The Cestus Deception (5 page)

His mind combed thousands of information files in a few seconds.
Selenome,
he decided.
Deadly. Native to only one planet, and it sure as space wasn’t this one—

Another voice in his ear: “
How many of these things are there?
”

“
Just one freaking big one, enough to kill you if you don’t shut up and do your job. Keep the channel clear. Right flank—tighten up. Watch each other’s blind spots.
”

Then there was no more talk, only action. Energy bolts sizzled through the water, freeing vast billowing gas clouds that threatened to obscure their view.

Once again, their understanding and instinct-level programming proved invaluable. If he could so much as see a single trooper, he could estimate the position of others. If he could glimpse the ocean floor, he could guess the size and shape and position of the rest of the formation, and hence determine where and when and
whom
it was safe to shoot.

When a man was sucked screaming into the depths, it tore no fatal hole in their formations: those around him merely closed in and continued to fight. The creature at the ocean floor might have been a self-regenerating horror, a colony creature with no natural enemy save starvation, but the Grand Army of the Republic was its equal. The GAR would live forever, the whole infinitely more durable than any individual part.

“
I’m clear! I’m clear!
” another voice called.

“
We lost another one! Watch your blinds, and cover your brothers!
”

“
Tendril on your nine!
”

“
Got it covered.
”

Nothing about a selenome could be considered routine in the slightest, but Nate, although he had never faced such a challenge, already knew how to fight it. Again, complex behaviors arising from simple instructions.

His blasters were calibrated for underwater combat and demolition. Nate squeezed the trigger in short, controlled bursts, swooping left and right, up and down, evading the searching tentacles. He and his legion of brothers danced to a martial melody, shearing chunks of tentacle until the water was a boiling froth of selenome bits.

We’re the GAR,
he thought savagely, grinning as one of his brothers evaded a questing tendril by a hairbreadth.
You had no flaming idea who you were messing with, did you, you flak-catching, sewage-sucking—

A fleshy tendril’s grip jolted adrenaline through his veins. Toothed suckers smacked at his sled. Its lights flickered and died. The tentacle chewed at his depthsuit, mouthing at him as it fought to pull him down into the selenome’s gaping maw.

Fear chilled his combat fever, and he clamped down on it instantly. What had Jango said?
Put your fear behind you where it belongs. Then blast everything in front of you into splinters. You’ll do fine.

A thousand thousand times he’d repeated those words, and he’d never needed them more.

The tentacle squeezed powerfully enough to break an ordinary man’s ribs and grind his spine to paste. Troopers were not ordinary men. Nate inhaled sharply. The captured air transformed his midsection into durasteel, capable of resisting as long as he could postpone exhalation. Like any trooper, Nate could hold his breath for almost four minutes.

Of course, once he was forced to exhale his rib cage would collapse and the selenome would crush him, then devour his shattered body in the darkness. He couldn’t concern himself with that. He refused to entertain the possibility of failure. Instead, he freed his rifle and doubled over, firing in short controlled bursts until the tentacle ripped free.

The water boiled black.

“
Break off!
” the voice in his ear bawled. He didn’t know if that was a general order or one intended only for those in his wave, but it hardly mattered. He swam up through the cloudy water. Around him twitched floating chunks of selenome, and pieces of other things he had no intention of inspecting closely. Later, perhaps, in the inevitable dreams to follow.

The ocean floor sloped up to meet him. In a few more meters his feet had traction, and Nate swam and then crawled his way to the surface. Now he towed his broken sled, instead of the other way around.

Nate ripped the mouthpiece out of his lips and sobbed for breath as the waves crashed around him. He wasn’t through yet. A quick glance to either side revealed his exhausted brothers, still crawling out of the waves in their hundreds, dragging their equipment behind them. He flopped over onto his back, spitting water and staring in paralytic fatigue at the silvered sky.

The clouds parted. A disklike hovercraft floated down, bristling with armament. Nate closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. This next part he could predict perfectly.

“
All right, keep moving,
” Admiral Baraka called down to them. “
The exercise is over when I say it is.
”

Baraka’s hovercraft continued down the beach, repeating the same announcement over and over again. Two troopers at Nate’s side spat water. They glanced up and shook their heads. “Keep moving?” one said in amazement. “I wonder how fast he’d drag his carcass off the sand if he’d just fought a selenome.”

“I’d give a week’s rations to find out,” Nate muttered.

“How many of us made it?” the other asked.

“Enough,” Nate said, and pushed his way up to his feet, collecting his gear and pulling it up the beach. “More than enough.”

From his position on the hovercraft, Baraka called down: “Keep moving! This exercise has not concluded! I repeat, has
not
concluded…” Admiral Arikakon Baraka was an amphibious Mon Calamarian. Mon Calamari were goggle-eyed and web-handed, with salmon-colored skin and a measured and peaceful manner easy for their opponents to underestimate. But the Mon Calamari warrior clan was second to none, and Baraka held high honors in its ranks. He didn’t particularly like clones, but there were prices to be paid for remaining within the Republic’s vast and sheltering arms. In one way clones were an advantage: there was no need to conscript civilians or recruit the homeless. That led to an army composed only of professionals.

Baraka heartily supported the notion of experienced, professional tacticians and strategists supplementing Kamino’s more theoretical training. After all, when it came down to it the Kaminoans were cloners, not warriors. Baraka had won scars in a hundred battles. Should all that hard-won knowledge die because the Chancellor wanted more of the power collected in his hands? Never! In a soldier, focus and experience reigned supreme:
The tide will slacken, the whirlpool will shrink, the krakana will cower. Such is the power of a focused individual.
Mon Calamari philosopher Toklar had penned those words a thousand years ago, and they still rang true.

So beings like Admiral Baraka came to Vandor-3, the second inhabitable planet in Coruscant’s star system, one of many underpopulated worlds where clone training operations were commonly conducted. Clone troopers shipped out to work side by side with native troops on a hundred different systems. They weren’t bad soldiers—in fact, he admired their tolerance for pain and ravenous appetite for training.

Destined to be a professional soldier from birth as had his father and grandfather before him, Baraka feared that the birth of the clone army was the death of a tradition that had lasted for a dozen generations.

His sergeant and pilot were both clone troopers, just two more broad-shouldered, tan-skinned human males. Beneath their blast helmets, they had the same flat, broad faces as those crawling from the surf below. “We estimate one point seven percent mortality during these drills,” the sergeant said.

“Excellent,” Admiral Baraka replied.
Clones are cheaper to grow than to train.
Even he was appalled by the coldness of that thought, but was unable to generate a smidgen of guilt. All along the beach, he saw nothing save hundreds and ultimately thousands of troopers crawling from the waves, their wet, ragged tracks like those of crippled crustaceans. They were an officer’s dream: an absolutely consistent product that made it possible to plan campaigns with mathematical precision. No commander in history had ever known
exactly
how his troops would react. Until now.

Yet still… still… there was a part of Baraka that felt uncomfortable. Was it just the idea of being rendered obsolete? Or was it something else, something even more disturbing that resisted labels?

He couldn’t decide. Admiral Baraka had a distant sense that his lack of respect for the clones’ dignity and worth had decreased his own, but couldn’t help himself.

“Keep moving! Keep moving!” he squalled into his microphone. “This exercise has not concluded. I repeat, has
not
concluded until the objective has been taken…”

He flew on, quietly noticing his pilot’s and sergeant’s helmets turning toward each other. If they hadn’t been trained so exactingly, his disdain would probably make them hate him. Considering the killing pressure he placed them under, lesser troopers would have gladly roasted him alive.

But not clone troopers, of course.

As laser cannon fodder went, they were the very best.

His day of drills thankfully completed, Nate lay back against the transport’s waffled floor as it flew him and fifty of his brothers back to the barracks. Vandor-3 was the severest training exercise he’d yet endured. According to rumor, the mortality rate had edged close to the maximum 2 percent. He did not resent that statistic, however. Nate understood full well that ancient axiom:
The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat.

He and the other troopers were wounded and weary. Some still trembled with the aftereffects of adrenaline dump. A few chewed nervesticks; one or two sat cross-legged and eyes closed. Some slept, and a few chatted in low tones, mulling over the day’s events.

To outsiders, they were all the same, but clones saw all of the differences: the scars, the tanning, the difference in body language due to various trainings, vocal intonation variations due to different service stations, changes in scent due to diet. It didn’t matter that they’d all begun life in identical artificial wombs. In millions of tiny ways, their conditioning and experiences were different, and that created differences in both performance and personality.

He peered out of one of the side viewports, down on one of the towns at the outskirts of Vandor-3’s capital city. This was a small industrial burg, a petroleum-cracking plant of some kind, surrounded by square kilometers of barren, unused land. This was where the barracks had been built, a temporary city built purely for housing and training fifty thousand troopers.

The barracks was modular, built for quick breakdown or construction, and he had been camped there for the last week, waiting his turn to go through the training drop.

Clone troopers who had already suffered through the drop gave no clue as to the rigors ahead. He’d seen their suction-cup wounds, of course, but the troopers who had already survived the selenome quieted when a trooper lacking a Vandor-3 drop ribbon approached. Early warning of any kind would inevitably degrade the experience. To an outsider such a warning might seem a courtesy, but troopers knew that prior knowledge reduced the severity and emotional stress of the exercise, and therefore decreased a brother’s future chances of survival.

The transport dropped them off in front of a huge gray prefab building, housing perhaps three of the troop city’s fifty thousand.

Floating on a haze of fatigue, Nate dragged his gear from the transport and through the hallways, nodding sardonically to the troopers already sporting the drop ribbons as they applauded, thumbs-upped, or saluted him, acknowledging what he had just endured.

They had known, he had not. Now he did.

That was all.

He caught a turbolift up to the third level, counting down the ranks of bunks until reaching his own. Nate dropped his gear onto the floor beside his bed, stripped off his clothes, and trudged to the shower.

Nate glimpsed himself in mirrored surfaces as he passed. He had no vanity as ordinary men considered such things, but was intimately aware of his body as a machine, always on the alert for signs that something was wrong, out of place, compromised, damaged. Always aware that the slightest imperfection might negatively affect performance, endangering a mission or a brother’s life.

Nate’s body was a perfect meld of muscle and sinew, balanced ideally along every plane, optimally muscled, with perfect joint stability and an aerobic capacity that would have humbled a champion chin-bretier. His skin sported recently acquired bruises and abrasions, new wounds to be patched or healed, but such trauma was inevitable.

A-98 entered the refresher station, moving along to the steaming tile-floored confines of the shower room. He leaned against the gushing water, gasping as it struck his new abrasions. After emerging from the ocean onto the bloody beach they had spent another six hours struggling up a hill to capture a stun-gun-protected flag, working against captured or simulated battle droids. A full day of glorious, grueling torture.

The soap squirted out of one of his brothers’ hands, and Nate caught it. Then, to the amusement of those around him, he tossed the slippery bar from one hand to another like a carnival performer.

That action triggered a brief wave of spontaneous silliness and dazzling jugglery as the troopers flipped the bars of soap back and forth to each other almost without watching, as if they were linked by a single enormous nervous system.

It went on for several hilarious minutes, then died down due to shared exhaustion. They soaped themselves, wincing as astringent foam flowed into cuts and bruises.

This was his life, and Nate could imagine no other.

Kamino’s master cloners had ensured that the troopers were no mere ordinary rank-and-file infantry. Ordinary sentient soldiers the galaxy over could be trained from ignorance to basic skill in six to twelve weeks. Standard clone troopers went from infant to fully trained trooper in about nine years, but in waves numbering in tens of thousands. Clone Commandos were a specialized breed, trained for special operations, recruitment of indigenous troops, and training. The Advanced Recon Commandos were a level higher still.

Ablutions completed, Nate left the shower room and returned to his bunk. Troopers were quite economical in terms of space: they slept in pods when there was no room for individual quarters. They were simultaneously a multitude and a singularity, thousands of identical human units cloned from a single physical and mental combat paragon, a bounty hunter whose name had been Jango Fett.

Their lives were simple. They trained, ate, traveled, fought, and rested. Occasionally they were allowed special stress relief, leading to interaction with ordinary sentient beings, but their training had prepared them for the simplest, most direct experience of life imaginable. They were soldiers. They had known nothing else. They dreamed of nothing else.

Nate found his bunk capsule, kicked his gear into the slot beneath it, and tumbled in, covering his nakedness with the thermal sheet. It automatically assumed seventeen degrees Celsius, the perfect body temperature to provide comfort and optimal healing: one of a trooper’s few luxuries in life.

Almost immediately, crushing fatigue bore him down into darkness. As it did, where other men might have released into sleep or tossed and turned, mulling trivial matters, Nate closed his eyes and entered rest mode, rapidly dropping toward dream time. Sleep would come quickly when he decided to let it: another valuable part of his training. No tossing and turning for a trooper. One never knew when an opportunity for sleep would come again. When necessary, Nate could sleep on the march.

But before slumber he was trained to use the thin edge of consciousness, the place between sleeping and waking, to organize information. His subconscious resurrected the day’s events, everything from his ascent to the
Nexu
to the initial mission briefing, the drop, and the battle with the selenome, struggling onto the beach, and storming the hill afterward.

Recalled information flowed into preselected mental patterns for storage, contributing to the overall chances of survival and, even more important, of successfully completing assignments.

He remained in this state for fifty minutes, as the tug of the day’s fatigue grew more insistent. He could stave off that fatigue for unnaturally long periods of time, but saw no reason to do so. He had performed well, and deserved his rest. And anyway: his dreams would continue to evaluate and organize, even if mostly in symbolic form. That was good enough.

A-98 surrendered consciousness and allowed his body to heal itself. After all, tomorrow was another day.

Best be prepared.