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

I’m a Leech again. You scanned my BCC. The colonel doesn’t keep his Leeches aware of security measures,’ she bluffed. ‘As for location? Do you really think they went back to where we came from? He, and Ms Moretti, could be anywhere.’

His hand jerked to inject Megan with another dose of PX-47, but then it froze, and Ingram knew she had scored. Eloise Moretti was safe too.

‘You failed to catch the two people you really needed—how’s that helping to get you out of the doghouse for your previous fuck-ups?’ She smirked.

Wagner’s hand shook. He had realised he had made a serious mistake. He was used to terrorising those who were already terrified. He’d had a mental image of a seventeen-year-old Molina Ortega eating out of his palm. He had assumed the years of a cosy spook job and life as an Elite would have made her soft, but he had massively underestimated the comprehensiveness of Special Forces training and the high standards Colonel Larsen expected from his people. Ingram was calm, collected and determined to stay that way. Logic told him it was killing her to see Megan tortured, but he saw no proof that she cared at all, and the doubts had shattered his composure.

Even a few weeks ago he would have been fascinated and thrilled by the challenge. Now, with Francesca Harper watching over his shoulder, all he could feel was frustration giving way to overwhelming fear.

‘Fine!’ he shouted, struggling to control the fury born out of panic. ‘You want to be a hard-assed bitch? Fine! We’ll just have to open your head and extract the memories the old-fashioned way. I’m sure you’re immunised and trained to resist mind probing, but brute-force memory and thought extraction can always get through.’

Memory and thought extraction was a sick experimental procedure. With the right cocktail of nano-hells, a properly designed VR environment could serve as a spoon to scoop up someone’s memory. It was only marginally more gentle than actually scooping up someone’s brain matter with a spoon, and often caused severe brain damage. The resulting confusion and degradation of the grey matter frequently led to insanity as the affected mind refused to go on and shut down.

From the point of view of the interrogator, the ensuing state was of little importance. The scooped-up memories were preserved and could be sifted for useful data at any time using a VR enviro. A skilful interrogator could focus the subject’s thoughts on the right type of event and collect memories at least loosely related to the relevant topic, but there was no way to narrow the search down with any reliable precision. Usually, what was recovered was a mosaic of scattered images, thoughts, experiences and associated emotions that made little sense to an outside observer.

Once it had been believed that the method could be perfected to recover testimonies and confessions, but as it invariably led to severe trauma the legal research had been halted in its infancy. These days the procedure was nothing more than a desperate final act, mainly used as a threat and a particularly nasty form of execution rather than as a reliable source of information.

‘We’ll get everything we need out of your head. And if we don’t, I’ll still enjoy the satisfaction of knowing that the mind rape broke you, because you aren’t coming out of it with your sanity intact,’ he whispered right into her ear with obvious delight. ‘In the meantime, say goodbye to this pathetic Leech.’

A gun flashed in his hand, and a volley of old-fashioned steel bullets, reinforced with nano-coating, slashed through Megan’s body. Her laborious breathing ceased.

CHAPTER 51

Roc de Chere

Lac d’Annecy

Afro-European Alliance

Thursday 30 April 2725

DAY 11

‘I’m not going to be difficult,’ Eloise reassured Gonzalez quickly as he gave her a weary look. She was standing in the door to the security room, looking dishevelled, still in her dirt-and-blood-covered armour. Her eyes looked bleary, indicating that she had stumbled over from her bed, where Atkins had deposited her unconscious body a couple of hours earlier, the second the sedatives wore off enough to allow her to walk.

‘I’m not going to be difficult,’ she repeated more slowly.

‘Good.’ Gonzalez nodded. The bone-knitting drugs had already dealt with the worst of the damage to his ribs, but his body felt battered and drained in a way no painkillers or stims could fix. ‘Because I really don’t have the energy to deal with you. Not again.’

Eloise looked at him for a moment, unsure what to say. The horrors the man was capable of had hit some new heights, but they were so outside of what she could process that it almost didn’t matter anymore. So she shut it all out as if she were switching off a VRP.

‘What are you working on?’ she asked, forcing her underdeveloped social skills to work overtime at making her sound as non-demanding as possible. The man looked like shit.

‘Nothing. There is nothing to work on. The data we downloaded off Cassandra’s network is gone. Once they broke our connection with Tilly and incapacitated her, the virus in the package we downloaded destroyed everything. It’s garbage. We have nothing.’

Tilly, dammit!

‘Is Tilly all right?’ It suddenly hit Eloise that she had woken up and her first instinct was not to ask Tilly for her status. She actually forgot.

‘Tilly, are you all right?’ she rephrased, lifting her head in an impossible-to-suppress reflex.

‘Yes, Eloise. I am indeed all right. I am still running a diagnostic in the background to confirm that all subroutines are intact, but so far the essence of my program checks out fine. They broke the connection in a way I do not understand, yet, but the firewalls around my program held. Unfortunately, they incapacitated my ability to re-establish the connection even after the jamming was removed. Essentially, I couldn’t leave the confines of Roc de Chere’s circuits.

‘Colonel Larsen has now ensured that this is no longer the case. It wasn’t tricky, but it wasn’t something I was able to do