Recon: A Military Sci-Fi Series

CONTENTS Also in SeriesChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5Chapter 6Chapter 7Chapter 8Chapter 9Chapter 10Chapter 11Chapter 12Chapter 13Chapter 14Chapter 15Chapter 16Chapter 17Chapter 18Chapter 19Chapter 20Chapter 21Chapter 22Chapter 23Chapter 24Chapter 25Thank you for reading Recon!About the Author ALSO IN SERIES RECON THE HUNTER THE MERCENARY THE OPERATIVE 1 Everything was pain and darkness, and all I could hear was the hollow sound of my own breath against the inside of my helmet. I tried to remember where I was and how I’d got here, but my thoughts seemed to be hazy and random, just flashes of faces I didn’t recognize in settings I couldn’t identify. The woods, dark and wet, dead twigs and detritus crunching under my boots as I maintained my interval, keeping ten meters between me and the next Marine in line. Scanning the dark with my helmet sensors, infrared and thermal, keeping my Gauss rifle pointed out of the formation. No warning, just light and fire and screaming in my ears in the headphones of my helmet. Something big and hot on thermal coming in from overhead, and I was shooting at it, knowing I couldn’t scratch it even with the tungsten slugs out of my rifle. And then a bright flash and suddenly I was here, and didn’t know where here was. I decided to start with something simple: my name. Randall Munroe. The thought struggled out as if my tortured mind were giving birth to it. My name’s Randall Munroe, and I’m a Recon Marine. Flashes of images in my head: looking in a mirror, seeing a narrow, sharp-edged face with slate-gray eyes and sandy brown hair cut short. I knew it was my face, but it looked…wrong. How could my own face be wrong? I had a concussion. That must be it, I was out of my head, I had to be concussed, or maybe it was blood loss. But that wasn’t it; there was another face in my memories, another face in another mirror. This one was less sharp, more rounded, more soft, with dark eyes and long, dark hair. And it went by another name, not Randall, but Tyler. Tyler Callas. That’s who I was… “Tyler.” I blinked and looked away from the brilliant star field above me, back to the older man still staking down the tent in the dim glow of a chemical ghostlight hanging from the branch of a gnarled tree overhead. The high desert sandstone was brick hard, but his big, gnarled hands pushed the stakes into it effortlessly. “Are you going to stargaze all night long?” Cesar Torres, my great-grandfather, went on, smiling crookedly. “Or are you going to help me set up camp?” “Sorry, Gramps,” I said, feeling my ears burning a little with embarrassment as I moved back into the circle of light and picked up a tent stake from the pile. “It’s really beautiful tonight. You can’t see any of these stars from Trans-Angeles.” “That’s why I spend as little time as possible there,” Gramps said, his cracked and weathered face twisting into a scowl. “Well, it’s one reason among many.” I fell silent for a moment, concentrating on stretching the tent’s rain-fly over it, then connecting its hooks to the stakes. I snuck another glance around at the high desert night, seeing the outline of a sandstone arch against the frosting of stars. It was so empty out here. “We never see anyone else out here,” I mused. “Why don’t more people spend time away from the cities?” Gramps shot me a look, and I imagined it was the same look he’d given a recruit who’d asked a dumbass question back when he’d been in the Marine Corps of the old United States over a century ago. “Because it’s too damn expensive, boy,” he said as if I should know it. “There aren’t any roads out here anymore, not since the Big One.” The Big One. That was what he called the Sino-Russian War. “And renting a hopper isn’t cheap. Most people never leave the city their whole lives.” Our own hopper squatted silently about fifty meters away from the campsite, its ducted fans still and motionless. We didn’t rent it, though; it was a company vehicle assigned to our family. “But there are a lot of people who work for the Corporate Council,” I tried again. “Mom’s friends are always taking shuttles up to the orbitals, or visiting the Martian shipyards. Surely they could afford it.” “Yeah, I suppose they could,” Gramps allowed with a shrug. His sour expression didn’t change, though. “But most of them don’t strike me as the outdoors type. Fact is, there’re damn few people who have both the desire and the money to enjoy nature anymore.” His face softened a bit, with what I thought was nostalgia crossing it. “Which is a damn shame, considering that we’ve finally started taking good care of it.” I’d heard that trip down memory lane before, and although I loved hearing Gramps talk about his time in the Marines, hearing him wax poetic about how we saved the polar bears and gorillas wasn’t in my top ten conversation topics. “Do we have time to practice infiltration techniques?” I asked him, trying not to sound too kid-eager. I was eighteen now, after all. About to turn nineteen. “Tomorrow,” he promised. “Tonight, I want to get a fire going.” I fought back a sigh, not just because we weren’t going to be training tonight but also because a fire meant he wanted to talk about serious, adult stuff. But we didn’t get to camp out as often as we used to when I was younger, and I didn’t want to ruin it by whining, so I went ahead and helped him make the fire with the wood we’d collected. It was a chilly night anyway; early spring in western Utah could get pretty damn cold. I was dressed for it, but a fire would feel good. “Ty,” he said as he sat down on one