“Good,” Sevflk said. “Keep a close eye on them.” He didn’t want the Dominion to unexpectedly jump into the middle of his Marine landing while he had dozens of shuttles and hundreds of transport beamings going on. That would be disastrous.

“Derik, have the Gorkon, Earhart, Qu’vat, and P’rang move up into position.” The four ships, plus the Charleston, assumed a stationary orbit over the Dominion garrison outside of weapons range of the surface for the moment, a status that was about to change. “Prepare for bombardment of the planet’s defensive weapons. Assign targets to the ships, Captain.”

Seconds later all was ready. “Begin bombardment,” the admiral ordered.

Captain Nogier took command of her own ship. “Shields up. Helm, close to weapons range. Tactical, use torpedoes on the heaviest shielded emplacements. I want you to keep the yield down to avoid damaging the native settlement six kilometers from the closest weapon. Once the shields are down, use phasers.”

The tactical officer called out, “Surface weapons are firing,” just as the first disruptor blasts rocked the ship. Nogier heard the helmsman mutter to himself, “No kidding.”

The lieutenant commander at ops then said, “Enemy fighters are launching from the surface. Sensors show 47 of them.”

“Derik, have the fighter wing intercept them,” Sevflk ordered his chief of staff. “Keep them out of the way.”

Walking over to his strategic display console, the admiral looked at how the bombardment was progressing. So far, the garrison’s shields were down only three percent; at this rate it would take hours to knock them down and that would put them seriously behind schedule. Turning to van Antwerp, he said, “Captain, have the Thomas Paine, the Moldova, and the two Steamrunners move up to join the bombardment.”

Van Antwerp looked up from the console where he had been entering commands to ask, “Sir, that will leave the Nobility with only the Omegas to protect it. If Dominion reinforcements should show up….”

“I know, Captain. But if we don’t speed up this operation, we’re likely to face a lot more enemy ships before we even begin landing troops,” Sevflk replied.

The USS Charleston manuevers to begin the bombardment of Callessus III.
Image courtesy of Andrew Hodges.

On the surface of Callessus III
Landing zone (LZ) alpha
H-3 hours

Mark Wickham shuffled up to Tony Martinez as they hid under a camouflage net near the expected landing zone for their assigned regiment. In just three hours, at mid-morning on this part of the planet, they would be joining up with the rest of the recon company as the whole recon battalion landed as an advance force for the division. But for now the platoon sat under their nets, trying to stay hidden from Dominion patrols that had suddenly increased their size and frequency with the initial Alliance attacks.

The Englishman leaned over to the lieutenant to speak in hushed tones, “Sir, the chief sent me to tell you that the enemy is varying the sensor net protocols. He thinks they are trying to see if any of us were landed before the attack and tampered with their sensors.”

Tony sat up at the report. If their tampering with the sensor network was undone, the Dominion would know exactly where they were and would drop a whole mess of Jem’Hadar on top of them. “Can he keep the blocks in place?” he asked the clerk.

“He said only for a few more minutes. After that they’ll know someone’s working against them and they’ll just reset the whole system,” Wickham replied.

Martinez cursed under his breath. They weren’t supposed to take any action until just before the first landings, but he had to act now. “Find Ensign Kaftaro and tell him I said to blow the network right now and then bring his platoon to full alert.” If he couldn’t block the Dominion from using their sensors to find him and his Marines, he would deny them the use of their network. While they had been scouting out the enemy’s defenses over the past four days, they’d rigged the sensors and other equipment they’d come across with explosives. The Dominion would know that there were Marines on the planet, but they wouldn’t have their exact location. Or maybe they'd just assume that it was the result of the bombardment.

H-2 hours

The Marines huddled along the edge of the clearing, waiting and watching for any sign of the enemy. Not that they would see a shrouded Jem’Hadar coming. The first sign would be the blast from a weapon streaking out at them.

Bel Kibish shifted his bulk as he kept scanning the area in front of him, not looking for anything in particular, but just being ready for any changes in the environment, anything that didn’t belong. The Brikar squad leader had just heard from down the line that an enemy patrol was known to be in the area. For four days he and his Marines had worked hard to avoid detection, sneaking away from fights to preserve the element of surprise, but now with a full-scale divisional landing only a couple of hours away they could strike back with everything they had.

Kibish concentrated on the environment around him. The wind played softly through the trees. Somewhere nearby an avian or insect chirped in a continuous, monotonous tone. The sunlight filtered through the leaves and branches above and the ferns below to strike a multi-hued patchwork on the ground. The ground itself was covered in an assortment of brown and green leaves, garishly colored flowers, and a type of tan grass. Nothing but the leaves and insects was moving around them.

Wait, that wasn’t true. Off in the distance, about 100 meters away, a branch moved, but in a direction opposite of all the others blowing in the wind. Kibish raised his massive arm to the side, waving at the next man in line, getting his attention. He gave him a hand signal to let him know that there was movement to the front and to signal it down the line. Bel then lowered his eye to his phaser rifle, allowing the sighting reticle in his helmet’s visor to shift over the area where he expected an enemy to appear.

Abruptly, right in front of him, the air shimmered and a Jem’Hadar unshrouded, charging at him with weapon raised. The blast from the rifle shredded a tree just behind Kibish, who fired his own rifle point-blank into the Jem’Hadar. Another appeared just behind the fallen fighter, also firing at Kibish. This one hit the Brikar in the shoulder—he was too huge to miss for long—but his ultra-dense skin deflected most of the blast. Kibish would walk away with the equivalent of a nasty sunburn.

Firing again and again, the Marine tried to take a moment to see how the rest of his squad was faring. There seemed to be a gap in the line to his left where Clive Holmes had been. Was he dead or injured? The others were still in their places, firing their weapons, perhaps a little wildly, chewing up everything in front of them. In their first taste of battle against the Dominion, their nervousness seemed to be expressing itself. Kibish, himself, had fought in battles against the Klingons a couple of years ago and several other skirmishes before that. He was a veteran and wanted to project a sense of calm and order to his squad.

Picking out another Jem’Hadar unshrouding before him, Kibish aimed and fired and missed. A shot over his head from the right made him flinch. Where had that come from? Sparing a quick look over there, he saw nothing, and hunched lower behind the boulders he was using for cover. He shouted at Tel Delis, the Bajoran fire team leader crouched near him, that he was going to check on Holmes. Tel just nodded, intent on picking out targets in front. Kibish gathered himself and ran as fast he could for where Holmes was supposed to be.

Phaser beams flashed around him and he was hit a second time, but again it was not serious. Finally, he jumped—if the awkward move he made could be called a jump—over a fallen tree and slid to a halt next to Holmes’ prone body. Kibish activated the tricorder installed in his uniform and waved his arm over Holmes to gather readings which showed up in his helmet display. As he feared, Holmes was dead. The blast had hit him right in the chest and killed him instantly. There was nothing he could do now, so Kibish turned back to the battle, only to realize that all the firing had stopped.

Tel approached him and looked with sorrow at Holmes lying on the ground. A few others also started to surround them. “Get back on the line,” Kibish growled at them. “We don’t know if there are any other Jem’Hadar out there.” Turning to Tel, he spoke sorrowfully, “He probably didn’t even see it coming.”

Tel responded, “For what it’s worth, no one else has suffered a serious injury.” Then seeing Kibish’s two phaser burns, he added, “Except you apparently. Do you want me call for a medic?”

“No,” the squad leader said. “It’s really nothing. It’ll take a lot more than a couple of phaser shots to hurt me.” Turning to the body of their comrade lying nearby, he said, “I’ll take him to the lieutenant to be evacuated on the landing craft. Hold the line here.” Holmes had been his responsibility, and while he expected people to get injured and killed in this battle, his squad had suffered the first casualty. Was it a bad omen or bad luck? Kibish didn’t much care, being a non-superstitious type, but it did weigh on him nonetheless.

Picking up the dead weight with no effort, Kibish began moving down the line toward Martinez’s position, avoiding the other squads. He would let the lieutenant make the decision whether to tell the rest of the platoon about their first casualty.

Martinez was receiving the report from the platoon leader, Kaftaro, on the fight with the Jem’Hadar. “We have six wounded, one seriously who will have to be evac’ed on the landing craft,” he was saying. They were standing just inside the tree line along the clearing that the platoon was covering. “We estimate there were about 15 Jem’Hadar in the patrol and no Cardassians.”

“Did any escape?” Martinez asked.

Before Kaftaro could answer, Martinez caught sight of Kibish with his burden. “Add one dead to that casualty list, Ensign,” he said. He gently lowered Holmes’ body to the ground as Tony approached to identify him. He’d known that he was going to lose people. In fact, hundreds or even thousands of Marines could die in this operation. But that was just numbers; the body of one of his Marines was real, even if he hadn’t known him well, and his sense of failure was just as real. It wasn’t logical to beat himself up over the loss, he thought. It was the Dominion’s fault for starting this damn war in the first place. And he would do his part in making them regret that.

He knelt silently beside Holmes for a moment, offering up a silent prayer for the man, his family, and for the rest of the recon company. Then returning to the business at hand, he said to Kibish, “Thank you, Marine. Return to your position.” Turning to Kaftaro, he added, “Make sure that Holmes and the wounded Marine are loaded on the transport when it lands.”

With a couple of “Yes sirs,” the human and Brikar Marines took their leave of their company commander. Tony took another look at his chronometer before returning to his position on the line. Less than two hours.