Recoil was my first read of March and it was an absolute blast! I loved every second of it and it was a total 5 Star read for me, It’s therefore doubly exciting for me to be part of this blog tour! Today I’m bringing you an exclusive excerpt and I hope that it draws you in as much as it did me, but first here’s a blurb to give you a flavour of the story.

Out on a salvage mission with a skeleton crew, Carter Langston is murdered by animated corpses left behind on this ship. Yet in this future, everyone’s consciousness backup can be safely downloaded into a brand-new body, and all you’d lose are the memories of what happened between your last backup and your death. But when Langston wakes up in his new body, he is immediately attacked in the medbay and has to fight once again for his life—and his immortality. Because this assassin aims to destroy his core forever.
Determined to find his shipmates and solve this evolving mystery, Langston locates their tech whiz Shay Chan, but two members are missing and perhaps permanently killed. Langston and Chan are soon running for their lives with the assassin and the corporation behind him in hot pursuit.
What Langston and Chan ultimately find would signal the end of humanity. What started as a salvage mission just might end up saving the world.

Excerpt

Fifteen minutes to live. I’d backed up, of course. I did before every run. But that was weeks ago. Time that would be lost, gone never to return. I had questions, so many questions. How had all these people died? Why had the engines suddenly fired? What had caused the coil to animate and attack me? 

Most importantly, where the hell was the Persephone? 

“Dammit,” I swore aloud. I didn’t have any answers, but it was worse than that. When it was over, when they re-coiled me, I wouldn’t even remember the fucking questions. 

I felt a bead of sweat trickle down my forehead. It wasn’t the stress, or adrenaline, or anything else. I had started to sweat because of the temperature. I brought up the suit diagnostics, splashing them across my vision. External temperature was rising. The suit’s enviro-suite was trying to compensate, engaging cooling units, but it was a losing battle. In about—I queried Sarah—sixteen more minutes, the sun was going to cook me. And things would likely get very unpleasant before that. 

So, what? Give up? My fingers twitched toward the Gauss gun at my hip. It would penetrate the suit’s helmet easily enough, and end things before they got too bad. But even knowing that the branch from a few weeks ago would be shoved into another coil, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So, what? Wait for the end? 

Fuck that. 

Sarah? Estimate current acceleration.
Approximately one point oh-one G and climbing.
Just slightly heavier than normal. I flexed my fingers. I could deal with that.
I maneuvered on the acceleration chair, getting my feet beneath me. I forced my mind to reorient itself, to think of the direction of the chairs, the bulkhead behind me as “down.” It took some concentration, but when I opened my eyes, I was no longer being pressed back into an acceleration chair. Instead, I was standing on that chair. Above me was the back of another chair. More chairs descended below me, more above, forming a ladder. I reached out, and began to climb, moving over the discarded coils, pulling my body weight up against the increasing force of acceleration as I climbed “higher” into the ship. With the engines live and power coursing back into the derelict vessel, there was a chance the communications systems would be working. I doubted I could call for help—the Persephone wouldn’t be ignoring my calls if there wasn’t something interfering with the broader signals. But it was damn hard to stop comm laser from pinging a relay. I wasn’t getting out of this in one piece, but if I could make it as far as the bridge, maybe I could send some kind of message. 

The odds sucked, but that was the life of a scavenger. 

Recoil is out now and available through Titan Books!