Star Wars®: The Cestus Deception Read online

  Sensors revealed that the capsule’s skin temperature was dropping rapidly: he was plunging deep now. Nate clenched his mouthpiece between his teeth, testing it to make sure that the cool wind of life-giving oxygen flowed freely. In just a few moments it would be too late to make adjustments. In a few moments, the game would commence.

  The comm crackled with intercepted chatter: “We lost one in quadrant four, another in quadrant two. Stay alive, people!”

  “Sounds like a plan,” he muttered, as much to himself as anyone who might have been listening. And there was no reason to mourn when the next moment might well extinguish his own flame: his own warning light flashed. His capsule had malfunctioned. Cold water gushed in through the cracks, flooding him from ankles to knees.

  “Warning!” his emergency system brayed at him. “Hull breach. Warning! Hull breach…”

  Thanks for the heads-up, he thought, his entire right side already sopping wet. Well, Nate reflected bitterly, that was what happened when contracts went to the lowest bidder.

  “We have breaches in three units on the left flank. Emergency procedures in effect. Request permission to terminate operation.”

  “Negative!” the commander said, not the slightest centigram of pity in his voice. Nate both admired and resented that quality. “Proceed to objective.”

  The first voice tried again. “Request permission to implement rescue operation.”

  “Negative, Trooper! Designated units will provide backup support. Stay on target.”

  “One hundred percent,” the trooper replied.

  Claustrophobia and the caterwauling of doomed men would dismay most, but Nate completed his emergency checklist with machinelike precision, punching buttons and pushing levers even as rising water increased the air pressure until his head threatened to explode.

  As the pod juddered and shook, a red diode at eye level counted down to zero. Air hissed into his mouth as the pod’s outer hull broke away and water engulfed his world. The pod split along its longitudinal axis: the top half flipped away into the deep as the pod’s lower half transformed into a sled.

  All around him, hundreds of his brothers floated into formation. He was merely one of an apparently endless multitude maneuvering through the murk. As far as the eye could see, troopers swam and sledded in endless geometric array.

  He adjusted the grip and the steering, happy to regain control of his fate. A strange kind of contentment enfolded him. This was the life for a man. His destiny in his own hands, flanked by his brothers, spitting in death’s bloody eye. He pitied those timid beings who had never experienced the sensation.

  Each sled was fitted with its own nose cam, transmitting images into a low-frequency network, generating a fist-size hologram Nate could rotate to examine from any angle.

  Trooper formations had the geometric precision of snowflakes or polished gemstones. One might easily have assumed such complex and beautiful patterns to have been rehearsed in advance, but that assumption would be incorrect. The formation was merely the inevitable outcome of countless troopers responding to simple instructions ingrained during their intense, truncated childhoods.

  Nate turned his attention from the overall patterns to his own specific tasks. All he needed to do was protect six troopers: those above and below, left and right, front and back. And, of course, trust that they would do the same for him. If he did that, keeping the proper distance, allowing for environmental factors, the clone formations naturally assumed the proper shape for attack and defense. Once battle was actually joined, other core instructions produced other effects.

  They moved through the murk, lights flashing out from the individual sleds, illuminating the irregular shapes of plant and animal life arrayed along the ocean floor. Except for the occasional comm crackle in his ears and the thrum of the sled engine, all was silence. All was 100 percent and straight-ahead.

  Nate focused on the task at hand, no thoughts of past or future clouding his mind. His arms gripped the handles, his legs kicked a bit, even though the sled had its own propulsion. He enjoyed the sense of his body’s impressive resources. A soldier needed infinite endurance, a powerful back, a deep and textured knitting of muscle in the abdomen. Some made the mistake of thinking that it was a trooper’s upper-body strength that was special. That was all most civilians remembered if they ever saw a trooper without his armor: the densely knotted shoulders and forearms, the thick, blunt, surprisingly dexterous fingers.

  But no, the difference was in his legs, capable of carrying twice his own weight up a thirty-degree incline at a steady march. It was in his back, capable of hoisting one of his brothers up and carrying him to safety with no sense of strain. No, a soldier in the field didn’t care about how he looked. What mattered was performance under fire.

  A voice in his ear chattered. “We have contact, right flank. Some kind of undersea snake or tendril…”

  This was it!

  “Evasive maneuvers! Triangulate on sector four-two-seven.” A hologram immediately shimmered in the water before his eyes, showing where that sector lay. Good. He had yet to see anything that he could call a landmark. The moment he saw something, his training, his “inner map” system, would kick in, but for now he had to rely upon technology.

  Something expected but still disturbing cut into his calm: the sound of a trooper’s plaintive, truncated scream. Then: “We’ve lost one.”

  Nate felt the wave of water pressure before his eyes or sensors revealed a threat. All around him his brothers scattered, evading. He watched as a fleshy, cup-lipped tentacle ripped the trooper two rows from his left into the deep, leaving clusters of bubbles behind. The dark clouds billowed in the thousand-eyed glare of their headlamps.

  And now he could see what they faced, and cursed himself: how in space had he missed it? The entire ocean floor was covered with immense clusters of what had initially seemed like rock, but were now revealed to be a gigantic, undifferentiated colony of hostile life-forms. Billions of them, a reef stretching in all directions for kilometers, a city of mindless, voracious mouths. Even the tentacles themselves were not mere appendages. Rather, each was composed of millions of smaller organisms, cooperating in some strange way to improve their odds of obtaining sustenance.

  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 calibrate
d 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.

  5

  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 beg
un 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.