The Reign is Over

Part 9 - The Unexpected Hero

Lieutenant McNamara had been prepared for Laszlo Reignover to put up a fight, but what she hadn't been prepared for was for it to be so impersonal and cold.

The attack she had feared came, but it wasn't by a hit-squad or a pack of goons rounding a corner. Instead, small openings that were nearly invisible along the upper walls slid back, and from their depths came semi-autonomous tracking drones. Each was equipped with a sensor and a small, oddly shaped guns on a three-hundred sixty degree rotating arm.

There were a few shouts of warning, then all hell broke lose. Two went down before she could get everyone to the relative cover of the prior hallway and the shallow doorways and various art pieces it contained. The emplacement cannons were using liquid, flesh-eating plasma. It was ghoulishly expensive, each shot consuming hundreds of credits of specialized chemicals and the compressed gasses to fling them hard and true, but the cost was repaid in full because of their deadly effect.

She wanted to help the unfortunate pair but they had taken body shots. Their shouts and screams were mercifully short-lived, the orangy-green liquid chewing through any exposed flesh in a matter of seconds, each millimeter consumed creating space for more of the voracious liquid to pour in. The smells, the screams, and the sight of plasma splashed across inorganic surfaces made the gorge rise in Lieutenant McNamara's throat.

Just how deep were Reignover's pockets?!

She took a dangerous second in the open to catch the nametags, burning Abby Manchester and Richard Smith II onto the walls of her memory. She would never forget either, just as she had never forgotten any of the three hundred and seventeen men, women, and those in-between who had died fighting alongside her over the years. Should she survive, theirs would become a part of the nightly litany that served as both vigil and penance.

For now, the important part was to survive in the first place. She tried to take pot shots at the attacking arms and veterans who had been in combat against similar weapons were mimicking her attempts. Energy-based plasma rifles were sticking out from every nook and cranny where people had managed to find cover, their barrels pressed close to the wall or door-frame to protect their owners fingers as much as possible. The results were mixed, and when Sergeant Tate jerked back screaming, his weapon clattering to the floor, the nearest officer had been forced to press their weapon against his wrists and blow off his hands before the liquid could chew its way further up his arms. It took a shockingly small amount of the stuff to claim entire limbs and even in his anger and pain, he was profusely thanking his erstwhile surgeon.

No one was willing to risk appendages with further blind-fire, and they were all of them looking to her for answers. Most of the faces that found her wore puzzled expressions however, because she had just started laughing. She quickly realized what she was doing, and cut it off. She'd always gotten a terrible case of the giggles when she was in the thick of it, and it hadn't helped matters that she'd just heard the most joyous sound in the world.

She schooled her face and pointed backwards. All eyes turned, and in a stunning reversal of fortune, the quiet *huff huff* of expelled liquid was drowned out by a steady humming roar of discharged energy.

The sound she had heard before was the unmistakable whine of Brutus's reactor revving to full.

From further down the hall, well outside of turret range, came a brilliant wave of blue-white beams. Fired milliseconds apart, the shots connected with metronomic precision. One turret arm after the next was covered in a deluge of plasmic rain, and when Armsworth shifted Brutus to the next target, only charred metal and blackened stone remained.

Pent up nerves and excessive adrenaline struck again, and she didn't even bother trying to fight the giggles this time around. Lieutenant Armsworth came into view, walking in the half-crouched, liquid-smooth duck-walk required to give Brutus a steady firing platform. His arms, enormous constructs of layered muscle and bulging thews, held the meter and a half barrel of Brutus steady as a rock while his eyes raked the walls and ceiling, trying to find any danger he may have missed.

He saw the crouched, laughing form of Lieutenant McNamara, and let out a breath that sent his enormous walrus mustache into hysterics. He rolled his eyes and tilted Brutus backwards to a safer at-rest position, winding down the small reactor which ran the behemoth as he did so.

Lieutenant McNamara's giggles turned into throaty peals of laughter.

To be continued...