Rising Tomorrow (Roc de Chere Book 1), Mariana Morgan [epub e ink reader .TXT] 📗

of old junk, running on the same basic hardware and software as her own XST, and its missiles had only basic stealth capabilities.

Of course, in practice, both the XST and the XLF were far from useless junk. They were reliable, nimble, especially the XST with its smaller mass, and had been thoroughly well tested and upgraded throughout the Wars. They just had simplified controls, primitive gadgets and in the case of the XST, no missiles or anti-missile defence. In reality, the XST was nothing but a short-range airtaxi for people and gear that the police used to ferry Elites. It was never meant to dodge missiles.

‘Negative,’ Gonzalez responded. ‘No codes on system.’ The only person that knew them was Bellefeuille, and even if she hadn’t been unconscious, they’d have had no time to get them out of her.

‘Land. Save Ms Moretti,’ he ordered.

‘Yes, sir,’ Ingram replied automatically, just as one of the missiles exploded behind her, taking out a sizeable chunk of a forty-storey building in the process. Ingram didn’t want to think how many Leeches had just died huddled in the building, sharing warmth and whatever food they had been able to forage.

Her time was running short. She had to make a choice. Her fingers busied themselves, keying in instructions for the autopilot.

‘Ms Moretti, get ready,’ she shouted.

‘For what? I demand to know—’

She never finished the sentence. Ingram sent the XST towards the building she had been searching for and engaged the autopilot. She reached with one hand to unbuckle Eloise’s seatbelt while opening the side hatch with the other. She used her own body weight to pull the other woman out of the aircar. They tumbled down, Eloise’s body slamming into Ingram on landing.

The XST continued faithfully on autopilot, evening out smoothly after their body weight rocked it, rising fast before the second missile shredded it in half.

Ingram managed to tuck her head in before landing, but her winded lungs were another thing, and she choked hard. The half-rotten rugs she landed on helped some, but it still hurt. She thought she heard a rib crack, but there was no time to spare. Pushing Eloise’s body, half paralysed in fear, against the raised edge of the roof, she crawled forward for cover.

An XLF was as quiet as an XST if it moved at the speeds allowed within the city boundaries, but both aircraft had significantly exceeded that speed. Ingram could clearly hear a soft hum as the police fighter zoomed past them, zeroing in on the site of the crash.

‘Stay down,’ Ingram ordered. Somewhere in the back of her mind she puzzled at the other woman’s silence, but she was too distracted to consider it properly. Struggling to breathe, Ingram edged herself slowly up until she had the hovering XLF in sight. Her own XST was in multiple pieces some eighty metres below, engulfed by fire. More fire blazed than the remaining fuel in her aircar could account for. They were getting rid of the evidence.

CHAPTER 8

Lyon’s 4th Police Station

South-Central Lyon

Afro-European Alliance

Tuesday 21 April 2725

DAY 2

Gonzalez inhaled sharply as the icon for Ingram’s XST disappeared from his screen. He didn’t waste time calling her name uselessly; the aircar and its communication system were gone. The missiles an XLF could carry were small compared to the behemoths used in the Freedom Wars by the military, but it didn’t take much to take out a defenceless XST. Even a shell could do it. No, there was nothing left but wreckage. He saw the aircar swerving sharply, veering up on its final trajectory just before the missile struck, and he hoped it meant what he thought it did.

The evidence was gone, but if Ingram had managed to get Ms Moretti out in time not everything was lost.

His fingers flew across the holo-keyboard with renewed vigour, but they failed to achieve anything before a throat was cleared behind him.

‘Sir, you need to go now,’ Megan urged. ‘The door won’t hold him for long.’

Door? What door? For the first time in what seemed like forever but was in fact barely three minutes, Gonzalez lifted his head to look around, and blinked.

No wonder he had sensed commotion around him and felt things brushing past him. Megan’s desk was knocked over, the items on top of it scattered. The bodies of the two gendarmes, Evan Bianco and Marco Schulze, were on the floor, as immobile as Bellefeuille’s. And there were loud banging noises and screams coming from Wagner’s office, the door firmly shut and its locking mechanism still smoking. Clearly Gendarme O’Haress had been busy watching his back, literally.

‘He will stop that pathetic screaming soon and find a way to open the door,’ Megan added, stepping over some debris. ‘Everything he’s accessed from his account since he logged in to the 4th’s network is on here. Go!’ She pressed a standard data chip into his hand and made a shooing motion.

Gonzalez always favoured informality among his team, and if not for the accident of her birth Megan would have passed the Special Forces officers’ training with flying colours years ago, possibly have even made captain by now, but this was hilarious. He hadn’t been shooed away like this since he was ten years old. He laughed at her with soft amusement, pocketing the chip, but then his mood sobered.

Megan was looking at him with serious determination, and he knew she was about to save him the need to give one of the most difficult orders of his career.

‘No.’ She shook her head before he managed to open his mouth. ‘You don’t have to say anything, sir. I can get more out of his account. Give me a few days and I might even be able to hack it entirely now that I have a foot in the door. I need to stay where I can access the 4th’s network directly.

‘Marco’—she pointed at the body of one of the gendarmes—‘never saw me coming. Evan’—her hand flicked to the other side of the room—‘is