The drop ship bucked and slewed wildly as the pilot tried to evade incoming phaser and torpedo fire. What inertial dampening systems the old craft did have were primitive, and the passengers in the troop compartment were spared little of the g-forces generated by the ship’s wild maneuvers. There were gasps, groans, and the sound of someone retching further down the line.

Var felt the thumps of the craft’s missile payload dropping from the wing pylons and heard the whoosh of the rocket motors igniting even over the roar of the drop ship’s own engines. The overhead lighting turned from orange to red, an indication that they were approximately two minutes from their landing zone.

Urtrim, their platoon’s So-Dal, stood and grabbed hold of a steady bar above his head. The grizzled old sergeant called out above the whine of the engines, “Establish a perimeter around the ship when we egress. Make sure you know what you’re shooting at before you pull the trigger. We’ve lost many of our comrades in orbit, and more on the way down, so we can’t afford to go killing each other by accident. Our enemy has phasers that are more powerful than your pulse rifles. They also have surface shields. They are more advanced technically, but they are soft! We have been hardened by life on Cardassia. All the depravation, the hunger, the violence… surviving all of that has made each of us stronger than the mightiest among them. Remember that and show no mercy!”

The roar of guided anti-personnel rockets leaping from their pods signaled that the drop ship was saturating the landing zone.

“Weapons check!” Urtrim ordered.

Var checked the charge on his rifle’s energy magazine and made sure that his three extra e-mags were secured in the pockets on his tactical vest. He leaned forward and moved his grandfather’s ancient scatter-gun in its leather scabbard across his back from where it had dangled over one shoulder on their descent. His knife was securely sheathed on his belt and a coil of garotte wire was secreted in the inner wrist of his right tactical glove. He wore the heavy, padded, leather-like armor of conscript service. It would absorb physical blows and some shrapnel, but it would be useless against phaser weapons.

Now Var heard and felt the chatter of the drop ship’s plasma turrets opening up from the ship’s nose and sides, as the gunners bathed the landing zone in fire to suppress any remaining opposition to their disembarkation.

The engines whined louder as the craft slowed to land and the egress ramp at the front of the compartment slammed down with a crash.

“Go, go, go!” Urtrim yelled, prompting the troopers to rise in unison and charge forward with a collective cry of, “For Cardassia!”

Var followed the man in front of him down the ramp and onto the soil of an alien world. His boots kicked up dust and ash as the drop ship’s nose cannon chattered away only two meters above him. Var threw himself down onto his stomach, sweeping the area immediately in front of him with the nigh-vision scope of his rifle. The air was heavy with the smell of burned vegetation and the ground was pocked with craters.

Behind him the engines of their drop ship roared as it lifted off. Another of its sister craft some two hundred meters to their left had unloaded first and was already airborne, only to be struck by multiple phaser impacts. The craft had no shields, and it’s antiquated polarized hull plating was insufficient against the state-of-the-art Federation phasers fired from the cluster of commercial buildings ahead of the advancing troops.

The stricken drop ship struggled valiantly to rise, even as flames licked the hull from a ruptured fuel line. Another fusillade of phasers halted its escape attempt by severing the ship’s left wing and engine pod. Its nose dropped and with a protesting death-scream from its remaining engines, the craft slammed into the ground and cartwheeled in a flaming, rolling explosion. This maelstrom of destruction tumbled through the enemy’s defensive line and sent debris raining down for hundreds of meters in every direction.

Rather than seek immediate escape, their platoon’s drop ship made a beeline for the source of those beams and saturated that defensive strongpoint with it’s remaining rockets and a sustained burst from its plasma cannons. As it passed over the main defensive line the ship released two cannisters that detonated twenty meters from the ground, saturating the area in a wave of superheated plasma.

Var rose to a kneeling position, scanning the area through his rifle’s scope. He could see some of the drop ship’s fire absorbed by the enemy’s shields, but those energy blisters only protected specific areas. Between the shield bubbles Var managed to make out what looked to be burning bodies and equipment scattered haphazardly.

A few enthusiastic conscripts in Var’s platoon began shooting at the defense line but were quickly stopped by So-Dal Urtrim’s angered shouts to cease fire. At this range all they were accomplishing was giving away their position.

Urtrim assumed a low crouch and motioned to the platoon to rise and follow him. He occasionally paused, touching a hand to his comms earpiece.

Var followed along, glancing back and to the sides trying to catch a glimpse of Arvik. Var wondered idly why the first defensive line was still there. The plan, at least to his limited understanding, had been for their commando and shock-troop units to transport in behind the primary and secondary defensive positions and attack them from the rear just prior to the main assault force making contact. That didn’t appear to be happening.

So much for our plans, he thought darkly, clutching his rifle a bit more tightly.

From atop the hill, the Starfleet team watched as a flight of Cardassian drop ships flared out and disgorged their cargo of soldiers some five hundred meters shy of where Bartolo and the others had established their choke point in the commercial complex.

As Lar’ragos and Chief Schäfer finished assembling and ranging in the mortar, one of the drop ships was knocked out of the sky only to cut a blazing swath of destruction through one of the more heavily defended portions of the outer perimeter line. One of its sisters then delivered a devastating attack on the defenders with shockingly primitive weapons. There was frantic, confused comms traffic over their interlinked communicator network, panicked voices drowning one another out calling for help.

Cadet Waller, who was monitoring comms and message traffic on a tricorder, relayed, “Colony Ops is ordering the defensive line to pull back to the buildings. They’re going to leave the surviving automated phaser canons to cover their withdrawal.”

Schäfer raised his binoculars and switched to thermal imaging. “The troops those ships dropped off are on the move. Four hundred and seventy meters out from our line. I’m counting… somewhere in the vicinity of three-hundred and fifty of them.”

Lar’ragos spared a moment to take a glance through the chief’s binoculars as one of the departing drop ships roared overhead. “We took a pasting down there,” he noted with a dissatisfied grunt.

Phaser beams began to lance out from the upper stories of the commercial buildings as sporadic plasma bolts lashed back in angry reply from the advancing Cardassians.

Schäfer clapped Lar’ragos on the shoulder. “Let’s help cover our people as they fall back, Cadet.”

“Aye, Chief,” Lar’ragos confirmed. Schäfer scanned the position of the Cardassian infantry with his binoculars and transferred the coordinates to the mortar’s ranging computer.

“Set the shells for stun discharge,” Schäfer instructed. Lar’ragos looked skeptical but followed the senior enlisted man’s instructions. True, Bartolo had placed Lar’ragos in charge of this group, but now wasn’t the time to have a pissing match over authority. The El Aurian harbored doubts about the wisdom of merely stunning enemy soldiers in this situation, but Starfleet’s ethos had been drummed into him continuously during his first year at the academy.

Lar’ragos set the charge on the sphere as ordered, then double-checked the projected impact coordinates before dropping the sphere into the tube. There was a quiet ‘pop’ as the charge launched on an electromagnetic pulse. “On the way,” Lar’ragos called out, a habit ingrained in him centuries earlier that he’d completely forgotten.

A minute and a half passed, during which time seemed to crawl. As they awaited the weapon’s impact the group atop the hill watched as shoulder-fired missiles reached out from the advancing Cardassian formation to blast apart sections of the commercial buildings’ upper stories. The returning phaser fire from those locations began to slacken.

Finally, having completed its two-kilometer arcing trajectory, the photon mortar round detonated some ten meters above a squad of Cardassians with a bright blue flash. The dozen soldiers within the blast radius immediately collapsed to the ground, insensate.

“Range is good,” Schäfer judged. “Fire for effect!”

As Schäfer continued ranging targets and uploading the data to the mortar, Lar’ragos continued to calibrate and drop the spheres. Working in tandem, the two men managed to fire a round every four-to-seven seconds, walking the charges along the front wave of the Cardassian advance.

The forward ranks of troops faltered, though rocket fire from among their positions continued to savage the commercial structures, where multiple fires were now burning despite the best efforts of the buildings’ fire-suppression systems.

Now the surviving automated phaser turrets began firing, bathing the follow-on formations of soldiers with stun energy. The beams reached out, fanning back and forth to cut down swaths of men like grain before the scythe.

Lar’ragos primed another round, but before he could drop the sphere into the mortar’s waiting maw, the ground around him erupted and he felt himself catapulted into the air. He returned to consciousness a moment later, laying on his back and blinking dazedly skyward. A flurry of plasma bolts flashed across his vision, stitching a line of destruction across the hilltop only meters from where he lay.

A Cardassian drop ship screeched overhead, clearing the top of the hill by a scan fifty meters. The craft’s cannons rained destruction down across the crest of the hill in zig-zag patterns. Lar’ragos’ mind wandered lazily and he absently pondered why nobody had been scanning the vicinity for strafing aircraft. It occurred to him after a moment’s consideration that his team was made up largely of his fellow cadets. They were watching the show down below, he surmised. They’re used to enemies beaming in to attack, not using landing craft that double as air-support. This is an older kind of warfare, one the Federation no longer understands.

He brought up a trembling hand to activate his combadge, only to withdraw it with a painful start as he touched the scalding, faintly glowing dent in his armored vest. Lar’ragos realized just then that he had not breathed since waking and so attempted to draw in a gulp of air. He couldn’t.

Well, he thought numbly, we’re off to a great start…