The sounds of the exploding grenades behind them that briefly lit the night spurred the retreating personnel towards the illusory safety of the water reclamation center.
Sandhurst was gasping now, halting every dozen meters or so to try and catch his breath. Lar’ragos pushed, prodded, and half-carried him forward. “Donald, we have to move. I know you’re tired but staying here isn’t an option and falling behind means dying.”
The younger man nodded in the twilight, gasping, “O—okay. Let—Let’s go.”
They continued forward, hearing more and louder detonations from behind them as the remaining gunships strafed the retreating Starfleet personnel.
The defenders stumbled over rocks and shrubs, slogged through knee-high water in places, and flinched at the sporadic weapons fire that randomly flashed past them, compliments of their pursuers.
People fell behind, unable to continue the pace necessary to outrun the advancing Cardassians. Many of these accepted weapons from their comrades, laying low to ambush the invaders as they passed in an effort to buy a little more time for their friends and shipmates.
Eventually, the survivors reached the water reclamation plant. The large facility was set into the side of a hill, comprised of stepped concrete reservoirs holding water in various stages of decontamination. Stairways allowed access from the ground level, branching onto lowered walkways between holding tanks. The setup had unintentionally made the reclamation center into a defender’s dream, where the terraced reservoirs allowed multiple groups of defenders to hold the high ground against an advancing enemy in a surfeit of firing positions.
In defiance of Lar’ragos’ expectations, the situation at the reclamation center was not chaotic. The survivors were quickly rearmed and folded into the existing defensive scheme even as snipers began engaging the vanguard of the Cardassian assault. Lar’ragos insisted he and Sandhurst remain together, and the pair were placed on the ramparts of the lowest tier, both armed with Home-Guard style phaser rifles, a Starfleet design from some thirty years earlier.
Lar’ragos and Sandhurst lay on their stomachs on the concrete lip of a filtration pool, gazing out across the battlefield as grass fires blazed near the Line Beta trenches and where the fiery debris of the two Cardassians gunships had landed. In the east, or what the locals called east, the sky had begun to lighten perceptibly. Dawn was approaching.
The El Aurian glanced over at his much younger Human companion. Sandhurst’s hair was unkempt and littered with dirt and debris, while his face was likewise caked with dirt and sweat.
“How are you?” Lar’ragos asked.
Sandhurst snorted, turning his head to meet Lar’ragos’ gaze. “Hell of a time to ask.”
“Well, yeah,” Lar’ragos conceded, “but to be fair we’ve been a bit rushed.”
“Tired, hungry, terrified, angry and in pain,” Sandhurst replied heatedly. “Not necessarily in that order.”
“That is a pretty fair summation of combat in general,” Lar’ragos remarked. He squinted into the fire-lit distance towards where the snipers’ phaser blasts were terminating.
“Do you think Bartolo survived somehow?” Sandhurst asked.
“No,” Lar’ragos answered after a moment. “The Cardassians don’t have a stun setting, and they haven’t shown any tendency towards mercy.”
Sandhurst released a slow breath. “He was a jerk, but he deserved better than that.”
“He’s a good man, Donald,” came Lar’ragos reply. “He was tough on you on for a reason. Bartolo wanted you to be able to stand up the actual bullies at the academy and those in the ranks after you went out into the fleet. Hell, he asked me to keep an eye on you after he graduated.”
Sandhurst gave him a scathing look in response. “I’m not some fragile crystal in need of a containment field. That’s presumptuous and insulting on both your parts.”
Lar’ragos conceded the point with a fractional nod. “Yes, but how were we to know that until now? Honestly, you came across as a coddled little Earther.”
“Kiss my—”
The rest of his sentiment was drown out in the roar of engines as the last of the Cardassian gunships made a low pass overhead, it’s cannons inscribing patterns of carnage across the multiple tiers of the reclamation plant. Splinters of concrete and metal whistled through the air, scything down scores of defenders not already sundered by the streams of plasma bolts themselves.
The attack was so sudden and devastating that there was no return fire at all until the craft swept around for another pass. Then a flurry of phaser beams reached for the gunship, most missing due to its speed and angle of descent. One beam snatched away a piece of a weapons pylon, while another phaser discharge blasted a hole through an engine mounting and yet another scored across the ship’s cockpit. The cockpit windows blistered outward as the flash of multiple internal explosions lit the craft from within.
Trailing flame, the mortally wounded gunship rolled onto its back and dove directly into the upper terraced levels of the reclamation center. Its exploding power cells and remaining ordinance sent a fireball hundreds of meters into the pre-dawn sky.
Momentarily blinded and deafened by the nearby detonation, Lar’ragos and Sandhurst lay covering their heads as bits of smoldering debris rained down around and atop them.
A battered Home-Guardsman nudged the prone men with his boot toe. “They’re coming!” he shouted, rifle at the ready. Sandhurst and Lar’ragos stood, rifles momentarily forgotten as a cascade of debris slid off of them.
Seemingly from nowhere, a formation of Cardassian soldiers scrabbled up the low hill and broad stairs to assault their position.
Outgoing phaser beams snatched a handful of these attackers off their feet, but the majority of them boiled into the midst of the colonists’ bulwarks.
A Cardassian barreled out of the twilight, his plasma rifle blazing as he fired indiscriminately into the knot of defenders. A constable and a Home-Guard reservist next to Sandhurst went down, while a plasma bolt tore into Sandhurst’s shoulder in an impact that erupted in a gout of sparks and sent the young man tumbling backwards over a waist-high railing to plunge into a reservoir pool some meters below.
Lar’ragos blasted the offending Cardassian off his feet with his anachronistic phaser pistol, the beam punching a smoking hole through the alien soldier’s chest.
Another Cardassian surged forward from Lar’ragos’ blind side, but Pava dropped and rolled just as the soldier fired, the bolts intended for the El Aurian tearing instead into a Starfleet petty officer behind him. Laying on his side, Lar’ragos fired again, his beam catching the soldier’s rifle and blasting it apart and out of the man’s hands. The soldier’s momentum carried him forward though, and he landed hard atop Lar’ragos, the impact knocking the phaser pistol from the cadet’s grip.
The two men rolled, locked together, each grappling to get a secure hold on the other. The Cardassian reared back and delivered a head-butt to Lar’ragos’ nose, breaking it and sending a cascade of blood down the smaller man’s mouth and chin.
Lar’ragos managed to roll to his left, then reversed hard and used the Cardassian’s mass and momentum to send the enemy soldier tumbling away from him. He leapt to his feet and sent a kick towards the rising soldier’s head. The man turned just enough to absorb the blow in his shoulder and upper chest instead as he carried forward and tackled Lar’ragos to the ground.
Lar’ragos rolled backwards, grasping the larger man’s upper arms and placing a foot in the man’s midsection. He then kicked out to push the soldier up and over him at the top of the arc. The Cardassian landed heavily on his back with a grunt as Lar’ragos scrambled back to his feet and began looking for his dropped phaser.
Other Cardassians had arrived, scrabbling over the bulwarks and into the firing position. Individual fights had broken out between they and the remaining Federation defenders. Plasma bolts snapped to and fro and phasers replied, their trajectories ending in concrete, metal, or humanoid flesh.
Lar’ragos sensed his opponent’s impending attack, forewarned by his perversion of his people’s gifts. He turned to block the Cardassian’s strike, only to have his arm batted aside by the sledgehammer blow of the incoming strike. The staggering punch snapped his head back and caused black spots to swim across his vision.
He sensed a follow-on kick coming and dropped to a crouch, covering his head with a bent arm. When it landed, however, the kick carried so much force that it sent him sprawling. Lar’ragos slid to a stop, pondering the irony of being able to sense an attack before it came, yet being unable to defend against it. In the heat of battle, part of him reflected mordantly that he had allowed himself to become soft and complacent, losing the edge that had enabled him to him survive his many ordeals in his travels across the Delta Quadrant.
Regardless of his many years, his experience and his knowledge, he sensed the man opposing him was stronger, faster, and quite possibly a better fighter. Lar’ragos’ cheats were of little use here.
Dal Durak Var advanced on Lar’ragos, drawing his knife from its scabbard. Their fight had gone on too long and was interfering in his ability to lead his squad. Var was determined to end it.
Lar’ragos regained his feet, spying a length of tritanium pipe blown free from a pump station. He picked it up and prepared to meet the Cardassian’s attack.
Var rushed him and feigned throwing the knife, prompting Lar’ragos to raise the pipe defensively. Var kicked out instead, driving a solid boot toe into Lar’ragos’ thigh and then slashing out and down with the blade, which sliced across Pava’s chest and abdomen as the El Aurian attempted to back-peddle.
Lar’ragos felt himself beginning to fall backwards and swung the pipe wildly to try and force separation from his attacker. His clumsy swings did drive Var back a pace, but as Lar’ragos lost his footing the Cardassian lunged again and slashed towards Pava’s neck, missing just slightly but managing to slice open the El Aurian’s cheek.
Lar’ragos collapsed heavily, holding the pipe above him in both hands like a polearm as Var advanced. He felt the warm wetness on his chest and coursing down his neck, felt the searing pain of the facial wound but mused idly that he could hardly feel the damage to his chest at all. His arms trembled and his right thigh had cramped with the impact of the Cardassian’s boot. This was not going at all as he’d predicted.
He rolled onto his side and then rose as far as his knees, swinging the pipe at Var again with the last of his dwindling strength. The Cardassian stepped into the blow, catching the pipe just above Pava’s hands between Var’s padded chest-piece and his left arm. Lar’ragos released his grip on the pipe and delivered a punch to Var’s midsection that caused the larger man to grunt, but he did not fall and surrendered no ground.
Lar’ragos saw the glint of the knife in Var’s hand as the man brought it around and up in a killing blow aimed to catch its victim between chin and Adam’s-apple.
Four hundred years, Lar’ragos thought numbly, and this is how it--
A brilliant phaser beam flared to life above him and enveloped Var, driving the Cardassian backwards into another of his comrades who was locked in a struggle with a Home-Guard soldier. All three of them collapsed in a tangle of limbs.
Lar’ragos recognized from the sound of the beam that it was set to stun and craned his neck around to see a dripping wet Donald Sandhurst holding a phaser in his hand. The younger man stumbled forward, grabbing Lar’ragos by the back of his uniform sweater collar and began dragging him awkwardly backwards.
A bout of choking, gurgling and cursing from Lar’ragos finally convinced Sandhurst that Pava was fit to stand and move on his own. A limping Lar’ragos threw his arm over Sandhurst’s shoulder and allowed his friend to assist him.
As the two retreated from the ongoing melee in the defensive position, the brightening sky was filled with dozens of streams of collimated light stabbing downward. Countless impacts scored the landscape, some discharging swaths of stun energy, while others sent flaming founts of earth skyward.
A transporter beam flashed into existence three meters in front of the pair and Sandhurst raised his phaser, only to have Lar’ragos push his arm down so that his stun beam discharged into the cement.
“Starfleet Marines!” barked a humanoid figure wearing bulky combat armor, her face hidden behind a protective visor extending down from her likewise armored helmet.
Lar’ragos drug Sandhurst down onto the ground as Marines in teams, squads, and platoons began to beam in all around them.
The wounded Lar’ragos began to chuckle as he covered Sandhurst’s head while hundreds of Marine phaser carbines began to sing in unison, “Cavalry’s here!” he shouted above the din, laughing maniacally.