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

by Steven Barnes

  Throughout the last days the troopers had labored to build an obstacle course. As the morning’s shadows shortened they ran the recruits through their paces, forming them into lines by height, dividing them into four groups so that they could compete against each other. Running narrow rails, suspending themselves from overhead bars, lugging rocks back and forth across a field until they puked from exhaustion, the recruits suffered through standard trooper field training.

  During the sun’s waning Forry added calisthenics, and more running, jumping, and carrying. Nate was pleased to see that every one of the new prospects was game.

  For some reason he was especially pleased to see that Resta was keeping up with the offworlders. She might have been a bit slower, but she was as strong as a Noghri, and seemed to have an unquenchable tolerance for pain.

  By the time they broke for rest and food, only ten of them had dropped out, trudging home with heads down. One, Nate noted with pleasure, was the miner who had complained about Resta.

  Good. The first day’s grueling schedule was designed to make about half the group quit. From then on, those who remained could consider themselves tough, fire-breathing survivors. It was the kind of thing that bred camaraderie, the most important factor in a combat unit.

  After the meal break, his brothers began to divide the recruits into smaller units, testing them again and again. Not one had picked up a weapon of any kind. It was not yet time.

  Spindragon arrived when the day was halfway done, ferrying General Fisto back to camp. The Nautolan asked tersely how many recruits had come and how many had survived the early training, then retreated to the cave for whatever mysterious preparations or planning Jedi indulged in.

  Sheeka herself watched the recruits’ exertions and frowned. “Why all of this?” she asked. “Jango used to say it took months to get someone into real shape.”

  He smiled and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Gives us a chance to observe them. See who fits in and who doesn’t. Who can handle physical pain? Fear? Fatigue? We’ve got no time for dilettantes.”

  She nodded, as if she might have already anticipated such a response. She seemed an interesting woman: pilot, step-mother, galaxy-spanning wanderer, and former girlfriend of the immortal Jango himself.

  Sheeka interrupted his thoughts. “You told me what the army says about Jango. But there is always more than one way to look at a story, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So there are other people, who say other things.”

  Of course there were. Always. He had heard their snide comments, had watched their eyes narrow and the corners of their lips turn down when a clone trooper passed. “Yes,” he said.

  “And what do they say?”

  “What do they say? That he was a criminal, a bounty hunter, an assassin, a traitor to the Republic.” The snidely whispered words echoed in his ears, and he found himself slightly annoyed just to remember them. Had he no original thoughts of his own to offer? “It is our duty and honor to erase his stain.”

  “Is that how you feel?” she asked. “Is that all there is?” A short, hard laugh. “He was a man who walked between the worlds, but when I knew him he was honorable, and brave, and a great … fighter. Bounty hunter.” She shrugged. “Whatever. Not too smart to learn everything possible about someone from his enemies.”

  He thought about this for a few moments before answering. “What would I have to do to be more like him?”

  She looked him up and down, from his spit-polished boots to his chiseled face. And her smile softened a bit, grew more contemplative. “Not be afraid of being human,” she said. “Not be so scared of feelings. He rarely showed them, but he had them. Not be so scared.”

  Nate bristled. What in the world was this woman prattling about? “I’m not scared of anything.”

  She barked laughter. Despite his anger, he admired its clarity and timbre. “Bantha spit,” she said. “I’ve been watching you and your brothers. You’re afraid of everything. Of saying the wrong things. Feeling the wrong things. Probably of dying in the wrong position.”

  There it was. Thank the cloners that troopers had no such prejudices! “You don’t know anything about my life, or my death. Of course, that never stops civilians from judging, does it?” The last emerged as something very close to a snarl.

  Nonetheless, she was completely unshaken. “Who’s generalizing now?” she asked.

  He glowered at her, but no more words came to mind.

  “No?” she asked. “Then accept a challenge.”

  “A challenge?” Despite himself, he was intrigued. Distantly, he heard the shouts and grunts of effort. It was almost time for him to go and relieve the others.

  “Yes,” she said. “You know how to be a soldier. I’ve seen that. My challenge is for you to react to the world as just a human being. When you see a sunset, do you think of anything but night-vision lenses? When you see a sunblossom, do you only imagine the poisons that might be extracted from it? When you see a baby, do you think of anything except what kind of hostage it might make?”

  Nate stiffened. “Advance Recon Commandos don’t take hostages,” he said.

  Sheeka’s lovely face managed to darken even further. “Don’t be so blasted literal!” she said in frustration. “I’m trying to communicate with you, and all I can touch is your shell. Who are you?”

  The sounds of children playing seemed to have receded, grown farther away. “I know who I am.” He paused. “As much as any of us ever do,” he said, rising. “These mushrooms taste like dirt,” he lied. “I’m getting some meat.” He tossed his food into a trash container, and then rejoined the exhausted recruits.

  For the rest of the day Nate attempted to focus his attention on the trainees. He kept a wary eye on how they did on the obstacle course, discerning which of them were in the best physical and mental condition, which ones had the best emotional control, which might have leadership potential.

  But every few minutes he broke concentration and scanned the entire craggy area, as protocol directed. And he noticed that no matter when he did so, his eyes sought the face and form of the infuriating Sheeka Tull. Sometimes he found her beneath a rock overhang, sometimes helping with the food. Once he glimpsed her interacting with General Fisto, and pointing in the direction of her ship. And once, when he didn’t see her at all, he felt a strange disappointment.

  That lasted but a moment: Nate wrested his attention back to the task at hand.

  As the day rolled on, trainees were presented with an endless series of sweaty, torturous obstacles. Invariably the clones negotiated the tests first, with a level of agility and effortless ease that made the Cestus volunteers shake their heads in disbelief.

  Child’s play, for one who spent his childhood in the training rooms of the Kamino cloners.

  By the day’s end, 40 percent of the volunteers had quit. Those remaining were a hard, tough lot who glared at each other and cursed under their breaths at the troopers, but they cursed as a group. They had survived the best that these armored sadists from Coruscant could offer. They were ready for the next level.

  Nate organized his thoughts and made his report to General Fisto. As he approached the back of the cave a meter-long thread of light blazed briefly, snaked and coiled through the air, then died again. The strange phenomenon repeated. His nose itched with the stink of burning metal, and the glare of the flexible line hurt his eyes until he had to turn his head away.

  When General Fisto heard his approach, the light disappeared, and he pivoted with a loose-limbed adroitness so smooth that he might almost have turned inside out, seemed to flow through himself.

  “Yes?”

  “We’ve concluded the day’s testing.”

  “And?”

  “I believe that we have forty-eight good recruits.”

  Something like light glowed in the depths of the general’s unblinking eyes. “This is good. And tomorrow?”

  “We’ll pick up a few more. I can either accompany y
ou in recruitment, or stay here and continue training.”

  “Continue the training,” General Fisto said after a moment’s consideration. “Divide them into groups according to day and time of initial recruitment. Allow those who enlisted first to have the greatest status.”

  “Yes, sir,” Nate said. The general was underestimating ARCs if he thought that such a hierarchy was not already part of their command structure. On the other hand, it was not his place to educate or correct Jedi.

  For some reason, that thought made him think of Sheeka Tull again, and her insolent evaluation of him. There was something about her he found almost unendurably irritating.

  He wandered back outside the cave, and without telling his feet what to do, they headed in the direction of Sheeka Tull’s ship. After all, the day’s work was completed. His three brothers would take care of any cleaning of weapons or policing of the obstacle course area. He could take a few minutes. Just a stroll, he lied.

  He found Sheeka at a folding table outside her ship, scrubbing at the rust on one of Spindragon’s Corellian flux converters and enjoying the stars. She didn’t seem surprised to see him, but didn’t hail him until he came closer. “Nate,” she said.

  “And how do you know that it’s me, and not one of the others?” he challenged.

  She laughed. “You walk a little differently. By any chance have you got a leg wound?”

  He stopped for a minute. A broca, a huge reptilian creature that haunted the swamps of a misbegotten black hole called Altair-9, had nearly torn his hip away. He had thought the damage healed. Interesting. This woman was as observant as a trooper!

  “Yes,” he said, but kept the rest of his thoughts to himself.

  She smiled at him, went back to her cleaning. “How did the day go?”

  “Some good prospects. We pushed them hard and lost only forty percent. Strong stock on Cestus.”

  Sheeka smiled again, evidently pleased with his answer. She went back to her cleaning, and he just sat, watching the stars. He knew that many of those blazing orbs had planets of their own, and wondered how many would be embroiled in battle before the Clone Wars ended.

  After a time her attention returned to Nate. He felt content merely waiting for her to speak. When she did, her question surprised him. “What do you see when you look at me?” She chose that moment to yawn and stretch a bit, and for the first time he felt the impact of her as a woman, and was surprised at the fierceness of his reaction. Nothing male and humanoid could fail to notice her mesmerizing meld of strength and softness, the long elegant lines of her legs, the delicate arch of her neck …

  Nate stopped himself, remembering that she had asked him a question. He searched, found one answer that bordered on the obscene, and subsequently edited himself. Finally he said, “A human female whose skin tone matches that of General Windu.”

  “Who?” She laughed. It was rich and deep, and he realized that his first sense of being mocked was completely wrong. He found that he admired her laugh; it was warming to him in a way that let him reduce emotional control for a few precious minutes. Interesting.

  He found himself asking a question before he had stopped and evaluated it. “And what do you see when you look at me?”

  Almost instantly he regretted saying it, because that smile softened, became wistful and a bit sad. “The shadow of the best—” She paused, as if changing a word in midsentence. “—best fighter I ever knew.” She reached out and brushed her hand along his jaw, then rose as gracefully as a sun-blossom spinning in the solar wind and returned to her ship.

  21

  After the first few days, the stream of newbies had slowed to a trickle. Therefore, Nate was surprised to see a group of lean, dirty men and women approach. They arrived in a motley variety of battered hovercarts dusty enough to suggest they had hauled far more ore than passengers. Their apparent leader was a tall old red-bearded human male who looked wide across the shoulders and loose in the gut, well weathered and deeply tired. “We want parley with your leader,” he said.

  Sirty looked him up and down. “And who makes this request?”

  “Name’s Thak Val Zsing,” the newcomer said.

  “You’re looking for me,” Nate said, stepping forward.

  Thak Val Zsing looked from Sirty to Nate, and a humorless grin split his face. His teeth were broad, cracked, and brownish.

  “Recruits, sir?” Sirty asked.

  Val Zsing’s expression soured. “Didn’t say that.”

  “Well then—?”

  “We’re Desert Wind, and if we like what we see, we’re here to fight.”

  So. These were the anarchists who had been so brutally crushed by Cestian security forces just months ago. If they were even a quarter of their former strength, he was a Jawa. And they were ready to fight again? Brave if not smart. “Even Coruscant has heard of your courage.”

  Thak Val Zsing nodded, satisfied by that answer. “You know who we are. We’re not so sure about you yet.” The men and women behind him nodded. Nate scanned their clothing and armaments. Old. Badly patched. Their skin was ragged from fatigue and malnutrition. It looked as if their weapons were in better shape than they were. Still, tired and half broken they may have been, but these were people holding a serious grudge.

  “Every one of us is prepared to die to overthrow this decadent system.”

  Ah, then. They had every reason to blame the government for their problems, but he couldn’t use Desert Wind in its present form: they were too brittle and angry. This was a delicate situation, and he had to play it carefully. “Maybe you’ve misunderstood our intentions,” he said. “We’re not here to overthrow the legal government. We are here to ensure that that government obeys the Republic’s rules and regulations. As citizens of the Republic, you have full right to redress of grievances.”

  Thak Val Zsing pulled at his crimson beard with his fingers and spat into the dust. “The Families couldn’t care less about your rules. You talk pretty, and offer us nothing.”

  That was a perfectly accurate answer, and Nate felt a bit flustered.

  The Jedi suddenly appeared behind him. “I offer the opportunity to serve your Republic,” General Fisto said. Nate had been so fixed on the members of Desert Wind that he hadn’t heard a sound.

  The vast dark pools of the Nautolan’s eyes captivated the anarchists. Thak Val Zsing was the first to break out of the trance; the others followed swiftly and began to grumble. “Serve how?”

  “Come,” the general said urgently. “Fight with us.”

  “In other words, take your orders.”

  “Be our comrades.”

  The sincerity in his words was mesmerizing, his Nautolan charisma doubly effective on this desert world. Most of Desert Wind’s ragged members seemed to feel it like a blow to the chest.

  Most, but not all. Thak Val Zsing shook his head. “Nope. Don’t like this. We’ve heard enough promises, and taken enough orders. We’ll win our own freedom.”

  “If you act on your own, you become common criminals,” Fisto said. “With us, you are patriots.” Hard words, but these folk were at the end of their resources. They had nothing to lose.

  The ragged members of Desert Wind looked from Thak Val Zsing to Kit Fisto and back again. One devil they knew, one they didn’t. Like most creatures, they went with what they knew. They would continue to harry the government, and they would be eventually caught, or jailed, or killed.

  And that was the end of it, with nothing that anyone could really do to stop it.

  General Fisto extended his hand to Thak Val Zsing. “Wait,” he said.

  “What?” Val Zsing was tired, but also proud.

  “I could offer your people clemency if they work with us. When our job is complete your crimes will be expunged, and you’ll return to your mines and farms and shops. I would not have you throw your lives away.”

  Nate knew Val Zsing had to be warring with himself. This was a good man, but too weary to have much optimism left in him; he had b
een told too many lies to believe a Jedi, or a Jedi’s clone soldiers. He could hear the old man’s thoughts as clearly as if he spoke them aloud.

  “What do the others say?” General Fisto asked.

  “They say they trust me,” Thak Val Zsing said, puffing his chest out. “And I don’t trust you. I only came here because they asked me to. But now that I’ve seen ya …”

  The general gazed across the faces of Desert Wind, then turned back to Thak Val Zsing. “These are your people. How did you win their hearts?”

  “By blood,” he said. Nate could see it in Thak Val Zsing’s eyes. Despite his bravado the man wanted to believe, but couldn’t.

  “I see,” the Nautolan replied.

  “There might be another way,” Thak Val Zsing said slowly. The battered warriors straightened and stared at him.

  They looked at each other as if the confrontation was about to turn into something physically unpleasant, and then Thak Val Zsing’s shoulders slumped.

  Once, perhaps, the old man had been a great fighter, but those days were long past. Still, the members of his group looked up to him, and respected him as they would a father. Doubtless he’d shepherded them through more than one tight squeeze.

  How could the dynamic be altered? What resolution could there be?

  More than anyone else, Thak Val Zsing seemed to understand the stakes. One last action. One last judgment. It might mean destruction or salvation for his ragtag band. But what to do?

  “Thirty years ago I took command of this group,” Val Zsing said, his eyes locked with the general’s. “You could guide them, if you were willing to pass the same test.”

  “Test?”

  He nodded. “Brother Fate?” he said quietly.

  A gray-tufted old X’Ting male in brown robes walked over. He was accompanied by a somewhat bulkier X’Ting female, also in brown robes. They carried a woven reed basket suspended between them.

  The basket was large enough to hold a human infant, and that was what Nate initially supposed it held. He had heard of extremist groups who worshiped some child or infant, supposing it the avatar of a god, or the reincarnation of some sacred soul.