Steven L. Kent

“Distance?”
“Four hundred sixty million miles from Earth.”
“Is she hiding behind Jupiter?”
“She’s out in the open, sir.”

"you picked a hell of a place to die Marine" , i told myself .

Suddenly a rim of light appeared above the city , raining glare down upon buildings and streets. For a moment it looked like the light was coming from an explosion , but it did not flash and disappear , instead , the light expended over the top of the city like a smoke gathering over a fire . The light was bright enough to cancel the night-for-day lens , and the visor automatically switched to a standard tactical lens .

The instructor mentioned something about sharks and giant squid. I imagined a squid staring up at me through the darkness, a bit one, something sixty feet long with tentacles the size of fire hoses. I imagined it blending into the shadows, staring up at me from the darkness, ready to pull me into the inky depths. Ready to hold my body with two tentacles while tearing off each of my limbs with the others.

I needed a natural-born aide to help interface with the civilian population.
Having recently been conquered by the all-clone military, a lot of people were wary of clones. Go figure.

A moment of terrible silence followed the explosions. I knew that silence. It was filled with shock and disbelief, as if something so outrageous had just occurred that even the buildings could not understand what happened.

Synthetic conscription is abolished

In the sky , patterns of colors showed in the light , shimmering like heat waves , and the garing light spread across the sky .

We were a nation of clones. The end of our rule was built into our DNA. Well, sterility was built into our DNA, and since we didn’t have factories for building the next generation of clones, we were a nonrenewable empire.

Sarah Doctorow was an antisynthetic bitch ; but Doctorow didn't share here prejudice . She saw no difference between clones and robots .

He was a natural-born, something that automatically made him a person of interest.

Was Hannibal committing suicide when he crossed the Alps ?