The Cestus Deception Read online

  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 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 whe
re 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.

  6

  In the Jedi Temple's Archives, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Kit Fisto

  studied their assignment, the industrial powerhouse known as Ord

  Cestus.

  Obi-Wan found Cestus an interesting study, a relatively barren

  rock rich in certain ores, but miserable for most agricultural farming.

  Much of its surface was desert. The native life-forms included a

  hive-based insectile people known as the X'Ting, and a variety of

  large, deadly, and reputedly nonsentient cave
spiders.

  The current population stood in the millions, with several advanced

  cities unsustainable without imported resources: fertilizers

  and soil nutrients, medications, and spices used to modify the water

  supply for non-natives.

  "Dangerous," Kit said, studying at his side. "A simple rationing

  drove them into Count Dooku's arms. That could never have happened

  to a self-sufficient people."

  This was simple truth. In war, secure supply lines were as crucial as

  trained soldiers.

  Three hundred standard years before, the relatively primitive

  X'Ting—a single colony with multiple hives spread around the

  planet—had contracted with Coruscant, offering land for a galactic

  prison facility.

  At some point Cestus Penitentiary began a program designed to

  train and utilize prisoner skills. This became really interesting when

  a series of financial scandals and an industrial tragedy on Etti IV sent

  a dozen minor officers of Cybot Galactica, the Republic's second

  largest manufacturer, to prison for twenty standard years. The twelve

  hadn't been on Cestus for two years before cutting a deal with prison

  officials to begin research and fabrication of a line of droid products.

  Access to vast amounts of raw material and virtually free labor released

  a flood of wealth.

  The twelve were quickly and quietly work-furloughed into opulent

  homes. Select guards and officials became wealthier still, and a corrupt

  dynastic conglomerate was born: Cestus Cybernetics, producing

  an excellent line of personal security droids. The next events were difficult

  to sort out. Large tracts of land were purchased from the hive at

  fire-sale prices. Then, following terrible plagues among the X'Ting,

  Cestus Cybernetics gained almost complete control of the planet.

  Still, life, even for the average offworlder, had been rough before

  Cestus Cybernetics subcontracted to the fabulously wealthy and successful

  Baktoid Armor Workshops. It retooled completely, tapping

  into an interstellar market in high-end military hardware. The

  economy expanded, and then crashed when the Trade Federation cut

  ties after the Naboo fiasco . . .

  Boom. Then, crash. Cycles of growth and decay followed one another

  with numbing regularity.

  Obi-Wan scanned the roster of current leaders. Following last century's

  plagues, after the near destruction of the entire hive, the office