Steven L. Kent - The Clone Alliance (Ace Science Fiction)

My efforts to write this book were sabotaged!

A company called VG Pocket released a handheld game system called Caplet, with really excellent versions of the arcade classics Burger Time and Bust a Move . You may not have guessed, but I am an avid video game addict. When a Caplet landed on my desk, I often found myself struggling to reach the elusive fifth level of Burger Time when I should have been writing.

Caplet pried its way into my life sometime in August 2006, ten weeks before a finished manuscript was due to my publisher. That act of Caplet sabotage came toward the end of a rather rushed chronology that began on May 31, when I got a call from my agent, Richard Curtis, letting me know that he had sold Ace Books two more books in the Wayson Harris series.

Ace asked for nothing more than titles and story lines in May, but drafts of the books were due in October and April. At the time that Richard called, I was working on a book from an unsold series of young adult books. Switching gears in midbook was not easy.

At first the words for this book came slowly. I try to write two thousand words per day. As I began this project, I had days in which I wrote seven hundred words and days in which I wrote five hundred. Thus, while I expected to finish the first draft before August, I did not finish until September 13. That left me roughly fifty days to finish and proof a story that would clearly need a lot of polishwhich would not have been much of a problem in a Caplet-free world.

These are the people who helped me with that job. My parents read The Clone Alliance as I went along in weekly installments. My dad, an Analog fan from the first days of the magazine, was particularly helpful.

Once I finished that first draft, I ran copies of that very rough draft to Mark Adams and John Thorpe for suggestions on improving the story line. John was diplomatic about his reservations, Mark was not. The alarms go off when a soft-spoken friend like Mark Adams says he is afraid to send you his comments because he does not want to endanger your friendship. Mark, friends dont let friends go out in public with their pants down. Thank you, Mark, and thank you, John; many of your suggestions have been added.

I started the third draft of this book before finishing the secondmostly because the biggest problems were in the first half of the book. Once things seemed almost presentable, my wife gave this book its first proofing. With the spelling and punctuation in hand, I finished my half of this project by handing the book off to Rachel Johnson, a family friend who has a great eye for spelling, punctuation, and story suggestions. You may have noticed the dedicationRachel Johnson is that Rachel. Dustin and Dillan are her husband and son.

The second half of this project happened at Ace, where an editor named Anne Sowards cut and cleaned my work. She and her team are the final eyes. She tells me to cut scenes to make the pace faster or to add to scenes to get the point across.

One point I did not spell out adequately in prior novels was why Harris came out so different than the Liberators before him. I could not come up with a satisfactory explanation. Marcelo Sanjines (if the name sounds familiar, it is because Father David Sanjines, the priest in Rogue Clone , borrowed his family name from Marcelo) rescued me from this conundrum. One night while I was grappling with that question, I went out for hot chocolate with Marcelo and he said, Harris is so different than the other Liberators. Is that because he was raised in an orphanage?

Of course, I said, acting as if I had planned that all along. Thanks, Marcelo. Next time we hit Starbucks, the hot chocolate is on me.

Back to my publisherThere are a lot of benefits that come from being published by Ace Books. The best perk, though, is having my covers created by Christian McGrath.

I wish to thank everyone I have mentioned for their help with this project, except VG Pocket. VG Pocket, your little handheld game system is diabolical in nature.

Earthdate: September 12, A . D . 2512

Galactic Position: Scutum-Crux Arm

A book.

When we left the colony on Little Man, one of the Neo-Baptists gave me a gift. By its shape and size, I could tell it was a book. Since all of the books on the little farming planet were of the religious sort, I did not bother unwrapping the package.

After pretty much ignoring me for the months that I lived with them, the Neo-Baptists suddenly cared about my salvation. How touching. But why should they care? I was, after all, a clone. As far as they were concerned, I was a living being without a soul.

Ray Freeman, my partner, and I had come to this planet after the fall of the Unified Authoritythe Earth-based empire that populated and controlled the galaxy. These Neo-Baptist colonists were his people. He had grown up among them, then abandoned their fold as a teen. I do not know how religion fit into his psyche, but he now made his living as a mercenary. Killing came easily to Freeman.

Killing came naturally to me, too. What did not come naturally was living among religious farmers. We spent months trapped on Little Man, then Freeman got an idea that would either get us back into society or kill us. Either option sounded better than life on Little Man. He wanted to adapt a short-range military transport for pangalactic travel. We might as well have tried flapping our arms and flying the one hundred thousand light-years to Earth.

The colonists gave us a glib, Thanks for coming, and handed me a gift wrapped in a swatch of pearl white cotton cloth. They said good-bye and walked off without a backward glance. That was also how Freeman and I left their planetwithout a backward glance.

Think theres any chance this can work? I asked Freeman, as we entered our transport through the kettlethe windowless cargo and passenger cabin.

Does it matter? he asked. That was Freeman, always cutting to the heart of the matter. Conversation did not interest him, so he had hit the proverbial nail on the head. It made little difference to either of us whether our plan worked or we blew up in space, so long as we got away from the Neo-Baptists.

The military shuttle became the instrument of our passive suicidea short-range ship made to fly distances of twenty thousand or thirty thousand miles at a maximum speed of two hundred thousand miles per hour. We were going to crank up the speed, preferably to a respectable ten million miles per hour, as we flew it to a satellite approximately four billion miles from this planet.

In the unlikely event that we made it to that satellite, we would start the next phase in our suicide. We would attempt to adapt specialized equipment used for transferring ships across the galaxy to work on our transport. Imagine taking a submarine and gluing wings and a rocket engine to its chassis. Your submarine might have wings and a rocket engine, but it would not work in space. That just about summed up what we wanted to do with our transport. Even if we outfitted it with a broadcast engine, that would not mean we could use it to broadcast.

I had no interest in opening the gift that the Neo-Baptists gave me when I first boarded the transport; but traveling with Ray Freeman left me lonelier than traveling alone. I knew I would need some sort of distraction even before I entered the cockpit and watched him silently working the controls.