The Cestus Deception by Steven Barnes Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    Chapter Five
    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 where 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