The Reign is Over

Part 11 - Rifle Diplomacy

Lieutenant McNamara's foreboding thoughts plagued her as her team transitioned through the enormous gateway which separated the mansion complex from the storage areas and shipyards. There had been a locked armored door barring their way, but a few minutes talking to Brutus was more than even Reignover had been counting on. The enormous slab of door that had been meticulously blasted off was slowly smoking in protest as it lay across the entrance foyer of the storage facilities.

As Lieutenant McNamara led a pair of officers through the smoldering entrance, her worst fears from hours of planning and strategy meetings were on full display. There was cover available everywhere. The entrance to the storage facilities was an enormous circular room containing multiple recesses which housed the smaller personal storage lockers, free of any bothersome customs inspections or governmental banking regulations. Each of the smaller personal storage niches was a recessed, curved well with small storage doors coating the exterior wall from floor to eight feet up.

You could fit at least four people into each recess, and the enormous circular room contained no less than twenty such niches.

Poking out from every single one of the storage recesses was the barrel of a plasma cannon. A military grade plasma rifle. Which had never once come up in their intelligence briefing, nor their careful exploration of Reignover's operations, nor in the meticulous work of decades of Organized Crime investigations. Not. Once.

"FALL BACK, FALL BA..."

McNamara never got to finish her yelled warning, as a mountain of protective muscle named Lieutenant Reginald Armsworth hauled her bodily through the impromptu door. He was just in time, twenty plasma rifles spewing forth a phalanx of green bolts that hammered into Officer Denning and Sergeant Hightower, the pair who had who had gone through the gateway with her. Hit multiple times in the first volley alone, both had dropped instantly. Follow-up shots came in the second volley, and with them more bolts began pounding through the doorway, clipping Corporal Vasquez and Officer Bukhari in the arm and shoulder respectively.

Officer Bukhari managed to absorb the shot on her body armor, which had saved her life. The armor bore a smoking pit where the blast had struck, but she was otherwise unharmed. Corporal Vasquez wasn't nearly as lucky, the blast catching her in the elbow, and cleanly bisecting the limb and cauterizing the wound in the same gruesome display.

Her scream, more of anger and frustration than pain, rang out, bouncing off the blank and oppressive walls of the exterior hallway as more rifle fire attempted to drown it out. Impossibly, over all the cacophony, Lieutenant McNamara heard the rich, abrasive laughter of Laszlo Reignover himself. He had left his perch on high to join the fray.

It was so very like him; at once ensuring his best man was on the job while he projected an aura of determination. He painted himself as the hero and lead the charge from the front. It was all part of the game, however, and tricked others into thinking he cared about anything beyond his personal power and carefully cultivated aura of menace. It was just another message, delivered in his signature bombastic style, and his goons were too stupid to see they had been tricked into offering up their undying loyalty.

Clenching her teeth, McNamara set her jaw and crawled back to the sharply cut edges of Brutus's portal and began returning fire.

To be continued...