The Reign is Over

Part 19 - Pounding

Lieutenant McNamara wasn't dead.

Barely.

She was, however, out of the fight. According to the clinically detached report of Laszlo Reignover's personal physician, she was also out of every other fight that came her way. McNamara had lost almost sixty percent of the skin along the front of her body, her elbow was a collection of scorched bone and sinew, and no amount of reconstructive surgery or stem-cell therapy would change the fact that she'd never use that arm again.

The physician had required a cold, unmoving, almost inhuman stare from Lieutenant Armsworth to prevent her from simply amputating the limb. Seeing the look of a man prepared to do anything to prevent just such an occurrence, she decided discretion would be the better part of valor and settled for treating it and then wrapping it as best she could.

All told, they'd lost three in the ambush, not counting McNamara. Corporal Hidera had fallen first, his reactions slowed by the medication which had allowed him to be in the fight at all. Officer Lipscomb had taken a vicious sucker-punch in the gut from Lieutenant Raithe, followed by an unceremonious plasma blast to the face. Sergeant Hubert had thrown herself on top of a frag grenade some viper had rolled into the cover she was sharing with two other officers.

Reignover himself looked haggard as he sat recovering in his office. His face was drawn, his collar dirty with sweat. His suit was tattered around the edges, and the sleeve around his bionic arm was missing. It was easy to forget in all the mystique and power that he wrapped around himself that Laszlo Reignover was sixty eight years old. Fit or not, the demands of close quarter combat plus the physical strain of bionic enhancements were too much for a man well past his prime to endure without cost.

Liuetenant Armsworth looked like an angry boulder wearing body armor. He was perhaps more dented than when the melee had begun, but was otherwise unharmed. He stood across Reignover's desk, back straight, arms clasped behind him as he studied the screens which lined Reignover's office walls. His eyes were glued to the section reserved for monitoring the shipyard traffic. It appeared that the ISF Hidalgo was slowly closing the distance between it and the kingpin's shipyards. It couldn't get too close for fear of damaging the large ship on the nigh-impenetrable atmosphere shields, but from this distance the topside guns would have no trouble pounding the shipyard to splinters.

Captain Walsh was out of reliable troops, and as this mission had required him to run the most skeleton of crews, he appeared to be finished with subtlety. Armsworth grunted, pointing a finger at the images which displayed the enlarged ship profile.

Reignover looked over, and let out a grim bark of laughter as he followed the finger. As though it were the signal to begin, the rhythmic thumping of capital ship blasts on siege armor filled in the background. Captain Walsh, denied his chance to resolve the situation cleanly, was going to pound the hell out of the shipyards until nothing was left but a smoking crater on the bottom of the habitation ring.

Reignover, far from looking angry or terrified at the situation, wore an expression of surprised optimism.

"Captain Walsh has made his first mistake of the day. Let us hope that in his haste to resolve matters, he hasn't thought his defenses through."

Reignover pressed a button on his desk, and as Armsworth watched over an imposing shoulder, Reignover asked a woman named Karran if she would be able to establish a connection with the capital ship now that it had closed the distance between them.

Several tense moments later, a cool assurance to the affirmative came through the desk, and Reignover clenched a fist in triumph.

"Now Karran, I need you to hack the long range communication terminal on the Hidalgo and execute plan Sigma Beta Two. What? Well Karran, if you hadn't noticed, Captain Walsh is content to simply pound us to dust and fill out the paperwork required to justify it. Plan Sigma Beta Two, please. Reignover out."