Chapter 7: We Go Feet First

There's something deeply eerie about being in space with no starship around you. It's the silence. Even on a starship there's always the background hum of the life support systems, and of course the computer generates noises to match weapons fire and far-off explosions.

But a drop pod has none of that. There's no sound but your own breathing for the first stage of the drop as you fall towards the planet with nothing but a double layer of durasteel armor plate and crash webbing protecting you.

Then slowly, the hull begins to vibrate as you strike the upper layers of the atmosphere. The maneuvering thrusters fire periodically. The sound of wind creeps in.

Then the noise of enemy ground fire streaking past, and you feel more than hear the breakaway panels blow and the disruptors on the upper end of the pod start to seek targets and fire, clearing the LZ.

The status indicators for the falling infantry company are at eye level. Ten men from the MACOs, plus me and Bajor's assault team, plus four Cardassian platoons.

More noises. The pod launches sensor decoys. Several lights on my HUD wink out.

The pod jerks and shudders as the braking thrusters fire. The computer intones, "Prepare for landing," in Cardassian. "Prepare for landing. Five, four, three, two, one—"

The 'zero' is drowned out by a godawful smashing sound, metal grinding, earth and stone fracturing and pulverizing. If it wasn't for the noise dampeners in the pod and in my helmet I'd probably be deaf for good. The shock absorption is decent, could be better. Gonna be sore in the morning.

I unstrap, grab the lever above my head and pull, and explosive bolts blow the entry door off. I hit the ground running, catching sight of a barren desert with rock formations that remind me of Starfleet Academy's summer survival training in Arizona. A humanoid outline appears in red on my visor's HUD and I snap off a burst from my phaser rifle. "We got hostiles!" I yell into the comm. "Gardner! Report!"

"This is Chief Sebula! Gardner's got a broken leg from the landing, sir!"

"Ma'am, dammit!" I correct him as return fire comes in and I jump behind a boulder. "I got at least five Terrans on me, need backup!"

"This is Garresh Hogue Barreg," a Cardie NCO transmits. "I'm ten seconds away, hold tight."

"Make it snappy!" I pop around the bolder and fire a sustained burst; one of the Terrans screeches and falls.

Then a cloud of smoke leaps skyward with a loud bang and I hear screams of pain from the Terran fireteam's direction. I turn my head and see a squad of black-armored Cardassians—no, wait, those three in the middle are Bajoran—come over a hill about a hundred meters back, one of them with a still-smoking grenade launcher. "Thanks!" I holler.

"Gil Demak Ghibak, ma'am!" the gil leading the squad introduces himself. "We're scattered across about seven hectares of dirt, Captain. Most of your MACOs landed on the other side of those dunes"—he gestures westward—"and we lost a dozen men to ack-ack, and Dal Orlin cratered in."

"'Cratered in'?" I ask with some trepidation.

"Braking thrusters failed." I wince. "Hazard of the occupation. We'll deal with the dead after we've dealt with the living."

"Yeah, right." I reach into a belt pouch for my tricorder and scan. "All right, I've got the Orb, but there's a force field around the base. Shield generator, that way."

We head off to the northwest, trudging across the dirt. Reports of fighting pass back and forth over the radio. I bring up a tactical map on my HUD with a subvocal command. Despite the inauspicious beginning, the MACOs and my assault unit are holding their own and pushing forward.

My HUD alerts me to a platoon of Terrans headed towards us. Then I see a single lance of light reach out from the top of a dune and drop a Terran officer in his tracks. K'lak's not lost his touch. "Go around the right! Around the right!" I yell to the squad as more of ours summit the hill to the west.

"Contact!" a Terran NCO shouts. Phaser bolts whip past over my head as I drop to one knee and squeeze my trigger twice, hitting him center-of-mass. He rocks back on his heels but his armor's good. I shift my aim up a little and fire another double-tap, hitting him in the throat. The garresh fires a grenade and the other Cardassians add disruptor fire; more phaser fire comes from my left.

The smoke clears and none of the Terrans are still standing.

"Move up! Move up!" I bellow into my suit mic as mortar rounds start to screech in, landing long but tracking towards us. "That dune, up and over!"

We scramble up the sand and I drop flat at the top, seeing one of the shield generators. I sight on a man loading quantum charges into a mortar and skewer him front-to-back with a beam of light, then shoot the ammo supply a moment later and the rest are gone. A group of infantry takes cover behind a row of sandbags and throws a cover blanket off an assault minigun. "Hit the deck!" I order the Cardies, too slow for two of the gorrs. One falls backwards screaming, the other, a fresh-faced young Bajoran man, is hit in the stomach, folds in half, and tumbles silently down the dune.

The Terrans keep firing and Garresh Barreg grunts in frustration to my left, and the man next to him takes one in the head and falls flat. "Damn Terrans. I can't even raise up high enough to use my grenade launcher."

"Sebula! Athezra!" I radio. "I'm pinned; you think you might—"

As if in answer to my unfinished question a rocket screeches in from well off to the left and hits the sandbags just below the assault gun. Dirt and body parts fly everywhere.

"Think I might, Captain," Athezra answers as the Cardies cheer. "Come on! Move like you got a purpose!"

"Gil Ghibak, this is Dal Kanril," a simulacrum of my voice adds. "We've only got one more rocket and we lost the demo charges in the drop. You're going to have to deal with that shield generator some other way."

"Yes, my Dal," the platoon leader assents.

"Advance!" I command. We half-run, half-slide down the dune and I gun down a surviving Terran who points a weapon on the run. The transmission spire of the shield generator looms ahead of us, deceptively slender—I know from experience how non-fragile these things are.

Not a problem, though. Idiots left the account logged in on the control computer so I just turn it off. "One down!"

"Two down," Chief Sebula answers from behind me. "Never saw us coming."

"Wow, I didn't hear a thing," Barreg says, impressed.

"First rule of the MACOs," the graying man from Perikian Province says, phaser rifle at easy rest, "never let them know where you are." Then he eyes the wreckage of the machine gun nest, strewn with bloodied corpses. "'Course, there are other schools of thought."

Senior Chief Athezra grins. "Hey, I'm an assaultman, Chief, not a MACO. Why sneak around it when you can blow it up?"

"All right, save it, you two," I tell them, laughing.

"Ma'am."

I pan my tricorder around and gesture to the northeast. "Keep moving. That cavern's the source of the signal."

We form up with the rest of the Cardassian platoon and pass an empty antiaircraft emplacement that from the looks of it isn't meant to be able to depress enough for ground combat. I spot figures running for better cover near a red stone monolith and several more ack-ack emplacements jutting out of the desert. Gunfire erupts and Barreg fires off a few grenades as I find a rock. "They got another minigun!" I shout as a rapid-fire stream of bolts scythes through the Cardassians and several fall in their tracks. One of my redshirts, too, is hit, and I feel a bump as a graze ricochets off my helmet. I grit my teeth and aim downrange, flicking up the power setting up. A low-power warning lights up in my HUD, but I fire and the assault gun violently explodes.

I drop down behind the boulder and eject the spent power cell as the enemy troops return fire in my direction. An answering lance from K'lak streaks over my head. "Athezra! How's your man?"

"Wounded but still alive! Oh, phekk!"

A shell whistles over my head and blows a crater in an arch of sandstone. "What the phekk was that?!" I bellow.

"Tank!" Dal Kanril screams. "They've got a tank!"

Oh, lovely. I reach out with my left hand and extend the fiber-optic camera mounted to my wrist. Yep, main battle tank, looks like a Cardassian derivative. "Athezra, tell me your other rocket is a HEAT round!"

"Shredder, ma'am!"

Damn it. Frag shells are great for taking out bunched-up infantry, but to punch through heavy armor you need a shaped charge or a high-velocity kinetic penetrator. Man-portable phasers just aren't powerful enough, not against the microcrystalline plating everybody's using these days.

Another shell impacts among the Cardassian platoon, sending men flying through the air, screaming. Phekk, we're running out of options.

Time for something crazy.

"Give me some cover fire, people!" I get a good look at the setup with the fiber-optic camera, take a deep breath, and break cover.

Guy with a gun, dead center. I shoot him and keep running. Tank turret's tracking me. Dodge left, go flat. Cardassians open up with a squad support disruptor for suppressing fire on the infantry squad off to the right, and Athezra fires his shredder rocket into the middle of the squad to the left, opening the way for me. I jump up, vault the sandbags. The tank swings the turret towards me but I'm inside its range by now.

Hatch pops and a dark-skinned man pops out with a cut-down rifle of some kind. He hits me on my left side and I hiss in pain as I return fire; he screams and crumples. I grab for the handholds on the side of the tank and haul myself up, then pull a photon grenade off my belt, prime it, throw it in, and slam the door shut on the dead man's corpse, then jump down as a muffled explosion goes off inside.

In the sudden silence, I see Athezra standing by the sandbags staring at me, open-mouthed. I shrug and he yells, "Showoff!"

"They're surrendering!" Chief Sebula yells. "Cease fire, cease fire!"

K'lak and McMillan come down the dune to join us. "Captain, you're hit!" the shortish redhead cries with some alarm.

"Nah, first-degree burn at most," I tell her as they reach me, wincing. "Didn't even go through, just heated the armor."

"Let me be the judge of that," Corpsman Watkins says, joining us. She presses the latches on the cuirass and pulls it free, then prods the wound and I hiss again. Then she digs in her kit for a hypospray, snaps an ampoule into it, and reaches for the port over my jugular in the body-glove.

"No drugs, Doc," I tell her, pushing her hand away. "I still gotta fight."

"Mild painkiller."

"I've gotten worse burns off pizza. Just put some cream on it." McMillan holds up the section of armor for my inspection. There's a melted crater in the waist mail, as big around as my fist. "Whoa. Remind me to buy some shares in Normandie."

I dig the patch compound out of my utility belt and stuff a wad into the hole. As I work on the armor plate Watkins pulls the undershirt up under my breasts to get at the injury. "You're right, just a first-degree burn." She starts rubbing burn cream into the area and the stinging pain vanishes almost immediately, but the sensation through the messed-up nerves around the old knife scar is … odd.

While she's working on me I continue to hear staccato gunfire off in the distance, along with the rumble of engines and heavier disruptors as three of the Galor-class ships and several birds-of-prey and Hideki-class P-boats enter the troposphere overhead and begin striking targets on the ground, further away. A fourth Galor finds a flat area four or five kilometers off and sets down, its forward boarding ramp starting to lower.

Dal Kanril comes over to us with a pair of Cardies. "We're reading some more Terran life-signs in a cave under that monolith."

"Yeah, I saw," I acknowledge, patting the tricorder at my waist. "Ow!" I add as Watkins pulls a sliver of rock out of my neck.

"Didn't even feel that one, ma'am?" I shake my head. Must've slipped through the armorweave. I hear something explode off in the distance from a Klingon airstrike.

Then I hear a single gunshot, much closer. "Shots fired! Shots fired!" Chief Sebula bellows. Then, to somebody else, "Hold your fire or I'll blow your damn head off!"

Dal Kanril gets on her own comm. "Glinn Eggrin, what's going on?"

"Doc, you finished?" I ask her. She nods and I pull my shirt back down and stand, buckling the cuirass back on as I head towards the argument.

My guys and their guys have rifles pointed at one another, and it soon becomes apparent why. About ten Terran prisoners are kneeling on the ground with their hands behind their head, their faces resigned. An eleventh, a young brown-skinned woman not much more than twenty, is lying facedown in the dirt with a smoking hole in her back. An answering stream of smoke is coming from the emitter nozzle of the glinn's disruptor rifle.

Doesn't take a genius to work that one out. "What. The. Phekk." I snarl at the glinn.

"She committed crimes against the Cardassian people," Eggrin says simply.

"Right, the verdict is always 'guilty' and the sentence always death," I answer in a flat tone, stalking closer.

He nods. "Right, so you unders—"

Eggrin doesn't manage to get the sentence out before my gauntleted fist smacks into his gut below his breastplate. He doubles over and I help him along into the knee-guard of my armor, feeling his nose give as it hits the ceramisteel. "You son of a bitch! That's not war, it's murder!" I throw him to the ground.

"So what were you expecting, Captain?" Dal Kanril asks from behind me. I round on her and she shrugs and gives me a grim look. "End result for them will be the same—the Terrans never return anyone they take prisoner, either, not intact anyway, and you haven't seen how they keep them until then. All he's doing is saving the Alliance the cost of a trial."

"Oh, and that makes it okay?"

"This universe isn't okay!" she snaps. "The Terrans killed half a billion Bajorans before the Cardassians threw them out, and we're still finding mass graves forty years later!"

"And on my side it was the Cardassians!" I roar at her in return, hand twitching above the scabbard of my bayonet. "Six hundred million dead, cities bombed to oblivion, farmland poisoned, mothers raped in front of their children, children shot in the streets as sport! But what does doing the same thing to them solve?!"

"What do you want from me?!" she yells back. "I didn't start this!"

"But you can end it!" I scream in her face, so like mine.

I wipe off my mouth and turn to Corpsman Watkins, who's digging in her kit for a hypospray. A little hoarsely, I ask her, "Doc, can you—?"

"The prisoner's still alive, but only just. Doctor Wirrpanda is going to have to operate immediately."

"Get her to the Bajor. My HUD says we took down the transporter inhibitors with the theatre shield."

"Aye, Captain." She taps her combadge. "Watkins to Bajor, two to beam directly to sickbay."

As they fade out under a shower of blue sparks, I tell Dal Kanril, "It doesn't mean you have to just sit there and take it when the enemy does horrible things. But a little mercy goes a long way."

"This isn't your world, Captain," Gil Ghibak says.

"But people are still people," I retort tiredly.

"Central Command won't like it," Dal Kanril points out.

"I refuse to kill anyone I don't have to. There's enough blood on these hands as it is."

Meanwhile, the Terran prisoners are looking at each other like they can't quite process what's going on. Finally one of them says, "Uh, excuse me, Miss Bajoran… captain… person?"

"I think he's talking to you, ma'am," Athezra tells me unnecessarily.

"Can we come with you?"

I look at him. Kid can't be more than twenty, human, with dark skin. "I'm not from this universe and if my plan works, there's no way for you to go home."

"Anywhere's better than here."

I give him a tight-lipped look, then hit my communicator. "Kanril to Koranak."

"This is Gul Morag."

I pan my tricorder over the group. "I'm sending you images and DNA of some Terran POWs. I want you to run facial recognition and send back any files you have."

"One moment."

The files pop into my HUD as I look at the prisoners. "Gul Morag, do you have a problem with me taking custody?"

"I'm sure Dal Kanril has informed you of procedures."

"Well, if they're going to be executed anyway, no skin off your nose if I choose to grant political asylum, right? Either way, they're out of your hair for good."

"True enough." He sounds amused.

"Kanril to Bajor, I've got nine to beam directly to the brig. Energize." Most of the prisoners vanish in a shower of blue sparks, but the kid who spoke up first remains. He looks around with growing fear, finally looking up at me just in time for my power-armored fist to crack into his jaw. As he sprawls on the ground I look up at Dal Kanril. "If I took that one he'd just end up in front of a war crimes court. You can keep him."

"Gee, thanks. Shtellkan phekk'sha nakra kel—" Her profane monologue grinds to a halt as I start snickering. Except for the bits of Cardassian I'm sure that's how I'd react, too.

"So, what's the plan from here, ma'am?" Chief Sebula asks me, looking at the sandstone monolith that the still-smoking tank was guarding. "I'm reading one surface entrance; frontal assault'll be rough."

"In that case, probably us MACOs should take point—our armor should hold up better." I pan my tricorder over the monolith. "I got one Klingon life sign, plus four humans and an Andorian."

"The Klingon's probably a high-value prisoner," Gil Ghibak puts in. "Otherwise he'd be dead."

"Which means we need to keep him alive," Athezra concludes. "Flashbangs. Confined space, it'll magnify the sonic effect."

"Good idea, Senior Chief. Let's have the armory send us a care package."