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

Eloise froze, her eyes on Wagner, who had muttered something when the floor shook. He was out, but still a monster of infinite proportions, and Eloise couldn’t take her eyes off him. The fog around her brain was thick, but somehow oddly patchy, and certain aspects of what was going on were getting through to her more than others.

‘Take his gun,’ Gonzalez ordered. Tilly was still poring over the security system, trying to find even the smallest foothold to piggyback onto the back-up that was maintaining the energy source, but it wasn’t looking good. Rivas was barely a few metres outside, but for all intents and purposes he could have been with Gonzalez at Roc de Chere. There was no help coming from him and Eloise was entirely on her own.

Surely these aren’t my arms, Eloise thought as she saw a pair of blood-streaked hands manipulating the gun. Muscle memory from the hours spent on a VR shooting range had somehow kicked in, and she slid the magazine out, checked that it was full, emptied the chamber of the extra round and reloaded with practised ease. She had no idea what she was doing on a conscious level, but the clicking noise sounded right.

‘You shoot the moment he comes through the door,’ Gonzalez ordered.

Eloise turned around, the small automatic pistol fitting comfortably in her two-handed grip. She was ready. She—

‘I can’t shoot a person!’ she wailed.

‘Yes, you can,’ Gonzalez replied coldly. ‘You aim high for his head and you empty the whole mag. You don’t think. You don’t wait. You just shoot!’

‘I can’t…’ she whispered. But her finger could.

Wagner’s bodyguard lifted his own weapon, but what was strong enough to have affected the Stealthy’s system was more than powerful enough to have fried his laser gun. Nothing happened when he pressed the trigger, and then a volley of old-fashioned projectiles, travelling at a speed of over half a kilometre per second, ripped his face and brain apart. The lifeless body collapsed.

His armour was top-shelf, but the helmet with its flexible joints was, as usual, the weakest point. And Wagner’s gun was not standard police issue. It was substantially better than that.

‘Taking out four more warm bodies, south-west corner, seventy metres plus,’ Ingram announced. She was no longer asking permission. There was no point distracting Gonzalez with the obvious.

‘Now what?’ Eloise shouted. She could feel bile rising in her throat. She wanted to take her eyes away from the bloody mess under the shattered helmet, but she couldn’t. The nanobots were trying pointlessly to fix the damage, but there was nothing to fix. Seven of the fourteen rounds had hit their target and half of his brain was mush. It was beyond what modern nano-tech could do.

‘Wagner’s belt. Reload.’ The voice cracked in her earpiece, and it took Eloise a moment to realise it wasn’t Gonzalez. ‘Reload the gun, and get ready to shoot the crystal in the exact pattern I tell you.’

‘What—’ Gonzalez began, but then cut himself off. One of the external cams showed Rivas with his wrist-comp in direct contact with the shutters’ energy, and he understood instantly what Rivas had discovered.

‘Tilly! Will that work?’ he demanded, somehow convinced that Tilly could miraculously read not only Rivas’ but also his own mind. The state-of-the-art computer didn’t disappoint. Without being prompted she connected with Rivas’ comp and analysed the situation within seconds.

‘Yes!’

‘Where do I shoot?’ Eloise asked. She couldn’t remember re-loading, but somehow she must have because the gun was cocked and ready to fire, the empty mag lying on the floor.

‘Stand a hundred and forty centimetres away from the window and face it,’ Tilly jumped in, confident her familiarity with Eloise’s way of thinking would quicken the whole process, and no one objected. ‘Turn to two o’clock. Aim… there!’ Tilly instructed, and Eloise felt her headache redouble.

Somehow Tilly had managed to instruct the cam to superimpose the image of a firing pattern onto what Eloise could see, directly stimulating her optic nerve, but the cam wasn’t designed to function like that. Its nano-circuits began to melt and Eloise’s nerve misfired. Seeing her vision dimming along the periphery, Eloise lifted the gun obediently and squeezed the trigger repeatedly, before her right eye went totally dark.

Hearing Tilly’s voice was soothing despite everything that was going on, or maybe it was soothing because of everything that was going on. She trusted her loyal servant in a way she could never trust a human being.

‘The crystal has been weakened, and can now be breached with a force of twenty-three Newtons per centimetre squared. Regeneration has already begun and in twenty-eight seconds it will become impenetrable to anything travelling slower than a hundred Newtons per centimetre squared.’

The actual numbers meant little to Gonzalez, and even less to Rivas, but the meaning was clear. The crystal was vulnerable enough to be smashed.

‘Use something heavy to break it. A chair or—’

Rivas never got to finish as Eloise flung herself into the window, her shoulder exerting a few more Newtons per centimetre squared than was needed to smash the severely weakened and cracked crystal. As discovered by Rivas and confirmed by Tilly, the shutters’ energy was designed to keep things out, not in. Eloise’s body broke the crystal and passed through the energy barrier as if it didn’t exist, and she tumbled down onto the lawn, landing at Rivas’ feet.

‘Dammit, you crazy woman!’ he shouted, bending down to pry Wagner’s comp out of Eloise’s hand and pocketing it.

The crystal had smashed, but not into a million pieces like glass would have. The reinforcing nano-compounds were still embedded, trying to hold it together, and two pieces the size of Rivas’ hand had nearly torn Eloise’s shoulder away and remained stuck deep in her flesh. The blood was pooling fast, soaking into the lush lawn. The woman was unconscious, but breathing.

Acting on pure instinct, Rivas slammed a nano-patch onto Eloise’s skin and emptied a series of three syringes into her neck, before