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,
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