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

Ortega. That Leech had died in hospital twenty-one years ago, and a new person had been born instead.

Recovered from the wreck of her Stealthy—she had no choice but to crash land a few minutes after the nanobot-infused missile had done its job—she had been in a critical state, but nothing nano-medicine couldn’t fix. The treatment and transformation had been completed before she woke up. They had kept her in a nano-induced coma for a few weeks while it ran its course. When she came around, she learnt in one sentence that the Freedom Wars were over, and that Corporal Ortega had died a hero’s death, her body too mangled even for modern medicine to fix. The stranger that looked at her from a mirror was Elite Aisha Toscano.

There was a condition attached to her leaving the hospital alive. Toscano had to enter an accelerated officer-training programme and remain in the military. The price for her continued life, now with the spoilt luxuries of the Elite world, was to continue contributing her impressive piloting skills. The Freedom Wars might have been over, but the peace seemed fragile and she was needed to train others and continue to push the boundaries of what aircraft were capable of.

But Toscano knew there was another reason. They wanted to keep an eye on her. To make sure she never spoke the truth of who she was. To be close enough to terminate her if it looked like she was even thinking of betraying them.

In addition to the drugs that performed the cosmetic nano-transformation, she was also given the fourth-generation NanoBTher, which fixed any birth defects and strengthened her body. The therapy was laced with nano-smoothers that travelled through her body, fixing all the poorly healed wounds she had acquired over twenty-seven years of violent life. Any scarring, bone remodelling, thinned cartilage in the joints, every smallest sign of wear and tear was simply gone, replaced with fully functional, healthy and far more resilient tissue.

For all intents and purposes, her body’s lifespan had not only acquired a good few decades on the clock but had also been rejuvenated. Aisha Toscano’s official birth date was four years later than Molina Ortega’s to cover the physical inconsistencies. Nothing of Ortega that mattered was left.

At first, Ortega/Toscano had wanted to reject Elite life, daring the doctors to kill her. She had had enough, and the generous offer of officer training had sounded like another trap she had no intention of falling into. She had managed to achieve more than she had ever dreamt of by firing the nano-virus missile that forced the enemy to surrender, and she was content to leave it at that.

But then she slept the nano-drug cocktail off and began to think clearly. She realised just what she could do with the power her Elite birth would give her. She could actually go around and shoot every sonofabitch that ever abused a Leech, military or otherwise. She could break their necks with her own bare hands, and do it over and over again. She could—

On the third night in the hospital, she woke up unexpectedly, sensing someone’s presence in the room. Before the grogginess had evaporated, she felt a hand closing over her mouth and a pinprick in her arm. She was held down firmly, almost painfully, until the drugs overwhelmed her.

She had fervently hoped it was just nano-toxins that would kill her outright, but the moment she felt the intense hallucination kick in, her heart sank. She had no good memories of nano-hells. Their action was nasty, especially when such massive doses were used, often coming with sickening side effects, but even worse was how they could be used to program and condition a person to do someone else’s bidding.

Over the years, Molina Ortega had shown a pronounced knack for resisting such brainwashing, but Aisha Toscano was still weak and recovering. Which was probably what the intruder had counted on and why they hadn’t waited any longer.

When Toscano woke up the next day, she didn’t remember anything through the ensuing stinking hangover and nausea while her body tried to expel the rest of the nano-hells from her system. But she noticed a change in her mind. She was no longer bloodthirsty. An odd sense of patience had been inserted into her exhausted and frayed self. Without a trace of hesitation, she accepted the offer of life as an Elite and the impending officer training, and she was determined to excel at it.

It had taken a few months for the hallucination-induced conditioning to wear off, restoring her usual self, but by then she had seen the benefits of patience. Sure, she could have gone on a killing spree, shooting every sonofabitch that ever abused a Leech, but she would have been caught sooner or later. If she stopped to think and plan, she could put herself in a position to rebel against the System and kill the corrupted assholes en masse.

Now, that was something worth living for. She applied herself to her accelerated training and parallel education to compensate for her lack of formal schooling in the slums, with a dedication and commitment that made her secret protector and sponsor smile with pride and satisfaction.

Molina Ortega would never have been able to show so much patience. Luckily, Aisha Toscano was not Ortega.

***

‘There is no similarity,’ Ingram replied, her tone dead. As dead as the friends she had lost in the Final Strike and in the countless and brutal airbattles before it.

‘Of course there is. They must have done a superb job with nano-remodelling surgery. The visual similarity is non-existent, but you are the same person. You think and you act like her.’

‘No, I don’t!’ Ingram objected, just a tad too fast for it to be a spontaneous reply.

‘Yes, you do.’ Eloise rolled her eyes. Another flaw of human beings—they argued against simple facts the way computers never did. ‘My memories of Lyon’s slums are virtually fully recovered. I’ve seen you avoid missiles with nothing but an