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,
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