Steven Kent - Rogue Clone

“Harris, their shields are up,” Freeman whispered. By now we were close to the Grant . Shields were invisible in space, but their energy reading showed on our computers. More importantly, their cannons and missiles must have been locked in on us.

“Lee?” I asked, “that you?”

“You’re making this too easy, Wayson. I pretty much decided I would have to take you out, but you’re coming to me. Whoever heard of anybody raiding a carrier? And in an unarmed transport, Wayson, that’s great.”

And that was when it happened. Flames burst out of several areas along the length of the Grant . The entire hull seemed to breathe in and out like a bellow. Then the ship exploded. It looked nothing like the grand explosion of the Doctrinaire . This explosion was not nearly as big nor as bright. Twenty-foot fireballs ignited from the hull and extinguished in the vacuum of space. Pieces of the ship crumbled and flew off into space.

The superstructure of the Grant never fell apart. The ship just seemed to turn off. The windows in the bridge went dark, and the ship listed slightly, then floated out of position.

We landed the kettle and hiked back through the woods. As expected, the Starliner was gone when we returned.

The congregation assumed I had flown off in it. Upon seeing me, Marianne started a frantic search for Caleb. She found him out in the field. Only then did I understand.

Archie must have listened when I taught Caleb how to broadcast a ship. Caleb said that Archie ordered him off the Starliner early that morning. It must have taken the old man a long time to program the location of the Grant into the computer. Once he did, he started up the ship.

Around the camp, people compared Archie Freeman to Samson and said that he died a martyr. I don’t think he saw it that way. He would have described himself as a shepherd protecting his fold, the bastard. But he had left me stranded on goddamned Little Man. Marianne and Caleb would adopt me, and I thought I could love them, but I was made for space, not farming. Ray, I thought, would have even more trouble adapting than me. He’d abandoned this life once before.

“This is a short-range transport. It isn’t made for long trips,” I told Ray as he sealed the rear of the kettle. “It’s going to take us a month just to reach the broadcast station if we reach it at all.

“Even if we get there, this will probably be a one-way trip. You don’t really think we can make it work.”

“Death in space or the rest of my life stuck here on Delphi,” Freeman said. “I’ll take my chances.” Less than one month had passed since our battle with the Grant , and he was already going stir-crazy. Dying out in space might have been easier for him.

His plan was a shade shy of suicide. He wanted to fly this navy transport out to the broadcast station. I had never seen a kettle fly for more than a day, and we would be out for a full month. If we made it to the broadcast discs, Freeman hoped to strip the sending gear out of them and adapt it for this ship.

The shuttle’s engine produced the energy for it. It generated joules and joules of energy for its shields. But this shuttle wasn’t designed for the stresses of self-broadcasting. It did not even have tint shields. Even if we made it to the discs and somehow Ray adapted the broadcast equipment to work, it could all go wrong. I had first-hand knowledge about what happens when broadcasts go wrong.

“Even if this works, we’ll be lucky to get one flight with this,” I said.

“I’m willing to risk it,” Freeman answered. So was I, if it meant I could get back in the war.

The tough part about writing a sequel is that while the author and the characters remember every last detail about the previous book, readers who are new to the series do not. Just after I finished my first draft of this book, a friend named Dustin Johnson asked for a peek. As it turned out, his wife, Rachel, got to the book first and did me the greatest kindness a reader can do. She complained. (That greatest favor bit applies to pre-print. Once the book is out, insecure authors like myself prefer to be lavished with praise.)

Rachel had not read the first book in this series, and what she found was that while I and my characters knew the difference between the Republic, the Mogats, and the Confederate Arms, she did not. She wanted to like the story, but she could not tell which characters were fighting for which organizations.

Thank you, Rachel. Thank you, Dustin. Thank you, Andrew Perry, who I went to after Rachel. Andrew agreed with Rachel and my sizzling James Bond-style introduction was replaced with something a lot more expository.

I want to thank Mark Adams and my mother and father, readers to whom I resort for advice whenever I finish my first drafts. I want to thank Richard and Michael at Richard Curtis Associates for helping this book come about; and I especially wish to thank Anne Sowards and the crew at Ace for cleaning up after my many messes.

The cover of this book was created by Christian McGrath. It’s not often that a writer wants people to judge his book by its cover, but with Christian doing the art, I don’t mind.