The Cestus Deception: Star Wars (Clone Wars): A Clone Wars Novel

by Steven Barnes

  Within one of those ships, the Nexu, ran a man whose armor sported the blue captain’s color. His helmet and neck chip designated him A-98, known as Nate to his cohort. Although in other times and places he had led his brothers into combat, now he was merely one of identical thousands trotting to their destiny.

  The next clone in line locked himself into a cylindrical drop capsule, trusting Nate to do a spec check on the external monitors. Nate went through a mental list as familiar to him as the pattern of creases on his hard right hand. With a brisk, flat slap of that callused palm on its outer wall, he pronounced the capsule sound and secure. Through the heat and shock-resistant plate he could see his brother’s eyes. His own eyes, reflected back to him.

  With a bump and a chunk, the eyes retreated as the capsule sank into the wall, joining the conveyer belt.

  He turned, nodded at the next trooper in line, and locked himself into a tube. The man checked Nate’s settings, as Nate had a moment before for the man ahead of him. He heard the bang-slap against the capsule wall. A comforting sound. To blazes with all the flashing lights: there was nothing more reassuring than another trooper’s approval.

  The capsule, used on numerous previous drops, stank of sweat—and not his own, although the previous occupant had been a genetic twin. Nate detected traces of antiviral medications designed for functioning in an alien environment. He inhaled deeply, one part of his mind completely on autopilot as the rest of him went through his metal coffin’s checklist.

  That smell. Sweet, sharp, and organic. Triptophagea, he figured. Triptophagea was a drug used to prevent fever on half a dozen planets he could name offhand. Only one of them was the site of recently hot action, and he figured that that meant the previous occupant had been on Cortao within the last month.

  On a deeper level, he was aware that those thoughts were merely distractions from the drop’s danger. Risk was always a factor. Fear was a soldier’s constant companion. No dishonor in that: what a man felt mattered not at all. What he did meant everything. He was one of the few ARC troopers in all the galaxy, and as far as Nate was concerned, there was no better existence.

  The capsule juddered as it began to move down the transport line. The speaker in his helmet burped to life. “This is control to Trooper A-Nine-Eight. Estimated time of ejection one minute twenty-four seconds.”

  “One minute and twenty-four seconds,” Nate repeated, and clenched his fist in invisible salute. “One hundred percent,” he said, ARC-speak for perfect.

  One minute twenty. About eighty heartbeats, long enough for a thousand ugly thoughts to worm their way into an unguarded mind. He’d learned a hundred ways to deal with them, none more powerful than the personal ritual of his cohort meditation. He submerged in its comforting depths, shifting mental swatches of color and shape as he had since childhood, taking solace in the simplicity and beauty of each geometric pattern. He listened to his pulse as his heart slowed to forty beats per minute in response. Chanted the fourteen words engraved on his soul: It’s not what a man fights with, it’s what he fights for that counts.

  Nate fought for the honor of the Grand Army of the Republic, and to him, that obligation was a thing of beauty.

  Some thought clones could not appreciate beauty, but they were wrong. Beauty was efficiency and functionality. Beauty was purpose and a lack of waste.

  Most equated beauty with effeminacy or lack of utility.

  Troopers knew better.

  Bump. Another capsule gone. He lurched left as the capsule shifted right, rattling closer to the end of the line.

  Bump.

  “Fifty seconds,” control warned.

  BUMP. The shuddering became a hollow swooshing sound, felt in the bones more than heard in the ears. The capsule was moving along more smoothly now, and A-98 took the time to check his settings. There followed a moment of piercing silence. He held his breath, quieting his nerves, finding the place within himself that needed this, that lived for the moment to come.

  Then thought ceased as his capsule was spewed from the side of the ship toward the ocean below. Acceleration slammed him back against the capsule walls.

  Nate had time to check his visuals. This model was better than his previous capsule, which had kept him in darkness for most of the ride. This one had viewscreens: one giving a view from the capsule’s outer skin, the other on some kind of main feed from the Nexu, giving an entirely different perspective.

  From the perspective of the drop capsule the Nexu was a gigantic, angular flat metal shape, bristling with weapons and antennae, capable of carrying twenty thousand troops or megatons of weapons and supplies. Function at its finest.

  Then that view was lost, and A-98 was plunging down into Vandor-3’s outer atmosphere.

  The capsule shuddered as friction warmed its skin to two thousand degrees, heat that would have fried him in an instant if not for the thermoenergetic force screen that sucked heat into the capsule batteries.

  Nate checked his equipment as he plummeted toward the dark, churning ocean below. Sensors related the temperature, position, and acceleration. Tiny steering repulsors used the capsule’s stored energy to keep him on target.

  Everything was fine. Nothing to be done now. Nothing but to fall, and fight, and win. Or die.

  His stomach rocked with the sudden vibration as his capsule began to decelerate, the repulsors blasting as sensors warned that they had reached critical distance above the swelling waves.

  Within thirty seconds the capsule jolted again as he struck water. The capsule lights switched from yellow-orange to red emergency as some of the lesser systems began to fritz. Zero perspiration: glitches like that were to be expected. The miracle would have been if all systems had remained intact through the entire descent.

  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 throug
h 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 snow-flakes 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 me 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 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 ar
ound.

  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.