The troop lander had been unsteady enough as they entered the orbit of Chintoka Prime and came in range of the Level II planetary defense platforms which had survived the sweeps by Starfleet escort vessels, but here in the atmosphere, the squat, boxy ship shuddered with an intensity that suggested it had neither inertial dampers nor shielding systems. Neither of these were true, of course. The vicious, shark-like attack shuttles that ran cover were opening up with full phasers and photorps, needling the atmospheric batteries with brutal accuracy, and absorbing their shots. Meanwhile, the landers--essentially massive boxes of infantry troops with overslung command modules and powerful, side-mounted impulse engines--were putting out a hellacious amount of energy themselves, washing the Cardassian emplacements with enough ECM to make any sort of accurate targeting impossible, and forcing them to fire disruptors and anti-matter charges blindly. Their shields easily held against the concussion of the charges, and, occasionally, the exploding escort shuttles.
No one spoke anymore. Not the way they had on the Roanoke on the trip over when they'd joked and laughed and complained about the mission--the fact that four hundred years of wars hadn't generated any better ideas of how to insert infantry on enemy soil than just to dump them out of a large metal box, the fact that the Cardassians had buried their transport-bafflers deep enough so they couldn't be taken out from orbit, why they didn't just let fly the metogenic weapons and turn the planet into a big, dead rock in a matter of minutes. Now they sat in their G-couches, facing the row opposite--one cell of a lander that contained forty such cells--but not looking at the guy across from them, even when their heads were up. They looked between the guys, or at their armor or at the bulkhead, but not at the face. No one wanted to see their fear reflected in that face.
Paredes looked at the deck between his boots, where the butt of his phaser rifle stood. He knew the fear his face showed. He'd caught his reflection on a polished piece of engineering equipment on the way into this tub, just a quick flash but enough to show his normally-bronze Pacific Islander's skin was grey with deep bags beneath the eyes. Someone coughed a few people down the line, and a couple of the troops looked, startled by the noise. Paredes took the opportunity to quickly scan the faces around him--just enough to assure himself that there was no trace of the grim, stoic resolve of the soldier that the news reports were telling the citizens of the Federation about. They looked like kids waiting outside the principal's office. Glum and nervous.
He wondered if that wasn't exactly what was going on here: all them just big kids who'd committed the transgression of being in the wrong place at the wrong time in the wrong line of work, waiting to face the ultimate principal's office of the guns of Chintoka Prime. It took only a moment for Paredes to realize the inanity of the thought, and he wondered if the rest of the guys were thinking thoughts as stupid as his.
But what was there to think about? What were you supposed to think about? Friends and family? That just drove the knife deeper into your heart. Duty, honor, commitment, courage? Just words in the face oncoming devastation. On the trip over, Paredes had thought about his family, how there'd been soldiers in the Paredes clan since the beginning of the 20th century when they'd fought off the Moros. He'd thought about his relative (a grandfather with more greats in front of it than he could remember) who'd fought at Bataan until it fell, then survived the Death March, and lived the next couple of years under the watchful eyes and sadistic hearts of their Japanese captors until they'd been liberated by MacArthur. And then he fought again beside the Americans to drive the Japanese out before they could finish the job of exterminating the population of the Phillipines.
A Paredes had fought the Optimum Movement during the Eugenics wars--had been Movable Weapons Platform operator in Chicago and drove the genetically-engineered fascists out of the city as it burned around them. A great-great-uncle had fought the Romulans at the battle of Cheron, and a distant cousin he hadn't known well had died during the Second Borg Offensive.
He'd tried to find some familial sense of duty in these thoughts--the Paredeses keeping the Universe safe from whomever happened to be rearing their ugly heads at the moment--but instead all he could think about was the pointlessness of it all. Was he just a spoke in a wheel? Locked in a grove, because of his name, that would eventually and inexoribaly take him to the fires? And if so, what was the point of any of it? What was the point of even making decisions the moment his feet hit Cardassian soil if his life was already on autopilot and being navigated by someone or something higher?
Paredes inhaled through his nose and thought instead about his gear. The light olive pneumatic armor that enclosed communicators and tricorders--though not the black deluxe models used by the special forces troops that would also administer hypo-injections and cauterization techniques in case of injury. The platisteel alloy would stop a phaser-blast from a pistol or a rifle, but much heavier and they'd burn through. The photon grenades clipped in the folds of his armor--not heavy in and of themselves, but bulky and with a way of digging into your body whenever you flattened for cover. His pack, a solid fifteen pounds of prefab housing, spare weapons parts, extra clothing, rations, tools. His phaser pistol, useful as a club. His snug belt, its pouches stuffed with power packs. And there was his phaser rifle. It was an unlovely old Type III model with the bulbous pre-fire chamber and dual grips and no shoulder-friendly stock. It was a good enough rifle--got the job done and was reliable enough if you accepted that the non-essential components like the gyro-stabilizer and multiple targeting system would break almost immediately and didn't get too attached to them. Company Captain Marquand had one of the newer compression models--sleek and black and more comfortable to wield, more accurate and deadly. Paredes wished he had one of those to be sure, but the Federation could produce them only so quickly, and in the meantime his Type III was still a fine weapon. Beside him, Trudi Messonovich was saddled with a Shoulder-Mounted-Pulse-Cannon--a behemoth of a gun which looked like nothing besides an ancient bazooka. They were the newest from Starfleet R&D, capable of firing a phaser blast that could take out a whole garrison of troops or penetrate the first layer of tritanium armor of a starship. They were also heavy and impossible to secure. Messonovich carried hers like she would a crippling disability.
They hit atmosphere with a solid thud and heard it sizzling on the shields. The could even hear the whine of disruptor fire if they pressed their ears to the bulkhead. A couple did, but Paredes could see in their bottomless-eyed gaze that they were already gone somewhere that was inaccessible to almost everyone now.
Paredes glanced over at Bashir. The Starfleet doctor looked ashen and wan, but also like he was doing his damnedest not to look afraid. Paredes didn't know Bashir well--the doctor had rotated in after his transport back to Deep Space Nine had been engaged and crippled by Jem'Hadar fighters--but he hadn't had to go on this mission. Bashir's rationale was that a choice between spending three days in transit onboard a ship under heavy guard by escort frigates or accompanying Starfleet Infantry on what may well be the most critical battle of the war was no decision at all. Bashir was also the only Starfleet doctor that Paredes had ever met that didn't whine and moan about their Hippocratic Oath and being in medicine to save lives, not take them. Bashir had seen combat, had taken lives, and knew the cold realities of kill-or-be-killed. In his tritanium helmet with the chin strap snugly clipped, he looked like a beagle. Paredes said, "Hey," and nodded at him, catching his eye. Then he tapped his own unclipped strap that down to the edge of his jaw. Bashir moved his head, comprehending, and undid his as well. "Concussion'll knock it off your head," Paredes explained in flat, unexpressive tones. "Keep it tied up and it'll break your jaw or twist your head and break your spine."
Bashir nodded again.
Near the front, standing against the stomach-twisting combination of the lander's not-fully-adequate artificial gravity and Chintoka Prime's own natural Gs, were Captain Marquand and Sergeant Nguyen. They had their maps out and were comparing things on them. The maps themselves were polymer flimsies, foldable like maps had been for centuries. The same maps were programmed into padd screens set into the forearms of their armor, but not even the boys-with-toys at Starfleet R&D could pretend to believe that they'd work properly in an engagement such as this.
The COs were close enough that Paredes could make out their LZ--even though he had the same map in his belt satchel--and it helped give focus to his fear, sculpt it into something tangible.
Chintoka Prime Insurgency. Northeastern Continent. LZ: Creighton. Secure Section: Hammer Six.
Troop deployment, Hammer Six: 15,000 Cardassian and Jem'Hadar.
Heavy weapons: Six extra-atmospheric spiral-wave disruptors.
Fifteen intra-atmosphere spiral-wave disruptors.
Thirty-four anti-personnel/anti-armor disruptor cannons.
Undetermined concussion launchers.
1500 photon-grenade launchers (approx. 1 per company)
The landers would be touching down on the edge of a sandstone/basalt ridge that dropped nearly vertically into a boiling Chintokan sea. This left one direction to go, and that was straight up and onto the continent proper. Between them, however, and that continent were transport bafflers, fortified trench-labyrinths where soldiers could stand behind the protection of the ground and beneath the even more protective alloy phaser armor and go at them with small arms. Beyond them were the aboveground emplacements where the small arms were joined by the heavier anti-personnel and anti-armor weapons. At the top of the ridge, just before the blissful miles of weapons-free ground, were the major weapons, the anti-ship disruptors. Thankfully, those would not be aimed at them. The sidearms of the soldiers who manned those posts, however, would be.
Simple.
Captain Marquand slowly made his way to the rear of the troop segment, unswayed even by the dueling G-forces. Officers were immune to those things, Paredes guessed. Marquand paused by Bashir. "You set, doctor?"
"Yes sir," Bashir replied. His accent was too delicate and refined for the haunted features it accompanied. Paredes had been struck by the anachronistic quality of it all when Bashir had been telling them the latest news from DS9 while he field stripped his phaser rifle. "I've got the expanded medical pack, two dermal regenerators..."
"Leave them here," Marquand said firmly. "They're high-energy tools. One disruptor bolt skims them and they'll set off the power packs. They also take too long. It's going to mass-triage out there and you won't have the time to use them."
Bashir stared at him a moment, but unclipped them from his belt and placed them on the seat beside him.
"Derm patches'll work as well," Marquand continued, then he straightened up a little and addressed the company.
"All right folks, thirty seconds. Your harnesses release in fifteen, but keep your asses planted. You fall all over yourselves, we never make it out."
There was an almost imperceptible shifting in the seats. The Captain stepped to the rear and checked his map again. Sergeant Nguyen stepped forward next, paced the aisle equally steadily as Marquand. None of them were dumb enough to think that the dueling G-forces had any hold on the Sergeant.
"OK, people," Nguyen announced in a voice loud enough to drown out the ambient noise, "listen up! You heard the captain; you keep your asses planted until you feel the ground hit this tub, then you scramble those asses out of here. Cardies'll be sterilizing this whole inside with disruptors, so anyone who doesn't get out by the time their heavy arms draw a bead'll be caught in the murder hole. You get outside, you hit the ground and try to make it to some kind of cover. We got blast craters, some crags and we got those transport-bafflers if you're really lucky. Just find something that's going to keep the fire off of you and figure out where everybody else is. Then we can form up and make the big push. I want at least a meter between you people whenever you move. Those big guns are on batteries. One guy is a waste of energy, five is a bona-fide target. I know you're going to want to set your weapons on wide-dispersion disintegrate, but it's going to be assholes and elbows out there and you'll end up frying half your company. Anyway, you'll burn through your packs too quickly that way. Keep 'em narrow and low-kill setting, you don't want these guys to stay standing or to stand up a minute after they get hit. Keep 'em around eleven or twelve. You stay down, you stay fast, you stay alive."
And then the harnesses released. Everyone stopped breathing for a moment. Paredes suddenly realized that he couldn't feel his rifle. Was he still holding it? Panicked, he looked down and there they were, wrapped about the barrel. Slowly, carefully, he bent down and flipped up the transparent aluminum sight, feeling it click into place and lock. The whining outside of the bulkheads was reaching a crescendo, and a new stab of panic ran him through when he realized that the noise was neither the friction of the atmosphere or the lander's antigravs, but the sound of disruptor fire slamming the shields.
The lander hit the ground with a solid thump that reverberated through the hull and shivered through the troops' gear, their flesh and into their skeletons. They stood, still feeling the shudder ripple around their cores, braced themselves against the Gs and the impact.
"Guns up!" Nguyen ordered and was answered by the clattering of dozens of phaser rifles being raised. The warning klaxon sounded, and Paredes felt his body go cold as if dipped in ice-water. The front bulkhead fell and there was to see was land and sky and disruptor lightning.
They evacuated in as orderly a fashion as possible, stumbling, tripping, ducking, bolting. The lander's shields extended one meter beyond the edge of the ramp and they all felt a slight tingle as they passed through it. The first ones died instantly, struck head-on by the heavy disruptor cannons, their bodies had burned into molecules before they could take their next step. Paredes followed the rest of the shuddering, undulating line of soldiers off the sides of the ramp and into a duck-and-run formation. He registered the seared ground crumbling beneath his boots just as the first concussion round lifted him up, gave him a queerly serene view of the landers--their rotating compartments dispelling men glowing and dying--and slammed him down again.
Struggling for breath, wheezing, yelping for air--animal sounds unheard over the whine of disruptors and exploding concussions rounds. A jagged panorama whirling around him, troops running, falling, screaming, kneeling, crawling, inching along between the blue and orange needles of Cardassian and Jem'Hadar fire. Explosions lifted some of them up too and they tumbled back to the ground, bounced. Rolled.
Rifle gone. Pat himself down, everything feels OK. No compound fractures. His lungs worked again. Well enough to smell the ozone from the disruptor bolt that sizzled by him. Paredes ran until he tripped.
An entrenchment, close up, sprayed fire into the scrambling attackers, joined with the heavier bolts from above. Troops went down screaming, smoking, missing parts. Paredes scrabbled away like a crab, feeling the alien mud and dirt encrust his palms and nails, smelling burn flesh with every breath.
Voices: unfamiliar. Someone else's company.
"Let's move! Keep you asses down and we'll meet up at..."
Blue fire washing over them, a screaming, steaming pile of crooked arms and legs and the occasional moaning, screaming head. Some fired back, stopping, straightening, making themselves targets, being hurled off their feet.
Paredes crawled between bodies--some inert, some screaming, some trying to move despite the loss of arms and legs--found one still clutching a rifle. He pulled it out of still-pliable hands, didn't know whose it was. Seared uniform, smoldering crater for a face. Flipped up the sight, scoped through. Nothing to shoot, just LIVE!
A concussion wave, riding an explosion, rolled him on his side. The sun was gone. Paredes blinked until he could see. A lander had exploded, painting sky red/orange from horizon to horizon and burning bodies fell from its opened belly like black snow.
Screams all around him. Cries, guttural, high, whining, unintelligible, some with words, some calling out to Gods ignored for centuries, some screaming for home, family, some for mercy.
The transport-baffler--a high spider of diridium beams with a cluster of khaki uniforms huddled at its base. Twenty meters Northeast. Paredes charged, ran between the raindrops, watched it grow larger and larger.
An explosion hit him from behind like an unimaginable wind. He was airborne again, then rolling in an imperfect somersault. Seven meters. His boots found purchase, pushed to its base behind the body of another soldier whose head and some of their shoulders had been taken off by a heavy disruptor. The blast was so clean, that the edge of the corpse was flush with the edge of the beam. Paredes shoved the corpse into the opening between beams. A private on the opposite end of the baffler stared at Paredes with lost, frantic eyes.
"It's not fair! They're killing us! They're killing all of us! It's not goddamn fair!"
Paredes checked himself: no blood. The explosion hadn't injured him. He had a wild sense of the rules being broken. He'd slipped through when he should have been taken down hard. Screw it, let the masters of the game worry about it. He only hoped he wouldn't pay for it later.
"I mean, what is this? They can't just...They're just taken us one by one! And they're killing..."
He started to reply, but a hail of disruptor bolts slammed the baffler, pounding against the alloy frame and spraying them with molten drops. They felt like needles piercing his skin. The private lost it and ran. Fifteen yards and a photon grenade exploded in front of him. Paredes watched as the uniform and flesh over his midriff opened up and slid away like a cheap, cellophane wrapper, and his intestines spilled out in a wash of blood as if he'd just given birth to a nest of pale snakes. The private didn't realize it and got five more steps before his legs became entangled and he went down.
Paredes turned, sighted on the entrenchment ahead and to his left, and fired. His fingers jerked involuntarily, exhausting half his power pack before he even realized what he was doing. The tritanium shield held, but some shots may have gotten through the gun slits. Movement caught his attention. A soldier scrabbled up to the shield, tossed three photon grenades through, then spun and ran. A blue disruptor bolt ran her through as easily as a knife through water. A fine, blue thread tethering her to the entrenchment for the fraction of a second before the grenades blew and flushed plasma fire through the gun slits. Paredes thought of the Cardassian and Jem'Hadar bodies being vaporized inside the entrenchment and felt a furious flush of energy.
He bolted during the lull in the fire, left the spindly top of the transport-baffler behind and made it a decent twenty meters before the air went hot with disruptor fire again. He fell to a prone position and squeezed off a few more bolts at nothing in particular. A sudden gust drew the air from his lungs and he rolled on his side, looking for the source. In a blast crater, fifteen meters to his right, Trudi Messonovich had fired a blast from her SMPC. She lined it up and fired again. Paredes followed the sizzling pulse on its straight trajectory into one of the bunkers on the incline. It sliced through the shields and bored a hole in the armor. Paredes saw infantry troops pour through the rift in the bunker.
He ran, hunchbacked, and slid into the crater. "Good shootin'" he said, slapping Trudi's helmet, but she was ignoring him. Corporal Queen was giving her fire coordinates.
Besides he, Queen, and Messonovich there were five other infantry troops--three of which were huddled at the back of the crater sobbing uncontrollably while their rifles lay ignored on the scorched earth before them--and Doctor Bashir who was working feverishly on an injured man. The patient had a stump for a hand which Bashir had wisely covered with a plasti-strip and a chest wound which sucked and whistled like air through a bent straw.
"Target the starboard..." Paredes didn't hear the rest. He turned to Bashir.
"Where's Captain Marquand? The Sarge?"
Bashir grunted without looking up from his patient. "Marquand never made it out of the lander. Sergeant Nguyen was cut in half thirty meters from the ship."
And that left Corporal Queen in command of what remnants he could find of his old company. Trudi fired again. Wading through the SMPC's vented gasses was like stepping into a noxious sauna. "Sir! Private First Class Paredes reporting, sir!"
Queen barely gave him a glance. "Get up on the ridge, Paredes! See that one, past the transport-bafflers? C-for-Charlie's up there, or whatever they consist of now. I think parts of L-for-Lenny and A-for-Adam are there too..." An explosion cut him off. They hunched their shoulders against the sprinkle of dirt, shrapnel, and blood. When it was done, Queen continued. "We'll give you cover fire. Take the doc and get up there. We can take out one of those bunkers and get into the trenches, we'll be able to open a hole!"
Paredes nodded, then turned back to Bashir. The doctor was slapping shut his tricorder, the patient gone. "Doc, front and center. We gotta move!"
Bashir gathered up his gear and rifle and slid to a kneel by the edge of the crater next to Paredes.
"We gotta gun it between those two bunkers there and up to that grouping on the ridge. You see it?" Beyond the swirling steam and smoke, the combined companies creeping toward the heavier bunkers on the ridge seemed to flicker in and out of existence.
"I see it. That's a hell of a jaunt."
"They're gonna lay down cover fire on those bunkers close to us. We'll make it to the transport-bafflers, then sprint to the ridge. Got it?"
"Got it." Bashir sounded like someone had scrubbed his vocal cords with steel wool. A moment later Messonovich's SMPC thundered. Paredes slapped Bashir on the shoulder and went over the side of the crater.
Bashir ran wrong--his back not arched enough, making him an easy target. Paredes couldn't do anything but divest himself of the man. He stopped banking on making it to the ridge with Bashir alive and well next to him.
The SMPC soaked the bunkers in phased energy, but Paredes didn't pay much attention. Even if the armor wasn't penetrated, the blast would blind them long enough for he and Bashir to get past their scope of fire. Disruptors sizzled the air around them, seared the ground beside and behind them, but never found their mark. To Bashir's left, a Heavy-Weapons Specialist took a glancing blow on his armor, igniting the power-packs for his SMPC and tripod-mounted turbophaser. The man went up like torpedo warhead detonating, sending undulating ripples of flame outward to ignite the troops around him. Five humans became bipedal torches stumbling, reeling, flailing flaming limbs. Paredes looked away, grabbed Bashir by the shoulder of his armor to keep him from doing something foolish like rushing in to try and save those men.
He shoved Bashir, then slid in behind him, and they both landed ungracefully and painfully at the base of one of the transport-bafflers. Bashir was breathing hard and looking around furtively. Paredes hazarded a look back. The five men weren't standing anymore, but crackling, smoldering heaps that could vaguely be considered human-formed at this distance. Behind them two platoons were pushing forward, a wall of blue and orange disruptor fire slicing through them and being met by daggers of red phaser bolts.
"We're heading up there," Paredes said, pointing to the ridge. The amalgamated companies were beginning to get antsy, too many troops to stay down and covered. They wanted some retribution. "Hey! You looking?" he slapped Bashir's helmet.
"Yes, I...Sorry. I see it." The doctor's dark eyes blinked dumbly, then fixed on the bunker-entrenchment. It loomed like a medieval castle from children's fairy tales.
And how did all those quaint fairy tales prepare me for this shit? Paredes felt a sudden flush of murderous rage at every fairy tale he'd ever been told as a child. Shit (an old word, but the most appropriate) about Kings and Queens and wicked stepmothers and dragons and fair maidens. Garbage. All of it. Paredes had never met a King, wasn't sure if there were any Queens left, and had never encountered anything like a dragon. But here was was in the middle of a slaughter with hundreds dead and dying around him, the targets of entrenched guns of an invading, subjugating army and he'd just ran through the smoke of burning corpses to reach not a castle with a moat and a dungeon, but an entrenched bunker with pulse cannons and grenade-launchers and there sure as hell weren't any fair maidens waiting for him even if they weathered this shitstorm and won this day. No happily ever after for the Heavy Weapons Specialist, that was for goddamned sure.
He shook it away.
"Okay, on the count of three, we run for that thing as fast as we can. If you fall, if I fall, we just keep going, understand?"
"Right," Bashir said. Paredes saw that this was killing him.
Paredes counted it down and they ran again. They hit the ridge and huffed their way up the slope, stumbling on spent bodies and scattered gear, feeling the dirt give way beneath their feet until they fell over the crest, felt hands grasp them and arms drag them over.
"Paredes! I'm with the three-three..."
"I don't care if you're with the Ferengi Alliance, you got a gun and your buddy's got a med kit and we're fixing to take this goddamn thing in a twenty count."
The woman with the sergeant stripes delivered her words with the blunt precision of a projectile-weapon, and Paredes knew enough to get off his knees fast. He did a quick check of his weapon, then looked around him. There were about thirty-five troops, all from different companies and branches: infantry, Marines, Airborne. They were crouched in a slight depression in the ground that widened into a trench that led into the bunker. A small team was sidling along the forward wall of the bunker while two Heavy Weapons Specialists kept the other bunker pinned down with fire from their turbophasers. With the other bunkers unable to fire laterally, and the one they were attacking unable to depress their guns far enough to hit the assault team, they moved with relative impunity.
"It's gonna be high drama and hard feelings when that bastard goes off," the Sergeant muttered. Paredes watched as the team rigged a proximity photon charge, armed it, and tossed it through the closest gun port.
The ground beneath Paredes trembled and suddenly the day became brighter, photonic energy pouring out of the gun ports, making the thing look like a squat, armored lighthouse. The blast-hatch that ended the trench blew outward and expelled Jem'Hadar and Cardassian soldiers, all as ashen-faced as their Federation counterparts--well, not the Jem'Hadar.
The trench was twenty feet wide. Starfleet R&D had deemed the bayonet too primitive a weapon. Too savage. Not the type of weapon that Starfleet troops should wield. The Cardassians' bayonets were smooth, five-bladed weapons. The Jem'Hadar serrated their three-bladed bayonets. They had the brute strength to pull them out of a body they'd embedded themselves in.
They swarmed, melded, coalesced into a blur of gray, blue and steel. Around him, Paredes saw troops parrying and blocking the Cardassian and Jem'Hadar thrusts, knocking aside bayonet-equipped rifles, blocking them in mid-arc, diverting their kinetic energy aside. Paredes didn't bother. He fired from the hip at everything that moved. Hand-to-hand only worked when the enemy didn't have blades.
Rapid-fire: three fell, one Jem'Hadar. That bastard still moving, one shot into the head. Recycle time too long, kept him a target. He crouched, scooped up a Jem'Hadar pistol, shifted his rifle. A breeze tickled his cheek, a blade scraped his helmet. He fired upward at a bad angle, a flash of blue--he used the pistol--he was blinded.
Vision returned slowly. Scratch another Jem'Hadar. Khaki-armored bodies tumbled around him, spraying ineffectual red beams. Blades glinted, sang, sunk their teeth into flesh with a nerve-deadening crunch. Paredes scrambled over a couple of inert bodies, took the high road and fired down at two more Cardassians. Both went down easily. A tri-blade stung his cheek. A flash of murderous rage caught his peripheral vision--Jem'Hadar seemed to love being enraged. Paredes leveled the pistol, fired off with his left hand, the blast singing the uniform sleeve, carving a hole in his attacker's chest.
A surge forward: the enemy lines had faltered, spilled up onto the edges of the trench. Suddenly the fight had room, had space to move and spread out. Big mistake. Must have been the Cardassians, Paredes mused as he fired both guns at once, hitting nothing. His ears suddenly sang with the sound of phaser-fire. His comrades fell back, out of the reach of the blades, and fired. Paredes pushed the advantage. He exhausted the pistol into a cluster of Jam'Hadar, knocked them down in a spray of flesh and bone and blood, then threw it at the Cardassian who'd just put a shot over his shoulder. Paredes saw a glimmer of the open hatch. He fired furiously and clambered over hunched, mulling bodies--enemies, allies, alive, dead, wounded--he didn't know and didn't care. He saw the hatch. A bloodied Marine was firing bolts from his compression rifle into the bunker, too injured or preoccupied to notice the Jem'Hadar until the bayonet was rammed through his throat. Paredes cut him off at the knees as he was trying to withdraw the blade. Then he tossed the rifle aside, pulled three grenades off his web belt, flicked off the safeties, and armed the three-second defaults. He cast them frantically into the bunker. Then he pulled two more, armed them, and tossed them in, too.
Paredes dove out of the trench and rolled as the fire-wash rolled out of the bunker and enveloped him like a blanket of flame.
The explosion stunned the remaining defenders long enough to swing the battle irrevocably, and it was less than two minutes before the final Jem'Hadar was put down. The Cardassians, however, weren't opposed to throwing down their weapons and putting up their hands. The combined team used the safety of the bunker to take out the one beside it, and soon the troops were scrambling up through the hole in the defenders' cone of fire. It wasn't a perfect opening--disruptor-rifle fire crisscrossed it and stabbed out the occasional invader--but it was safe from the heavy weapons and concussion devices.
Hammer Six was secured two hours later. LZ Creighton was secured three hours later, and the cargo-landers descended like enormous locusts. Paredes watched them come down, occasionally losing them in the spires of thick, oily smoke that billowed from the demolished bunkers and entrenchments.
The three-three was more or less decimated. Only Paredes, Sweete, Bashir, and Messonovich survives, and Bashir wasn't technically one of them, and Messonovich had taken a Cardassian bayonet through the skull and had to be medevaced out. Bashir went with her in a shuttle packed with laceration casualties. Paredes held within him the angry hope that all those who'd believed the bayonet too primitive a weapon for Starfleet soldiers had children in that shuttle.
As the sun was setting, Paredes found a secluded spot on the ridge and looked out over the red-washed ridge. Bodies were scattered across its surface like grains of wild rice on a white tabletop. Closer, he could see steaming corpses and burnt body-shapes. Hands, legs, heads, were strewn about the ashy ground as if their owners were buried.
Amid it all were troops and the landers, the mobile guns, and the armor, all rolling inexorably forward, impassive in the face of the day's slaughter.
Paredes clenched his teeth against the urge to laugh and cry and scream, and whimper, and most of all to shout those most sacred words: I'm ALIVE!!!
His body shuddered and he turned his gaze downward, concentrated on the small dent the butt of his rifle made in the ground as he twisted it with both hands. Even as his heart exploded in his chest, a small part of his mind wondered how he would ever make it past this day. If the war took years or if it ended tomorrow, how could the rest of his life possibly mean anything in the face of what he had seen?