Early on, I was thrilled.
Special forces, the elite, only the stars ranked higher than us, damn it, Alphas…
They’re something else, honestly; there’s no other way to put it.
Not in the sense that they tear each other apart over nothing, but just in general, as people.
If our original template turns out anything like them, I’ll quietly take him out myself before some Jedi washout takes his head clean off with whatever’s handy.
I’d been picturing grown, hardened men, the kind whose training alone could put an enemy into a coma with one look.
Surprise, surprise.
Hello to the same old pen, just with three dozen bunks instead.
Hello, kids.
Well, fine, they’re a bit older than our batch, look maybe seventeen to nineteen, though who really knows with clones.
But their sense of humor tracks with that too.
More on that later.
Naively, I figured being some kind of chosen one would at least get me somewhere closer to fresh air.
Even one window.
A crack in the wall, even.
There’s no way they’ve got enough mats to keep this many people bunked up down here.
But that’s the kind of thing a person expects.
I’m a clone.
You just endure it.
In theory, this is supposed to be an elite fighting unit.
In practice, who knows.
This walking tin can, this golden armored menace, may his own helmet choke him, hauled me down, dramatic pause, a few floors lower still.
At this point, just hand me a pickaxe already, and I’ll go mining for whatever they’ve got down here besides water and more clones.
Or a heavier pickaxe, and I’ll go hunting Kaminoans instead.
I’m clearly the most seasoned fish in this pond, and apparently that makes me leadership material.
Ha.
This whole situation is going to drive me insane eventually.
Fine, I get it with the rest of these chip-headed kids; they’ve never seen daylight in their lives and don’t know any different.
But I did.
Not just daylight, the whole concept of an actual future, even if I never really saw much of it myself.
I’d kill for a bar of chocolate that doesn’t even exist here anymore.
Purely out of principle, I’ll probably end up killing someone eventually.
That must have been written all over my face the moment we got “introduced” to the A series clones.
AA-01, to be precise.
Hardened, seasoned types, mouths on them like you wouldn’t believe.
The one stretch of memory I’ve got that no implant or upbringing touched.
Spoiled, entitled brats.
Rude, thuggish troublemakers, minus the accent that the crowd back home always had, and without laughing like they’d been smoking something.
Master Kal walked me into the new pen, introduced me, announced an hour of free time before classes started, and left me standing there in the fog.
Great, hello, elite unit.
Now for the measuring up, and probably some beatings.
Under a set of silent, heavy stares from these lab grown miscarriages, none of whom even bothered standing up, I walked over to the bunk that had apparently been assigned to me.
“Hey, kid, what exactly do you think you’re doing here?” Oh, there it is, someone leaning down from the top bunk already closing in.
No, they’re probably not actually like that; this has to be some kind of test.
That’s honestly what I thought at first.
“Hello, I’m clone CT-134.
Pleasure to meet you; hope we work well together,” I said, smiling neutrally.
I quietly shifted one leg back, just in case.
You know.
Just in case.
This idiot tried kicking me in the head.
Tried being the key word.
I step back, grab his leg, and calmly bring it down, teeth first, right onto the corner of the next bunk.
Not too hard.
Won’t kill him.
And now they’re all going to come at me.
Whatever.
I’m too angry at this point to care.
Let’s see what’s still in the tank from my old life.
I’m hoping they won’t actually let us kill each other in here; cameras are hanging in plain sight, the first thing I noticed walking in.
Long ago, back in my old life, a lifetime and a galaxy away, I trained in wushu.
Plenty of other disciplines came after that, but the fluidity of that first style sank in somewhere deep, almost soul level.
Sure, I could’ve shown off a couple flashy moves from an old nanquan Shaolin form, if this had been some kind of exhibition match.
Instead, it turned into a standard brawl, army hand to hand rules maybe, except not exactly a fair one on one fight.
And there was nowhere to run.
No room for a clean mawashi geri here; they’d have snapped something important trying.
They came at me from every side at once, just piled on with sheer weight and dragged me down.
Pretty sure I got a solid kick into someone’s groin.
Enjoy explaining that one later.
Ow.
Damn it.
Kidneys…
They worked me over for a good stretch, and they meant it.
Fast in reality, but it never feels fast when you’re the one on the receiving end.
Techniques, strikes, all of it went out the window pretty quickly.
At some point I realized I didn’t have the mass or strength to handle even two or three of them at once, so I just started biting, clawing, hitting whatever I could reach.
Right about when they were ready to turn me into scrap, still on the ground, Master Kal came flying into the room and scattered the whole pile with two or three hits.
So now we’re sitting in a ragged row of busted up faces outside the infirmary, pressing bacta patches onto split skin, trying not to make eye contact.
Kal stands in front of us like a statue, barely even seems to be breathing.
Not a word out of him.
Would’ve killed him to say something, ease the tension a little?
Though I doubt it’d even show through that sealed up armor of his.
Learned that much back in the nursery, watching the training videos.
I sit there, worked over and processing.
Got some anger out; that’s good.
Met the team, also technically good.
Doubt they’re going to accept me as one of their own, though; that’s both good and bad.
Good, since I’m used to working solo.
Bad, since it probably means getting picked on a lot going forward.
Which, fine, also good in its own way.
Constant vigilance, as some mad-eyed wizard from that boarding school franchise used to say.
Whatever his name was.
It’s genuinely rough, though, if I drop the bravado and adrenaline talk for a second.
I’m not used to this.
Not even close.
Think about it, in real combat, if you burn bridges with the people you’re going into a fight beside, you’re a corpse.
Nobody says a word to you, nobody does anything outright cruel; they just don’t cover you when it counts.
And you don’t act up around armed people either; you either do your job right or you stay out of the way entirely.
And this is supposed to be the elite?
Fine, let’s say it’s still early.
But has this tin can seriously not explained any of that to them yet?
Or is this just how he builds a unit?
Doesn’t feel like there’s much of a plan here.
All I can do is hope for the best.
The wake up trick didn’t work again.
Well, “wake up trick,” meaning trying to get up before the Alphas trying to quietly smother me even wake up themselves, dash to the bathroom, then line up for the dining hall.
And this is where the perks of my new situation started showing.
Attached to our unit’s quarters was a separate dining room with a food synthesizer, a gym packed with equipment, punching bags, something like a mat area, and a training range.
The famous Citadel.
Access was open any time, for our group at least.
You’d walk up to the console, dial in a difficulty setting, and run training droids off stun rounds for as long as you liked.
Or rather, as long as your body could take it, since the rounds aren’t rubber, and at high settings a single hit twists you up completely from the shock, roughly the equivalent of ten thousand volts through a simulated layer of armor.
The wake up trick failed because of suspicious movement above me and off to the side.
Key thing now: don’t move your eyes, or they’ll know you’re awake and pile on together.
Judging by the breathing, the nearest bunk’s about a meter off.
Ready.
Now.
With a sharp double kick, I shove the nearest Alpha off me, roll under the bed, and bolt.
Ha, the idiots blocked my exit route together, that’s a mistake.
One good hook and both of them go down; my leg’s going to hurt for this later, but forget it, I can feel three more jumping over my bunk behind me, up and moving.
One more meter, come on, you idiots.
One landed on his feet; two more grabbed onto him.
Come on, come on, I can taste it!
In one last desperate lunge, my hand slaps the door release for the dining hall.
Yes.
I win.
“Ugh,” someone behind me groans, clearly annoyed, “he won again.” Thanks, Captain Obvious.
No idea what these guys were even betting on exactly, but the rule is you have to hit that door release before they wrestle you down.
Loser eats whatever breakfast the winner decides to give them.
Working the food synthesizer turned out to be simpler than it sounds.
We still get the same monotonous paste, but you can actually pick the flavor now.
And trust me, breakfast that tastes vaguely like dried garbage flavored porridge is still more entertaining than the local chicken substitute.
Only downside: the machine has no concept of chocolate.
I’m still holding out hope and experimenting, though.
I turn around, ten servings lined up already.
“Alright, guys, unforgettable breakfast today.” “Tear you apart, one thirty four, how’d you weasel out of it again?” “Company secret, twenty two, company secret,” I say with a grin, standing up.
“I asked you to call me Taros.” “Kal can call you whatever he wants, to me you’re Take Two, end of story,” I say smugly, heading into the dining room.
“He’s still sore about not getting a callsign yet.
This one’s Nate.
Different batch too, I think, CS series or something, don’t quote me on it.” “Don’t care about your callsigns, Reaper, he’s eating whatever I hand him today.
Yeah, I’m the villain here.” Though honestly, sometimes there were genuinely decent additions in there that ended up improving the whole menu for everyone by accident.
“At least you eat what you serve yourself, that’s fair,” said another one, Fordo, I think.
I walk up to the food synthesizer with a grin.
Alright, let’s see what I can whip up for you all today.
Heh heh.
Turns out it was surprisingly easy to make friends with this crew.
All it took was feeding them.
Honestly caught myself off guard with that one.
After a couple of days of nonstop hazing and beatdowns, they noticed I was spending longer than everyone else at the terminal, quietly poking around at something.
The fact is, I was the first one to figure out this machine could actually give the standard paste some kind of flavor.
I’d been in a mood, started poking through the menu just to have something to do, and stumbled onto it.
Before I joined them, they’d all been eating the standard slop, just plain paste in various levels of sweet or sour.
Digging through an absurd number of unfamiliar dish names in the flavor menu was fun, for a while, until I realized none of it changed the texture or the color at all.
Still, good to know, in theory, what a farra puree is supposed to taste like.
Never know when I might end up dining with the Queen of Naboo and need to tell a real farra dish from a fake one.
Wouldn’t want that to be the thing that trips me up.
Not even going to get into her formal wardrobe.
Anyway.
Not like any of that actually matters here.
We’re simple, us clones; we want more food, fewer hits, and if an instructor drops dead, that’s basically a holiday.
The main thing is staying clear of getting kicked by your own squadmates.
A few weeks on, the attempts to jump me had turned into a genuine competition; whoever gets there first gets to feed me.
That ended abruptly, same day, actually, when Master Kal brought in a few more clones from other batches and put the whole group through the Citadel on maximum pain settings.
Educational.
And it hurt.
In fairness, I made it maybe ten meters into that particular assault course.
With that kind of incoming fire, getting even that far felt heroic.
I still went farthest out of the group.
The Alphas all frowned about it afterward in unison, but the resentment stuck around, and since we had nothing better to do with our downtime, my suggestion for turning it into an ongoing competition landed instantly.
That’s how our little tactical survival games started.
Kal ran us ragged after that, one after another.
The first couple of months were brutal.
Conditioning, hand to hand, knife work.
Around then I also picked up on a quiet secret.
How did I end up back in my pen after passing out face down in the food that one time?
Simple.
Clones from batches that never made it through training, or broke down somewhere along the way but didn’t lose their minds entirely, worked here as support staff.
They looked just like the rest of us, only their job was different.
Whenever one of us dropped during training, they’d carry us, quiet and gentle, almost fatherly about it, back to our bunks or the infirmary.
Getting us settled in if needed.
Used to make me feel like royalty, honestly, back before I actually built up any real muscle.
And I did build up plenty, worth saying.
By now I didn’t stand out much in the crowd, except maybe in height.
You know how the Alpha series actually differs from the rest of us?
Hell if I know, probably barely at all.
That’s the honest answer.
I never spotted anything obviously different about them.
They just liked to say they were genetically closest to the original template.
And that’s really it.
From what I could tell, any cadet who showed enough sharpness could end up in group A.
Just as easily as getting bumped down to assault infantry or somewhere else entirely.
There’s a lot more range here than anything I remember from the shows or movies.
After breakfast, the Citadel was waiting for us as usual, and today Kal decided to throw in a surprise.
Another one of those “do it or die trying” exercises.
Honestly, the Mandalorians remind me a lot of soldiers back home in temperament; dying isn’t considered a valid excuse for not finishing an order.
Master Kal wouldn’t let us take off our gear, kept us in full kit, carbines and all, and marched us out for a run.
Calling it a jog would be generous, we ran through the lower level corridors of our conveyor style base.
Usually that kind of run just ends with everyone collapsing from exhaustion.
Today Kal changed the route slightly.
So there we were, running up a mild incline through a technical corridor for a solid ten minutes, gasping, but moving.
Kal was shouting something at the stragglers from up ahead, and then, I genuinely couldn’t believe what I was smelling.
The long forgotten scent of salty sea air hit me, carried on gusts of wind from somewhere off to the side.
I took a deep breath and nearly knocked my own breather clean off.
We all spilled out onto a mooring platform ramp together and just collapsed the second the order came to stand down.
I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye, the platform had to be a hundred meters above the water.
Rain.
Actual rain.
No way…
after all this time locked underground…
I can’t get enough of it.
“Welcome outside, cadets.” I remember wanting fresh air once.
Wish granted.
Congratulations, Gray.
I flipped up the visor on my training helmet and just dropped flat onto my back, right where I stood, letting the heavy, constant rain from Kamino’s dark, leaden sky hit me full in the face.
I’m happy.
com/Hezzario