making any money off them with this story.
After the first death there is no other
--Dylan Thomas
Lieutenant (jg) Adriana Criswell took the solid hit from the Jem'Hadar rifle squarely between her blunt, rounded breasts and fell backward without a cry or a whimper. When she hit the ground, she was little more than a pile of carbon-based components, hard-wired with Federation insurgent equipment, and leaking smoke that smelled acridly of cauterized flesh and the Jem'Hadar's own special anti-coagulant.
Tyre fired a burst in the general direction of the shot that had killed Adriana, but wasn't sure if he'd nailed the bastard who'd killed her. He'd killed somebody--the sound of the body being slammed by an anti-proton bolt and the guttural, Jem'Hadar shout of pain sounded over the high cackle of weapons fire--but actual combat was seldom as romantic a prospect as the popular conception of it, Tyre knew. The odds of avenging the one who took your buddy in battle were low. Most of the time you couldn't even tell who it was that took your buddy out. Or else your buddy bought it like Danforth who'd tripped a chemical mine. How do you avenge that? Best not to have buddies.
More Jem'Hadar were coming down the chute, falling into firing positions and squeezing off bursts, forming a solid blanket of undulating blue flame. Tyre pivoted on the balls of his feet and flattened against a support beam, satisfied that the triple-strength duranium would shelter him from the fire. Jackson, Q'intea, Portico, Donmar, and Sayles got caught in it and were tossed around like rag dolls in a hurricane.
And then there were...what...seven? Tyre thought. No, six. T'pak bought it in the desert...
The run through the desert had been a new taste of hell--twin, burning suns directly overhead and baked, hardened onyx below to simultaneously absorb and reflect the heat. Tyre had thought that this was a fundamental contradiction in thermal dynamics, but there they had been, running the mile or so from the landing craft to the aboveground portion of the complex, through shimmering waves of heat, while the soles of their boots went soft from the contact with the ground they couldn't even bear to touch.
They'd thought at first that the Jem'Hadar hadn't liked the heat either as they hadn't run into a single patrol. Then T'pak had tripped the disrupter mine. Stumbling on it, losing his footing on his melting soles, had saved them all. The thing popped up like a black alloy gopher and began spitting red fire in an arc. T'Pak was near enough that he caught virtually all of it with the exception of a few bolts that faded into the distance before Galle took it out with his Jem'Hadar pistol. Only then did the remains of T'Pak's body hit the ground. It looked like a charred tree limb.
So six. Six to complete the mission and maybe get out alive. Screw that last part. Six to complete the mission. They didn't have time for this. More of the monsters were coming down the chute from their waiting area--or whatever the big room was called where they hung out until needed. Tyre unclipped his last photon grenade and programmed the dispersal pattern, then tossed it into the corridor where they were preparing their charge. The white-hot explosion of particles expanded outward and upward, flooding the chute. Behind the explosion, he crouched, swung around and emptied his rifle rapid-fire into anything that moved.
"Go!" he shouted to the remains of the team. "I'll clean up."
"Copy that," Jolie affirmed, then ducked into the low, narrow tunnel that led to the lab. Four black-clad commandos followed. Tyre slapped a fresh charge-pack into his Jem'Hadar rifle and proceeded into the short corridor to the pile of bodies. He put a shot into each of their heads and set up a pulse bar at the mouth of the chute. Any more Jem'Hadar tried to slide down in the hopes of cornering the commando team and they'd be cut into two or three pieces before they reached the ground.
"You..." a cough. "You will not succeed...soft human..." The frail voice devolved into a gurgle. Tyre kicked aside a body to confront the voice's owner. It was a shredded Jem'Hadar, paralyzed, half its face missing, choking on frothing, congealing white that bubbled from the severed tube that stuck out of his neck.
"What are you saying, carcass?" Tyre sniped. He was angry and thinking about Lieutenant Adriana Criswell.
The Jem'Hadar's lips twitched into a cold, spastic smile. "You are all...doomed to failure...You do not know how to...war...You love yourselves too much..."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Victory is life and all that."
"Mock if...you...will...You love life. You would live it on your knees if only...to live it...We are dead...I...am dead..."
"That's more or less where I was going with this," Tyre admitted. "How do you like them apples?" He shot the Jem'Hadar in the face, then fired a couple more into its chest. Criswell had been good for conversation on the way over and now there was no one to talk to on the way back.
The beginning of the mission had begun in relative comfort in the lower decks and holo-decks of a Sovereign-class starship, the USS Lincoln. They were separated from the rest of the crew by DNA locks on the turbolifts. Only the captain, the exec, and the Chief of Security had access to them. Originally, the exec--a tightly wound Bajoran woman named Talika--had wanted all security personnel to have access to their decks in case the ship was compromised. Tyre had assured her that they'd be able to take care of themselves. When she'd seen the holodeck simulations they intended to run, she'd relented.
It was five days at maximum warp to the edge of Federation-held space--though their timetable was moved up due to some brilliant battle tactics by the Klingons who'd pushed the Dominion out of two systems. They trained exhaustively on the holodeck, pausing only to eat, sleep, and study their enemy. They learned Jem'Hadar weaponry, architectural layout, combat tactics, everything germane to the mission. She spoke to him for the first time at the weapons range.
"These rifles are hard to get used to. Why can't we just use standard phaser rifles for this mission?"
Tyre took the gun from her and showed her how to hold it in a versatile two-handed grip. "Their guns are more lethal, more compact, and in the event of an extended engagement, they won't be able to ascertain our position from the sound of the discharge." He didn't know Criswell, but most of the commandos were strangers to him. A handful were people he'd led on other missions, but they didn't banter or otherwise treat each other as close comrades. That wasn't done in these cells where secrecy was the status quo. Aside from the commandos was Quaylo and his command team. Their job was the insertion and evacuation, though the latter was highly questionable. He'd made it a habit of giggling every time he said the word to Tyre, as if the concept of the team returning from the mission was the most ludicrous thing he'd ever heard.
Criswell was lean and brown with hair as glossy black as the crust of the world they would be storming, and slightly almond-shaped eyes that betrayed her Filipino/Colombian heritage. She was murderous with a compression rifle, but took more time with the shorter, blunter Jem'Hadar rifle. Tyre had spent many hours of that initial journey training her with it. It was not personal--he simply wanted her to be able to kill as many of them as possible when they went in. By the time they departed the Lincoln she was more than proficient.
She asked him his division one day as they inhaled lunch. He'd answered cryptically enough, "Starfleet Special Operations." She'd smiled ruefully and turned her chocolate-brown eyes back down to her food, knowing that he had told her nothing and that he would tell her no more.
"This is lonely work. I may transfer back to Security sometime in the future," she said.
Fat chance, Tyre thought. Without an under-the-table OK from Section 31, Starfleet wouldn't let an officer who'd been on multiple covert operations back into a standard rotation.
"Less stressful," Tyre agreed. "Compared to this kind of mission, Security Chief, even on a capital ship like this would be a romp through the daffodils. Practically idyllic."
"I thought I'd feel more fulfilled when I joined Starfleet Intelligence," she said, picking at her rice and black beans, "but it's not exactly what I expected."
"How's that?"
"It's very sectioned. You're never quite sure what you're doing or why. Steal this, guard that. What did you steal? who are you guarding? What's the effect of your actions? You never know."
"True."
"On a ship, you have a fuller knowledge of what you're doing. Why you're doing it. You have a crew, peers, friends, companions. You get to even learn people's full names..." He smiled at that; she knew him only as Lieutenant Tyre. "I think the only reason I stay is that I'm good at the work and if I don't stay, someone who may not be as qualified will take my place. Do you know what I mean?"
"Yeah," Tyre admitted.
"Is that why you stay?"
"No."
She cocked her head and fixed him with those eyes. "Then why?"
Tyre blinked at her a few times, the question as foreign as a language from another quadrant, then he turned his attention to the high-protein salad on the table before him. "There's nothing to go back to," he answered simply.
"I don't understand."
He shrugged. "I've been doing this for almost ten years. I can't imagine doing anything serving in any other capacity."
"Do you have friends? Family? Wouldn't you rather live like a normal person where you get enjoy their company?"
"Everyone I was close to has been dead for years," he answered more brutally than he'd intended.
There was a cold pause, then Criswell asked, "Is that how you got into this business?"
Tyre nodded. "I was in Command division on a series of starships: the Kyushu, the Santa Clara, the Ahwahnee. I was on the Kyushu with my wife when we formed the blockade at Wolf 359. She was a tactical officer in charge of the photon torpedo systems. I sometimes imagine her sitting at her surround-console, watching the status of the guidance systems, launchers, delivery systems...watching as these weapons did nothing against that goddamn metal wall.
"Seven of us made it off the ship. I'd been taken out by a burst plasma conduit, left half my body burnt to gum, but that was okay, since by the time I regained consciousness the dermal regenerators were kicking in and two weeks had passed. Rachel hadn't been one of the seven off the ship. The Borg had targeted the weapons systems, so she'd probably been killed quickly, but it really didn't matter. While I recovered, I looked up my old shipmates, old friends, comrades. They'd all been there. They'd all been killed. Shortly after that a man in a black uniform made me an offer."
"And here you are," Criswell answered grimly.
"All these years later," Tyre nodded. "Protecting the Federation in ways it doesn't like to think about."
"Do you ever wish you'd done it differently?" Criswell asked, her liquid eyes drawing him in.
Tyre looked at her, looked at his salad, then back at her. "You're compensating with the wrong hand. These aren't Federation rifles, all the recoil is in the emitter cone, not the power cell. You have to hold tighter with that back hand, not the trigger hand."
She held his gaze for moment, then leaned back in her seat and asked the best way to extrapolate a target distance without using the front sight.
The Jem'Hadar had decloaked (or de-sheathed or de-blinded or whatever their term for it was) on its way down the ventilation shaft a second after Misk's shot had knocked it off its perch. Tyre spun, fanning blue fire around him, tearing apart wall panels, alloyed equipment, and the occasional cloaked Jem'Hadar. There were fewer of them in the in-vitro chamber than Tyre had expected. Twelve had decloaked on a catwalk suspended about twenty meters above the center of the chamber, but Tyre and Calquin had each targeted an end of the catwalk and blasted it away until blue/black bodies tumbled into the ventilation shaft, bounced off the massive cooling units, and plunged into the vats of embryonic fluid that contained the Jem'Hadar-to-be in varying stages of gestation.
"This place is too damn big!" Pakotio shouted as he loosed a burst from his weapon at a Jem'Hadar soldier at the end of the complex. He was losing it, Tyre knew. The in-vitro complex was bigger than anyone had expected it to be. It stretched deep into the planets crust, a ring of cooling towers around a central ventilation shaft that protected the fragile tanks of genetic material in varying stages of development. The ventilation shaft was the weakness. While the tanks and coolant towers were armored and even protected with an energy shield, the shaft extended as deep into the planet as possible without disrupting its stability.
"Cover Jolie!" Tyre shouted at him. "He's gotta plant the explosive!"
But by the time the words were out, half of Pakotio's head was gone. Tyre lunged, slid across the hot floor plates and scooped up the man's rifle. It was spattered with blood and bone fragments, but workable and Tyre's own gun was getting dry.
"Contact made!" Jolie shouted. Meaning he'd just dumped the protomatter device into the ventilation shaft and that his tricorder had linked in with the device's arming mechanism. Jolie was now doing a quick scan of the shaft and conveying the data to the explosive's detonator. When the explosive reached the most critical depth it'd go off.
Tyre sighted and fired on a small weapons team that had storming through a hatch on the other end of the complex. They fell firing, but more poured through hatch, kicking aside the bodies of their comrades. Tyre was dimly aware of other hatches around them opening. Things were about to get bad.
"We're surrounded!" Misk shouted, blowing fire through the nearest hatch, shredding whatever was beyond it. Tyre had been afraid of this. They were going to be overrun in a matter of minutes.
"We've got to buy time!"
Then he was tossed into a support beam with enough force to knock the breath out of him even through his combat armor. His ears rang and his vision was messed up. A concussion grenade, he guessed. The room was crisscrossed with gunfire, which didn't help his vision any, and he could see Colquin and P'reel slumped glassy-eyed on the floor. Misk was screaming and firing madly at the swarming Jem'Hadar, tossing grenades with barely a glance where they were going. Tyre squeezed himself between two support beams and set his weapon to overload, then tossed it into a pile of Jem'Hadar.
"Charge activated!" Jolie shouted. The operation was out of their hands now, and Jolie threw aside his tricorder and drew his Jem'Hadar pistol. His throat got ripped out before he had a chance to use it.
Tyre's rifle exploded and tossed bodies into the air like confetti. Behind him he heard Misk scream, then the scream die into a gurgle. Tyre bolted, dove into the ventilation shaft, embraced the warm updraft while the air above him sizzled. Fire loomed bright enough to sear his retinas, but a moment later the world wasn't there anymore anyway.
The insertion craft had taken off before the team had even made it into the in vitro complex. It was just good planning. The planet was rife with sensors that would scream like banshees if tripped, so the craft had had to cloak and then land to insert the team. However, stealth was not a necessity in extracting the team, so to prevent detection, Quaylo had parked it in a geostationary orbit and cloaked and waited for the signal. When it came, his transporter chief boosted the emitter and sent out a signal that made the sensors on the planet go berserk, but the moment the charge went off, no one was paying attention to their monitors.
Tyre stepped off the transporter pad and proceeded to the bridge. The ship was a hybrid Klingon/Starfleet light attack craft and, standing in the darkened bridge with its dim lighting and sharp-edged consoles, Tyre felt like his combat armor should have been worn by everybody in the room.
"Check it out," Quaylo said, gesturing at the viewscreen. "Major tectonic and seismic activity all over the hemisphere. The bastards can shield themselves from our phaser, our torpedoes, but not from fickle nature's indigestion." He looked at Tyre. "Planet's going to completely rearrange itself in the next couple of months. Whatever they've got set up there is going to be crushed."
"Four-hundred thousand Jem'Hadar soldiers is what they've got there," Tyre said dryly. "Four hundred thousand more after next year."
"Worth a dozen or so of Starfleet's finest, don't you think?"
Tyre shrugged. The scene shifted to a blurred starfield as the ship headed to its rendezvous with the Lincoln. He could see from the tactical board on Quaylo's command chair that the Dominion ships around the planet were scrambling to try and rescue their people on the surface.
"I guess. Would've been nice to have brought a few home with me."
"Can't blame yourself. I wasn't expecting any of them to make it back anyway."
"Me either," Tyre admitted. "But there was one of them I talked to. Would have been nice to talk to her on the way home."
"You mean I'm not stimulating enough company?"
Tyre grinned and stared at the memorizing starfield, thought about the doubts that came for him at night. Doubts about the decision he'd made almost a decade ago.
"I told her my story over dinner. Would have liked to have heard hers."
Quaylo nodded. "Pretty tall order, since you knew she's probably not coming back. Still, I suppose it beats telling it to your horse like in the Russian writer's story...the hell was his name?"
Tyre didn't look at him. "Just fly the damn ship Quaylo."