The Cestus Deception by Steven Barnes Read Free Book Online

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