The Cestus Deception

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 twentyfour

  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 lifegiving

  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 lifeforms.

  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