Rising Tomorrow (Roc de Chere Book 1) by Mariana Morgan (essential reading txt) 📕

open frequency as his laser gun overheated, burning his hand. But Tilly’s modifications had worked and the laser had done the job. The shutters’ energy was gone, and he fired a burst of old-fashioned projectiles at the unprotected crystal.

Perhaps the overheated laser slowed him down. Or maybe Eloise somehow sensed something was about to happen and ducked a split second before Gonzalez told her too. Or maybe it was that damned fate and Murphy’s law all over again, but Wagner saw it coming. Well, he saw something coming. He flung himself to the floor fast enough to avoid most of the crystal shrapnel, but not fast enough to avoid all the bullets.

He yelled at the top of his lungs as his left leg was torn to pieces. The last thing he remembered was feeling the nanobots create a tourniquet around his upper thigh. Somewhere in the haze of agony, as the tourniquet tightened, he reached for his wrist-comp and hit the right combination of commands. And then he felt nothing as blackness overcame him.

His uniform trousers probably saved his life. The filthy rich could afford the best. His uniform was laced with pre-programmed nanobots that could stabilise the wearer’s condition until proper medical care could be provided. Of course, the uniform’s nanobots couldn’t instantly form a bulletproof cocoon to protect against incoming projectiles or shrapnel, but they could act fast enough to create airtight compression dressings or tourniquets and protect the internal organs from heat and cold, saving the wearer’s life in all but the most dire circumstances.

‘Fuck.’ Rivas’ voice reached Eloise. ‘The shutters are up again and my laser is done.’

‘Banshee, where is the energy source?’ Gonzalez demanded

‘Sixty metres under nano-reinforced rock,’ Ingram replied. ‘Under its own shutters.’

There was no need to clarify that it would take a whole volley of earth-penetrating missiles to dig that deep through all the nano-reinforcements. And a Stealthy couldn’t carry even a single one of those behemoths. The nimble aircraft wasn’t designed to carry any armament capable of working to such depths—it was too small.

‘The crystal is beginning to regenerate,’ Rivas informed them. He was separated from Eloise by a mere few metres, but there was no way to get in.

‘Moretti, take Wagner’s wrist-comp!’ Gonzalez ordered, watching Tilly frantically search Wagner’s security system for any clues as to how to shut the energy source off remotely. ‘Take. His. Comp!’

Somehow the mic and earpiece implanted in Eloise had survived the energy blast from the overloading shutters virtually unaffected. The cam, which only benefited from the protection of Eloise’s thin eyelids, however, was damaged and the video feed was dimmed and grainy. But it was enough to tell Gonzalez that Eloise wasn’t moving. Her vitals were sound. Well, maybe not sound, but she was alive and conscious.

‘Moretti!’ Gonzalez shouted. He couldn’t even remember at what point he had started to skip the respectful ‘Ms’, but it hardly mattered.

‘Sir!’ Ingram interrupted. ‘Four warm bodies just appeared in the north corner. Permission to fire.’

Gonzalez needed only a fraction of a second to understand what had happened. There were more security guards underground, just like there was a back-up security system that was so entirely independent of the one they had hacked that they hadn’t even known it existed.

‘Kill the bastards,’ he ordered, trusting Ingram to take them out with minimal damage to the building. Luckily, where they had popped up was far enough away from Eloise and Wagner to ensure their demise without massive collateral damage.

Sort of.

The whole residence shook as a sleek missile took the north corner of the building out of the equation, along with the four not-so-warm-anymore bodies. The shutters flickered briefly, but then the system stabilised.

Gonzalez was about to shout at Eloise again when he saw the woman heaving herself up amidst the shards of crystal. She grabbed her shoes from the wreckage and slipped them onto her feet, surprised that anything remotely logical or sensible was coming out of her frayed mind. She ignored her clothes and stumbled towards Wagner, the crystal crunching under her soles.

Wagner’s breathing was shallow but stable, the puddle of blood around him much smaller than it would have been without the smart nanobot-infused trousers. Quickly, she bent down to pull his comp off his wrist, swearing at her numb, fat fingers.

‘Another four warm bodies. South corner, sixty metres from Harpy and approaching fast.’

‘Shoot them!’ Gonzalez ordered. That was much closer than he liked. He wasn’t worried about Ingram’s accuracy. At that distance, he would trust her to hit within a metre of a target, but damage to the building was another thing. Wagner clearly relied on energy barriers to reinforce the windows, and it looked like similar tech reinforced the walls. They weren’t a solid, uniform construction, but a combination of different technologies arranged in layers, and there was no telling how well the remaining improvements would hold up if one or more of them failed. The last thing they needed was for the whole mansion to fall like a house of cards.

Another explosion shook the residence as the missile exploded, and Eloise collapsed to the crystal-covered floor. The shards cut into her leg and palm, but the pain hardly registered. With morbid fascination she pulled a bloodied piece out of her thigh and threw it to the floor.

The shutters’ energy flickered multiple times, and Ingram felt her Stealthy stall for a fraction of a second as the discharge temporarily affected her systems. She had never felt anything like it and had no spare limbs, or attention, left to check the sensors. Going into combat without a co-pilot was draining and meant relying heavily on her instincts, and even she couldn’t perform miracles.

‘One survived. About thirty metres away, downstairs!’ Ingram reported. Somehow one of the bodies she had targeted had been flung across the hall when the missile hit, and his armour must have held. He was moving unsteadily, clearly dazed by the explosion, but he was pressing on. ‘Phantom, check your electrics. The energy discharges from