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

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, the place between sleeping and waking, to