J’zryn: In Memorium
Posted on April 1st, 2003 by Allen Zinthys

Major Allen Zinthys just shook his head as he returned to the bridge. Jzryn was dead. There was no mistaking it. Hell, he even carried her to the morgue. The Chief Medical Officer, for Chrissakes! Jzryn, he thought to himself, she’s the one who used to stand up at staff meetings and ask the Admiral why he’s sending people to die. Now she’s the one who got killed by the Romulans. Irony… thy name is Romulan! What I wouldn’t give to go kill some Romulan scum right about now. Not just the ones here on Alexandria, but the whole lot ’em. Is it too much to ask to be able to annihilate a star empire single-handedly? No. That’s not right to spoil her memory that way.

But seeing her lying there… I’ve lost too many good people to war. And what for? Is it just because these Romulans do not know when to quit? Or were we too aggressive? I mean, of course we expect them to attack us, especially after what they did during the Dominion War, but does that make it right for us to attack them first? The Federation may be peace loving, but I can’t help but think that we’re starting this one. I mean, after we hit them, it’s only natural that they’d strike back. And Tal Shiar. Terrorists. State-sponsored, ruthless terrorists, but still terrorists. But did we bring them down on us? On the other hand, I am so glad that these are just Romulans and not Jem’Hadar….

Cue the flashback sequence….

All I remember thinking was “run.” It was the only thing that mattered. It looked like we might actually win Bajor back. Of course, we never doubted that we would. The Dominion was on the run; we just had to chase them back through that damn wormhole they crawled through. Besides, we had to believe it. It was the only thing keeping us going. We had been sent through this hellhole back to the front. “Reinforcements” they called us. It was more like clean-up crew. They were the shock troops, and we nabbed whatever was left. But this time they were attacking us. We were going to play with the waiting game with them, all holed up inside their bunkers, but if they wanted to come meet us, we were going to oblige them, believe that. That’s how it all started.

My company got there just in time to join the fight in earnest. I took a quick accounting of the numbers and realized that our addition would push the battle in our favor. We’d take out the vat-babies quick and goon home. They couldn’t hope to stand up against us with their inferior numbers, even if they were clones. I should’ve known something was up right then, but you know what they say about having 20/20 hindsight. Despite the superior numbers, it still wasn’t an easy fight. They shot a lot of my guys, not fatal for most of them, but they were down. The real bitch was when they decided to go hand-to-hand and rushed us. Here they had quite the advantage, and while we cut most of them down before they could get to us, the pointy-heads still managed to pulverize some good men. It was about the time they charged that Carrie start to scream at us. Carrie was the communications officer, and a damn good one at that. Her dad was Japanese, so you knew the shit had hit the fan when she started to scream.

“Emergency! All units pull back to base! Enemy fighters in the base, I repeat we have Jemmies at HQ.” So that was it. It hit me then why they had only thrown those pathetically few numbers at us. It was a diversion, and we bit like a barracuda that saw a silver plate gleaming under the water. Now, the inbreds don’t know how to plan very well, so this mean a commander had to be nearby. And panicked to have ordered a headhunter mission. It took me about four seconds to realize that we had found the Vorta we were looking for, and he didn’t like being found. I just hoped there was someone else nearby, ’cause if not then that Vorta would have the best clone heads swarming over our plans in a matter of minutes.

It took me ten long minutes to extricate my company from the Jems and convince Benny to stay behind with what was left of his company to hold off the reptiles so I could rescue command. Not that there was much to hold off, especially since the ones that were left seemed to be gloating about something. I’d fight out just what pretty soon, I was sure. We raced back to the HQ base. I can’t remember if we were going faster than we came. I can’t imagine us being able to after fighting for so long, but it sure seemed like we were. Maybe I just had more to think about. I couldn’t take it any longer, though, that I knew for sure. There was one advantage I knew we had over the Jemmies this time, and that was surprise. Not us showing up with guns blazing, they were expecting that. We had SunSpots.

The whole unit wasn’t SunSpots, mind you, but a few of us were. Okay, I was and so were my platoon commanders. What can I say? I trusted them in command. So sue me. Darlene used her clairvoyance to see ahead and told us they were still there. Jimmy was able to obscure us from vision, and it was my job to fly us in. Yeah, I’m the telekinetic one. Not that I had to make us fly to move us quicker, but if I’m gonna do something, I’m gonna do it in style. Anyway, that’s how the five of us went in. I almost felt sorry for the Jems. Okay, you caught me lying there. I could never feel sorry for the bastards. Not that that’s an insult, they really are bastards. Comes from being grown in a vat.

We were almost there when Carrie’s voice came back on the line, calm and unflustered as usual. “All units, HQ is being overrun. We are evacuating to sector 0503. Rendezvous there as soon as possible.”

I called out to Darlene, “Hey, Seer, tell me what’s up in there.”

She took a minute to respond. That was alright with me, I knew she needed to focus and have a look around. “Not good, Mover. Nobody’s evacuating but the command staff. Everybody else has weapons to fight back. Even the med-corps.”

I nodded my understanding, and then realized she couldn’t see it, but that didn’t matter. It was all in the way so responded. This was a SunSpot mission now and we all knew it. No more ranks, just chaos and mayhem, SPF style. “Great. The brass is running and leaving everyone else behind to make sure they live. I’m sure they’ll spout something about ‘needing to maintain command cohesiveness’ and all that. Okay, here it goes. We’re gonna go in there and save anyone who isn’t saving themselves. Got it?” I heard a chorus of echoes inside my head. Definitely a SunSpot mission now. “Excellent.”

When we got there, the shooting started and didn’t stop until we were done. It looked like they had used transporters to beam straight into the courtyard at HQ. For all the energy that must have cost them, they were definitely desperate. Jimmy kept us invisible for as long as he could, and that definitely freaked out some horn-heads. Especially when we appeared and they saw us flying. It was a strange look of puzzlement and bemusement, but not fear. The Jem’Hadar were not afraid of anything. I had us make a beeline for the communications coordination vehicle. Not only would it have been great to be able to talk to everybody else, I wanted to rescue Carrie. She was a comm. officer because she didn’t want to kill people. Why a conscientious objector volunteered I guess I’ll never truly understand, but I knew she wouldn’t pick up a phaser for anything. Not even to move it.

Alright, so you can see the ending coming, right? Go ahead, I won’t be offended. Yeah, the Jemmies got there first. Yeah, there was a big gaping hole in the side of the comm. van where they had blasted their way in. We got into the husk of the van only to find everyone in there dead. Guess that’s why we weren’t hearing anything out of HQ now. Try as I might, though, I couldn’t find Carrie’s body. Not that I had much of a chance to find her, what with all the shooting going on. Of course, with all the blood on the ground, there wasn’t much chance she would’ve been alive if she was in there anyways. At the time, I missed all the smashed equipment. It was just the dead noncombatants that I couldn’t get over. Still can’t, it seems. I vented some fury on the Jemmies and we looked for whomever we could find.

There was nobody left alive at the base, but we did find some self-righteous medics who decided to disobey orders since they knew they were too vital to the war to bother picking up a phaser. As much as I hated their attitude, they were right, so I said I evacuated them when I came to HQ. Granted I was ordered to the fallback point, but when the five of us showed up before the rest of my company, even the brass knew not to ask questions.

I had to assume that the Jemmies took Carrie prisoner. They usually just shot first, and then shot a lot more, but I guess even they recognized that Carrie would never be a threat to them. Of course, she might just have been vaporized by the initial blast. I don’t know which would be worse. I shudder to think at what a Vorta would do to a human prisoner.

End the flashback –

God, I don’t know what we’re going to do without Jzryn. At least it was quick for her. Allen looked back up and forced himself to focus on evacuating personnel from Starbase Alexandria. Now this would be a task.

FIN