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

picking the naked woman up with ease and setting off at a mad dash towards his Stealthy. The nano-meds would have stabilised her condition and stopped the bleeding, but she needed proper care fast.

‘Banshee, keep firing to keep them away from Wagner. We need time—every second you can give us counts—but do not get into a fight with anything airborne. Understood?’ Gonzalez ordered calmly, ignoring the helpless frustration gnawing at him.

There was no chance that anything of standard police issue could ever pose a serious risk to a Stealthy piloted by someone with Ingram’s experience, even if she was without a co-pilot, but there was no guarantee that Wagner didn’t have military support including a few Stealthies on standby.

It was clear that Wagner had activated his hidden security features only after he had been shot, so wherever the support was coming from, it probably wasn’t in the air yet. But sooner or later someone would show up to check what the hell was going on. Wagner’s residence was shielded from view by thick woods and the closest inhabited structure was nearly four hundred metres away, but someone had to have spotted the missiles and the energy blast from the shutters.

Stealthies were designed to reap the maximum benefit of their stealth capacities during a low-powered approach. They were masters at sneaking in unnoticed, right under the nose of radars and sensors, but Ingram was no longer in low-power mode. Each time she fired a missile, the angle and speed at which it hit the target would bring the enemy one step closer to pinpointing her location. Eventually they would get lucky.

Or they would simply swoop in close, into a range at which no stealth could fool anyone, and overwhelm her with superior numbers. Either way, she wouldn’t know what hit her until it was too late.

‘Roger that,’ she replied, swooping around in a tight arc. The strain of the last few minutes of solo piloting in near-combat conditions was building up, but through the buzzing adrenaline, she couldn’t feel it just yet.

CHAPTER 34

Somewhere in the Afro-European Alliance

Monday 27 April 2725

DAY 8

The caller stared at his holo-display in silence, watching as the black silhouette shook its head in sombre regret.

‘Yes, she is gone. We couldn’t let her leave Lyon. Wagner is too unstable as it is. Gonzalez made a fool of him, and the risk was unacceptable,’ the silhouette explained.

‘She will die.’ The caller’s voice wavered, his eyes flicking to Megan O’Haress’ file.

The black silhouette nodded. ‘She will die.’

‘Does your Gonzalez know about the sacrifice?’

‘No, and he will never find out.’

CHAPTER 35

Roc de Chere

Lac d’Annecy

Afro-European Alliance

Monday 27 April 2725

DAY 8

The security system beeped and Gonzalez spared a fraction of a second to check the cam feed. Rivas’ Stealthy was landing, the hangar doors opening and closing automatically. Then he glued his eyes back to the displays showing Wagner’s residence, or what was left of it.

It looked like they’d got lucky, because no more security guards had appeared after Rivas took off, at least not at first. But more were stationed underground, and apparently they had learnt a valuable lesson from the earlier carnage. They had correctly guessed that there was only one airborne opponent and they changed their tactics accordingly. They became more difficult to track, and Ingram was wondering if they were trying to play them.

‘Sir, if they can mask their life signs that well, who’s to say they can’t mask them even better? What if I’m firing at ghosts?’ she asked, wiping sweat off her face. She felt a certain sluggishness in her arm, the first sign that she had been sitting hunched over her controls for too long, giving a hundred per cent focus without a second’s break. The adrenaline was wearing off.

She was running out of missiles and soon she would have no choice but to leave. The enemy’s new strategy gave her less time to think and aim, and it was only a matter of time before someone got too close to Wagner to risk taking them out. Really, what Ingram wanted was to vaporise the sonofabitch, but keeping him alive would be far more useful, at least in the short term. Alive and panicked.

‘Possible,’ Gonzalez replied, suddenly pensive.

The door behind him opened and Rivas stumbled in, Eloise unconscious and slumped over his shoulder. They were both covered in blood, looking like they’d been to hell and back. The nanobots were doing their job, not only keeping Eloise stable but actively applying pressure to keep the bleeding to a mere trickle, but each movement threatened to rip her wound open.

Gonzalez reached out for Wagner’s comp and without a single wasted word jammed the gadget under a scanner. Tilly was pre-programmed and ready to go.

‘DNA scan!’ Gonzalez ordered, but the AI was already on it.

Rivas rushed Eloise to the Medibot. The weight of the woman seemed to double itself as he handled her with extreme caution. He had used his own jacket to cover her, but the non-reinforced fabric he had chosen for warmth rather than protection was already in tatters, shredded by the shards embedded in Eloise’s shoulder.

The Elite woman groaned in pain as he lowered her onto the diagnostic bed. It took no medical knowledge to turn the machine on, and the Medibot hummed softly as it set to work.

‘Nano-crystals found embedded in tissue. Anterior deltoid severed. Pectoralis major partially severed. Pectoralis minor severed. Axillary artery severed. Severe blood loss. Stage-four hypovolaemic shock. Damage to brachial plexus…’ The machine set to fixing up damaged tissue and readied itself to transfuse nano-blood even as it continued reporting its findings. Eloise’s weak but stable vitals were displayed on the screen.

Suddenly, the door opened and Gonzalez walked in, his features tight and his eyes on Eloise. Tilly had found more than enough of Wagner’s DNA on the nano-probes of his comp and began to programme the nanobots. They needed to hack his comp before Wagner regained consciousness and could deactivate it remotely, but