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During the war, Miles Edward O’Brien served at the epicentre of many of the key moments of wartime operations, Deep Space Nine. As Chief of Operations at the starbase, he oversaw fleet replenishment activities for the Ninth Fleet, including the extensive logistics required for the Chin'toka Campaigns and the invasion of Cardassia at the culmination of the war. Following its conclusion, he became Professor of the Starfleet Academy School of Advanced Engineering in San Francisco, Earth.
The following is an extract of a much longer interview, originally carried out in late 2384 as background for Jake Sisko’s biography of his father, Captain Benjamin Sisko. Although the primary work itself remains unpublished, Mr Sisko agreed to allow relevant portions of his transcripts with DS9 officers and crew to be released to the Dominion War Archive upon its creation in 2401.
In this sequence, Professor O’Brien discusses the events which led to the outbreak of the war.
Those last few weeks after the Cardassian announcement were scary. Every so often, the Dominion would nibble at us a bit, trying to provoke a reaction - military, diplomatic, it didn’t matter. I’d been in border wars before; hell, my career as an engineer was built on the Cardassian frontier. The Cardies were always up for giving us a bloody nose to see how we’d deal with it, but this was different. This wasn't border tensions, or testing the waters to get a concession. It felt like they were looking for a pretence, determined if possible to have us make the first move.
You've been working on the Wolf 359 thing, right? I remember talking to the person behind it years ago for the Holland Report. Anyway, the Borg shook us out of the complacency the Cardassians and the Tzenkethi had created. They woke us up to the idea that there were implacable hostile forces out there whose only goal was our total subjugation. It wasn’t a fantastical idea from speculative holoprograms anymore. And the Dominion felt a lot like the Borg in the early days – mostly because they were a complete unknown. All we had were rumours and tall tales. Then the Odyssey happened. Sitting there in the cockpit of the Rio Grande, seeing their total lack of self-preservation…
Once they got a foothold in the Alpha Quadrant, of course, there were fewer unknowns. But the sense that they might be unstoppable grew the more we knew. Their ships were more powerful than ours, their tactics more brutal. Personally, watching those fleet convoys come through the wormhole week after week, I wondered how we were going to be able to hold them back if things did kick off.
So, I concentrated on what actions I could take. I made sure my family was safe - Kirayoshi was only a few months old at the time, and a war zone was not where they should be. Even then, I was scared that the war would find them eventually. I’d seen some of the tactical projections of how the early days of a conflict with the Dominion might pan out from Worf, and it felt like every Federation world might have Jem’Hadar warships on their door in just a few weeks – even Earth. I didn’t see how we could stop them.
But you were responsible for the breakthrough that kept the war contained for the first six months.
I can’t take credit for that. Dax and I had been bouncing around ideas for the minefield for hours - there were so many tactical and engineering considerations that it seemed impossible to come up with something that could do the job right. It was our local engineering genius, Rom - well, I suppose that’s Grand Nagus Rom these days - who hit on the idea of having the mines be self-replicating.
Essentially, each mine took all of the elements of a standard photon torpedo, condensed it into a cargo pod, and added its own little matter pool and a replicator/transporter hybrid. When a mine was destroyed, its neighbours would detect the detonation by way of a graviton cascade from the subspace explosion and trigger a chain of replicator actions. Each mine would contribute a part of the new one, then refill their pool by taking in material from mines further away. I still can’t quite work out how he made the connection, though - he was worrying about his wedding to Leeta at the time!
- [Detailed technical specifications of the Rom-O’Brien self-replicating mine can be found in file DWA/Tech:Fed/2373/31736.]
And then you had to put the minefield up.
Right. Those were the toughest days of all. Once we’d developed the mines, we needed to get the field out and deployed before the Dominion could take any action. The problem was that we couldn’t have the field active until all of the mines were in place, and we had maybe two, three days at best.
The Defiant wasn’t the most comfortable of ships at the best of times; she wasn’t designed for it. But when you’ve got cargo holds full of volatile materials and proximity detonators, and half of the station’s engineers crammed in to fabricate and assemble the mines, for the first time I could remember, it really felt dangerous to be on board. We were putting the damn things together in the mess hall, of all places!
On top of that, emotionally, the ship was a pressure cooker. We all knew this was the final step towards war, and the tension was… I mean, you could feel it; everyone was uneasy. I did my best to keep my people focused on the work, especially when the attack really began. They were professional and experienced, but having a squadron of Jem’Hadar firing on you really has a way of concentrating the mind. We only had a couple of dozen mines left to release, but that last hour or so was a real effort.
Watching the sensor display of all of those mines activating and then cloaking – it felt like such a small victory, especially when we had to leave it all behind only a couple of hours later.
Of course, we never expected it to work forever; we hadn’t even considered all of the possible countermeasures at the time. I guess Starfleet thought we’d retake the station in short order and the minefield would be back under our control. But things didn’t go the way they planned, and the Dominion had a lot of technical expertise on their side. I kicked myself when we got word of the anti-graviton beam - of course that was the way to deal with it. Whoever devised that idea had really done their homework.
- [Data declassified from Cardassian records after the election of Castellan Garak show that the idea was developed and executed by Glinn Damar, later head of the Cardassian resistance movement.]
What did it feel like, having to leave the station?
The captain giving the order to evacuate was the moment it really hit me. We’d discussed the possibility over the days before, but it never felt real until then. That station had been a thorn in my side from day one - a ragged hotchpotch of systems and programs, constantly threatening to fall apart - but by that time, five years in, it really had begun to feel like home. A bit of a ramshackle one, but home nonetheless.
Once the Defiant docked, though, there wasn’t time to think about that. I spent every spare second getting our people on board with as much Federation tech as possible; we knew we couldn’t leave it behind. Worf had told me about how it felt evacuating the Enterprise in its final moments, but I’d never had to abandon a post before. It was fraught, and knowing we were leaving friends and colleagues to deal with a Dominion occupation made it even worse.
When we found out you’d stayed, Jake - I’d never seen that look on your father’s face before.