Stardate 47329.4: Commander Sisko's inabilty to sleep has caused him to realize that the fourth anniversary of the passing of his wife had just passed the day before. Thinking about Jennifer, he meets a woman on Deep Space Nine who he becomes enchanted with. Meanwhile, a terraformer has docked at DS9 in order to have the warp engines on the science vessel Prometheus upgraded so that they will be ready for his mission to restore life to a dead star.
When the Cardassian occupation of Bajor ended in 2369, the mining space station Terok Nor was left abandoned, its systems ripped out. By invitation of the Bajoran provisional government, Starfleet stepped in to oversee the rebuilding and day-to-day operations of the newly christened Deep Space Nine.
The years of Starfleet's nonintervention into Cardassian matters, however, had taken its toll on relations with the Bajorans. Consequently, Starfleet's position was a tenuous one; many Bajorans, suspicious and hostile as a result of decades of Cardassian oppression and brutality, did not greet the Federation's presence with open arms. The Federation's assistance is put to the test as DS9 becomes a center of travel and commerce that stretches into the Gamma Quadrant.