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

‘You chose me,’ Eloise whispered, and instantly regretted it as his fingers tightened around her throat. Her optic nerves fired and she saw stars in the periphery of her vision.

He wanted to scream at her, and hit her until he felt better. But that wouldn’t really make him feel better. Nothing could. He had just lost one of his closest friends, and yes, he had saved an absolute pain in the ass Elite woman instead, because she had unique skills he still needed. The realisation that if Eloise’s usefulness had run its course he might have decided to carry Ingram out of Olympus instead wasn’t necessarily helping.

Hold on, Aisha. They will want to keep you alive. Just hold on, I’ll be back.

His hand around Eloise’s neck relaxed as his need for vengeance found an outlet in the form of a rescue plan that was already coming together in his head.

‘We have to go back! Now!’ Eloise demanded, and launched herself onto Gonzalez. Her fists pounded into his chest. The terror was wonderful for stimulating the self-preservation instinct, but it also made her giddy and reckless. She didn’t know when to keep quiet.

‘Shut up!’ Gonzalez shouted. He hardly felt her attack, but her arms lashing out at him were distracting. With a sigh of frustration, he punched, knocking her out. Her wiry body collapsed to the floor, and for a moment Gonzalez could do nothing but stare at her and breathe. And then the Hippogryph swerved violently.

‘Dammit,’ Gonzalez grunted as his body bounced off a rack, gear digging into his ribcage despite the protection of his armour.

‘Sorry, sir!’ Atkins called.

‘You just worry about keeping us in the air,’ Gonzalez snapped. He reached for Eloise’s helmet and slapped it back on her head, holding it in place for a couple of seconds while the nanobots fused. The woman was out cold, but he couldn’t see any visible signs of injury. The nanobots in the armour could take care of any bruising or swelling. He manhandled her unconscious body into one of the seats and fastened the straps tight. Holding on to the seats with one hand for balance, he made his wobbly way to the cockpit, while with his other hand he absent-mindedly cradled his ribs.

‘Status?’ he asked, plopping himself into the co-pilot’s seat.

‘I’m being jammed, can’t get through to Phantom. There’s something in the air that’s just arrived, and it’s using laser guns so it has to be less than five kilometres away. But I can’t see it. The good thing is, I don’t think they can see us either. They’re firing blind.’

‘The troop transport?’ Gonzalez asked, his eyes greedily on the display.

‘No. I saw them land below the plateau.’

‘Our course?’

‘West. I want to lose them in the mountains.’

‘Good. Let me have a look at the jamming.’

***

‘Fuck!’ Rivas swore as another laser beam nearly singed his wing.

He saw the Hippogryph taking off and heading north, but the aircraft was no longer visible on his sensors. He couldn’t provide cover for something he couldn’t see. There was no way they would stay on the same course with the lasers slashing the air all around them, and Rivas made the most logical choice. The mountains. Unfortunately, the foe was likely to make the same decision.

Making a tight turn, in his mind he replayed the last few images his display had provided. Only three life signs had left Olympus and made it back to the Hippogryph.

‘Fuck,’ Rivas repeated.

***

‘What is going on?’ Eloise demanded. She was awake again, her armour’s mic and the earpiece fully functioning, but Gonzalez had strapped her in so tight she couldn’t move her hands to activate her visor to see what was happening.

‘They’re shooting at us, that’s what’s going on,’ Gonzalez barked, his fingers flashing fast on his wrist-comp in frustration. ‘Why is Tilly not responding?’

A rude reply ready on her tongue, Eloise paused to think. She hadn’t heard from Tilly since she had activated the pre-planned spider-crawl codes. The files had copied—Eloise knew that—but she couldn’t remember Tilly ever speaking up to confirm. The system had pinged, but Tilly liked to verbally confirm all status changes. But she hadn’t this time. And she definitely hadn’t warned them that the door, and a sizeable portion of the lab with it, was about to blow up—something that should have been plenty visible on the security cams.

‘Jamming?’ she answered with a question, while a far more terrifying thought occupied her mind. If the enemy knew they were coming, if they were ready with the ambush, could they have done something to disable Tilly? Could they have used the open connection Eloise had established to hack into Tilly’s program and dismantle it?

‘We lost Tilly much earlier than we lost contact with Lieutenant Rivas,’ Atkins replied, wiping sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand.

‘Would Tilly try to restart?’ Gonzalez asked.

‘Of course. But if the jamming is still active, she won’t get anywhere. She can’t break through the jamming if it’s on this end and she’s been locked out, can she?’ Eloise spat. It still boggled her mind how they had managed to get past the security blocks she had placed on top of Tilly’s standard anti-hacking subroutines.

Gonzalez repressed a nasty curse; he didn’t need to hear the obvious. What he needed was to punch through the jamming, and it wasn’t happening. This stuff was too complex for him to figure out on the spot.

‘Let me look at it,’ Eloise demanded. Unsurprisingly, she didn’t even try wriggling her body free. There was zero gain in hurting herself while trying to achieve the highly unlikely. Gonzalez would let her free when he needed her again, which was likely to be sooner rather than later.

‘Do not get up,’ he ordered as he removed the straps holding her arms. At the same time, as if to prove his point, the Hippogryph lurched, throwing him to one side. Grabbing a set of free harness straps, he steadied himself. ‘I tried