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

Over thirteen thousand Stealthies launched that day in hope of saturating the fixed defences around a freshly built R&D complex deep in the Altai Mountains. It had been the deepest raid into the Asian Coalition in the second half of the Wars. The Stealthies had to be launched from multiple airborne carriers, otherwise they could never have flown over three thousand kilometres from the border and still have the fuel to manoeuvre.

While a Stealthy could be piloted by one person, in a fight a co-pilot was required to make full use of the aircraft’s capabilities, and so each had two air-trained soldiers. Most of them weren’t going to come back, but if at least one Stealthy made it past the fixed defences to fire its nano-virus-infected missile, it would be enough.

Unfortunately, the enemy was ready and waiting. The airspace around the compound was saturated with Phoenixes. They knew the Stealthies’ flight path and angle of approach, they knew the time of attack—they knew everything. From such a short distance no amount of stealth could hide anything as big as a fighter. They hadn’t quite been sitting ducks, given their superb manoeuvring potential, but due to the tight formation, in the first seconds many died in collisions, bright flashes blinding everyone around them.

Ingram blinked, her eyes refocusing on the playback.

The formation continued to disintegrate. For the enemy, the targets were separated now, and each missile fired from a Phoenix could only target one Stealthy, but one missile was all it took for the superb machines to go down in flames. Stealthy after Stealthy exploded, making Ingram flinch, and then the point of view shifted.

The viewer was no longer onboard a Stealthy. Instead they were now following the airbattle riding on a drone, clearly seeing more and more Stealthies disappearing in flashes. Some from enemy fire, some still from collisions with other Stealthies as they dodged around in great panic, each pilot on their own.

No, not each pilot on their own; some were still in formation, supporting each other. There was Ortega’s Stealthy, and Jarvis’ and Derrickson’s, the pilots still drawing upon their training, experience superimposing itself over the panic. At least for now.

And then the playback zoomed in, showing Jarvis and Derrickson setting off on a kamikaze run. The Stealthies were too small to cause any real damage against the armoured hull of a Phoenix, but if they could collide with missiles leaving the tubes, then maybe, just maybe, they could take a chunk of the aircraft with them.

Seconds later, a big explosion shook the massive Phoenix right in front of Ortega, spewing flames into the air. She dived her Stealthy through the cloud of fire and smoke, virtually invisible to any sensors as she passed through the final layer of the blockade towards her target. She couldn’t see if anyone else had made it. Her co-pilot was either dead or unconscious, and her Stealthy was barely airborne, damaged by the heat and debris, but somehow it was still in the air. Five of her eight missile launchers flashed green.

The point of view shifted back to Ortega’s cockpit, showing her unresponsive co-pilot and the controls flashing angry red. The Stealthy seemed to lose altitude before jerking back up with difficulty. Navigation was dead and visibility poor though the heat-and-debris-damaged canopy. And there, in front of the Stealthy, were the automated fixed defences of the R&D compound, and she didn’t have enough missiles to saturate them. It seemed pointless to continue, each second in the air making it more and more likely that Ortega would lose control of the aircraft and go down. The ejection and parachute systems still flashed green, but with so much damage taken, anything could go wrong.

Ingram remembered that the situation had been desperate, but not quite the extent of it. The video showed Ortega flying entirely on visual, what was left of it, with no readouts of any kind. There was no time to think or analyse; she was reacting, relying entirely on her instincts. It was as if the flying machine and she were one, and in a way that was exactly what had happened. She had a probability-defying instinctive touch for any aircraft. She was one in a million. But that could not, should not, have been enough, not against one of the most heavily fortified, top-secret (and doesn’t that sound hackneyed?) R&D facilities in the world. And yet, the resistance she had encountered was token.

Maybe the automated defences didn’t see her Stealthy as a threat, due to the extensive damage and the thick smoke she dragged behind her. Maybe the outlandish defences weren’t as fully operational as the enemy wanted them to think, hence the heavy blockade. Or maybe the Afro-European Alliance’s spies in the facility had penetrated further and deeper, crippling its security at the worst possible moment. Or best, depending on one’s perspective.

There was no bright flash when one of Ortega’s missiles hit its target. There were no explosives in the missiles she was firing, just some nasty nanobots ready to fight in a way no one on the other side had considered possible.

‘Pause,’ Gonzalez instructed, and Ingram shook herself like a wet dog.

There was no need to go any further, and Gonzalez wasn’t finished with Eloise. He hoped she would learn another lesson about the System.

‘I can confirm that Corporal Ortega and Sergeant Ingram are the same person. And I’m curious about what you meant when you said that you should have seen it. You mean you should have somehow recognised that they were the same person?’

‘I should have seen the unusually high similarity, yes.’

Ingram frowned. Her body was technically the same, but extensive nano-transformations of her facial features, eye colour, hair type and skin pigmentation had been conducted. The nanobots had even stretched her long bones, making her nearly two centimetres taller, more Elite in height. She didn’t look like Ortega, and so much had changed in her life, she truly no longer was