to reach the Enterprise but is destroyed, and when thoron radiation threatens to kill the crew, all signs on the planet point to sabotage...

In the aftermath of the Dominion War, the Klingon cruiser IKS Gorkon is on its way back to the homeworld when it is diverted by a distress call... It is two hundred years since the expanding Klingon Empire discovered an icy planet rich in a valuable mineral, topaline. They named the planet 'taD' - Klingon for 'frozen' - and called its people 'jeghpu'wl' - conquered. It is four years since the Klingon Empire invaded Cardassia, breaching the Khitomer Accords and causing a diplomatic rift with the Federation. On taD, depleted Klingon forces were overthown in a coup d'etat, and the victorious rebels took advantage of the disruption to appeal for recognition to the Federation. Now the Klingons have returned to taD and re-established their control. But the stubborn rebels insist on Federation recognition. A solution to the impasse must be found: a task that falls to the Federation's new ambassador to the Klingon Empire. Worf regards himself as a fighter, not a diplomat. But the Federation disagrees. Now, for the sake of the Empire, Worf must somehow forge a peace between the hardened rebels and the battle-hungry Klingon forces. And as everyone knows, Klingons do not negotiate...

Interstellar civilization depends on the twin blessings of warp travel and subspace communications. But now an unknown force is disrupting subspace throughout the galaxy, creating "dead zones" in which advanced technology will not function. Ships are stranded in space, unable to communicate. Colonies are losing life support. Governments can no longer negotiate with their allies -- or their enemies. Worse yet, the dead zones are proliferating at a geometric rate. Unless a solution is found, the entire Alpha Quadrant may be doomed to a new dark age! in the wake of the Dominion War, a tenuous peace exists between the Federation and the Romulan Empire. The uneasy alliance is strained to the breaking point, however, by the enigma that is destroying subspace. Now Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Ambassador Spock must join forces with an infamous Romulan war criminal in a desperate attempt to find the source of the disruption -- even if it means sacrificing the very peace they hope to save!

Riley, an orphan boy living in Victorian London, has achieved his dream of becoming a renowned magician, the Great Savano. He owes much of his success to Chevie, a seventeen-year-old FBI agent who traveled from the future in a time pod and helped him defeat his murderous master, Albert Garrick. But it is difficult for Riley to enjoy his new life, for he has always believed in his heart of hearts that Garrick will someday, somehow, return to seek vengeance. Chevie has assured Riley on numerous occasions that Garrick was sucked into a temporal wormhole, never to emerge. The full nature of the wormhole has never been understood, however, and just as a human body will reject an unsuitable transplant, the wormhole eventually spat him out. By the time Garrick makes it back to Victorian London, he has been planning his revenge on Riley for half a century. But even the best-laid plans can go awry, and when the assassin decides to include Chevie in his retaliation, the three are tossed once more into the wormhole with no idea where—or when—they will end up.