making any money off them with this story.
Doctor Julian Bashir applied the compress to the wound and cursed himself. Cursed himself for deciding to follow his conscience and spend some time as a battlefield medic, rather than continue his war service in the relative protection of Deep Space Nine. He cursed himself for foolish pride which had delivered him to DS9 in the first place (frontier medicine indeed!). He cursed himself for even going into medicine--weren't there places where a genetically enhanced intellect could be of service that didn't entail witnessing so much death? He cursed himself for being born.
But most of all, he cursed himself for allowing Ezri Dax to come with him. Stupid, stupid, stupid good intentions! She's still Dax, he'd thought. No reason to treat her like a child, just because she lacks Jadzia's sophistication, he'd thought. She still has over eight-hundred years of life experience behind her, he'd thought. She did just fine at AR-558, he'd thought.
Stupid good intentions, Bashir thought furiously as he released the compress and treated the wound with more Albex-767 to stimulate the platelets and, hopefully, counteract the Jem'Hadar anti-coagulant. More men were moaning from around the bend of the fortified trench. Bashir looked up and tried to locate Dax amid the scrambling soldiers, found her tending to a shuddering Federation Marine. She was running a medical tricorder over his steaming combat armor and trying to keep her helmet from slipping down her brow and into her eyes. Bashir gritted his teeth and finished the Albex treatment. Any more and the wound burn and the platelets would start clotting at the slightest trauma. The man's blood would turn to sludge. He fixed the battlefield dressing and moved on to the next.
Shrapnel wound. Easy. Tissue regenerator for a few seconds to close the internal wound, then a simple molecular enzyme to dissolve any shrapnel left in the body. Two minutes and Bashir was moving on.
Phaser rifles were whining at a fever-pitch from the Marine's positions above him. The Jem'Hadar must have been advancing. Bashir tried to block the mental image of the advancing, lizard-like Cardassians and Jem'Hadar pounding up the burnt-black hill of dead and dying scrub beneath a coal-grey sky of this world and looked for the next salvageable casualty. There weren't many--not without any sort of mobile medical unit nearby and the orbiting starships besieged and running with shields up.
Bashir stumbled over two blackened corpses locked in a death-embrace (photon-grenade at medium distance, the coldly analytical segment of his mind observed, one tried to throw the other out of the way and got caught in the blast), and fell to the side of a gasping, sobbing woman who was frantically clawing at her armor.
"Stop!" he told her tersely, "Keep your hands away from it..."
"IT BURNS!" her head thrashed back and forth, grinding her auburn hair into the black mud. "GOD, I...GOD, IT HURTS..."
Bashir pressed the tip of his battered hypo to her carotid artery and counted off the seconds until the pain-killer kicked in and her eyes grew distant and rheumy. Then he stuffed the hypo into his equipment belt and dug out a laser-scalpel he used to slice open her armored vest. The stench of burning flesh stung his nostrils, and he cut away her uniform. The phaser blast had sent a red-hot fragment of alloy from her vest into her midriff. Had to be a Jem'Hadar rifle, the analytical part of his brain chimed in, Cardassian and Starfleet rifles didn't disrupt matter that violently or imprecisely. Regardless, it was an easy one. He pulled out his hypo and switched vials to the alloy solvent which he shot directly into her bloodstream. Then he slapped a bandage on it and moved on.
The explosions knocked him down as surely as if he'd been struck from behind with a kayak oar while riding the whitecaps with O'Brien on the holo-suites. He struggled unsurely to his feet, but his body wasn't working properly. His lungs didn't seem to be able to draw oxygen and his hearing was lopsided.
"Mortars!" a voice cried from above him. More explosions drown it out. Bashir ducked with every distant blast.
Where the hell was Dax?
He craned his neck, whipped it around until the muscles screamed, but all he saw was Heironymous Bosch landscape of pallid corpses in ashy mud. Bosch's paintings were purely visual, but Bashir had no doubt that the painter heard something close to what he was hearing now: whining pulse-shells, screams of pain and fear, explosions that cut them all off.
He shouted her name, but only knew it from the burning in his throat. He couldn't hear his own voice. He bolted on unsteady legs across a sea of bodies, dismembered limbs, spilled intestines. They were people, components of people, larger than Dax. Tougher. These were Federation Marines. They practically lived in mud and blood. Compared to them, Dax was his little sister.
He stepped off a level, not even realizing it, fell two meters onto a warm pile of corpses. Bashir screamed (didn't hear it) and scrambled to extricate himself, but the explosions began again and he crouched low amid the death.
They didn't stop. A continuous peal of throbbing thunder that sent shockwaves sweeping through the trench taking Bashir's helmet off and carrying it away. Flack, debris, and body parts rained on him.
He may have still been screaming when he saw her, but when he did his jaw clamped shut tightly. She was wading, dazedly, through the ash/mud about twenty meters further down the trench. Even from there, he could see her blue eyes as brilliantly as Earth's sky.
Bashir ran, his footing giving out on the organic material beneath him, charging through the devastation that fell from the sky. Her eyes locked on him, formed dim recognition as he tackled her. Above them a gunner support exploded into shrapnel. Ezri had lost her helmet, he saw, and blood was trickling slowly from a superficial cut on her scalp. Bashir bunched up his shoulders protectively, shielding her from the flying debris. Only when he felt the warmth of her breath, did he realize she was crying.
"Stay down! You're all right! Ezri...stay down!" He took her apple-shaped face in his hands and stared intently into her eyes until the fear there subsided. They were crystal blue--as blue as the Mediterranean Sea and he had the sudden, wildly insane desire to swim in them and lose himself in the sun and salt water and be far, far away from fear, loss, and slaughter.
Her lips pressed against his with suddenness of a disrupter blast, and the warmth of her mouth seemed to fill his entire body. She lashed out with her tongue and he met her advance with his own. Ezri pressed herself into him, and he pressed her deeper into the protective ground. He imagined the feel of her smooth, spotted body beneath him in his bunk, in his quarters, on the beach of the Mediterranean.
After decimating the Federation Marines holding the trench, the Dominion troops stormed it, but by that time the starships had driven off their Cardassian attackers and could launch their atmospheric support shuttles with safety. The Jem'Hadar converged on the hill in time to meet a wall of phaser beams and micro-torpedoes. The absolute destruction of the Jem'Hadar and Cardassian ground troops took about ten minutes. Bashir and Ezri remained locked in their intimate embrace throughout it all. A few hours later, they assisted the starship medical teams in triaging the wounded and inventorying the dead. It was long, exhausting work and they ended up traveling back to Deep Space Nine on separate starships. Once on the station, they didn't speak of what had happened in the trench, under fire, and surrounded by death.