Barracks.
This is, no joke, a barracks straight out of my homeworld, just dressed up for the futurism of some galaxy people around here call the Sky River.
Why exactly “river,” and why it’s supposedly “heavenly,” nobody seems in a hurry to explain, though I never really knew why my own galaxy back home got called the Milky Way either.
Sarlacc take me if I know.
About a month’s gone by since we got sorted, and here I am flat on my back, staring up at the bunk above me sagging under my neighbor’s weight, doubling as my ceiling.
I lie there thinking until the wake up siren goes off.
Damn thing.
What’s actually changed in a month?
Almost nothing.
Wake up, wash and toilet run, food and table run, the parade ground I’ve come to hate, a trip to what we’ve started calling the sarlacc pit of a bathroom, chased along now by the training center’s own AI, then more physical training, where the Master Sergeant seems determined to turn us into actual cyborgs, squeezing every last drop our small bodies can give.
After that, the bare minimum is crawling to the dining hall, and the ambitious goal is passing out somewhere on the barracks floor.
There’s exactly five hundred of us now.
Five hundred and twenty four, to be precise, the whole batch.
And here’s the thing, I remember being scared of falling asleep before.
Turns out nobody cares either way.
The most I got out of our sergeant yesterday was a flat, “Not bad, CT-134, you might make a decent clone pilot.” Me.
A ground pounder in both lives, and now suddenly a pilot?
Guess it’s time I stopped fooling around on the flight sims.
Funny thing about this place: in the training center you can basically do whatever interests you.
Half an hour of poking through the interface and I’d found walker combat sims and a couple of flight programs.
Messed around, flew a fighter across the screen a few times, and boom, apparently that makes me clone pilot material.
Fine.
I’ll hit the repair databases specifically today then, make myself clone plumber material instead.
Ha.
No, seriously, why does he keep needling me about it?
Every other sentence out of him lately is some version of “one thirty four, one thirty four,” like I’ve done something wrong.
We still haven’t been issued weapons.
Manduke, that’s what I’ve started calling our Mandalorian, mentioned it’ll happen soon.
Makes sense, given how he runs us into the ground; I wouldn’t hand us weapons either.
Even training ones.
According to the base computer, the practice carbines are real weapons underneath, just rigged down to stun settings.
Meaning even a “pew pew” from one of those still won’t feel great.
Wait for it, you yellow armored freak.
I’ll get you back somehow.
Pure spite, probably.
Anyway, time to peel myself off this mattress; my internal clock’s about to go off, and I hate the crowd in the washroom.
And here’s a secret, shh, I actually train in there, because it’s the one spot in the whole barracks without cameras watching everything.
Found that out by accident.
Well, sort of by accident; I mean, I remembered it.
Feel the power, Luke?
Heh.
No, nothing like that.
What I mean is, I remember there’s some kind of Force related nonsense in this universe that specially trained Jedi types are constantly using to wipe each other out.
It’s a lot more grounded than that for the rest of us, though.
Based on what I remember from the films, our real opposition is droids.
A machine’s aim and reaction time will always outpace a human’s, no matter how much they try to build terminators out of us.
I checked, and the target recognition systems here are solid.
You slot the right chip into a weapon, and you’ve basically got a built in guidance system.
Range is tiny though, a couple meters at best with that kind of hardware.
So step one, before any of that, is just getting faster and more accurate myself.
So, thinking about how to actually survive here long term, I dug back through everything from my old life.
And, well, I spent a long stretch cursing myself out over it in the worst language I had.
Realistically, I’d probably still be alive back home; I never would’ve ended up in this body if I’d just thought things through a little more back then.
Too late for that now, but at least nobody’s going to erase me here just for being careless.
The self discipline system I used to run on back home, we called it a combat trance.
Turns out the parade ground helps with that more than you’d expect, however dumb that sounds.
When you’re marching and your mind switches off, there’s a point where you drop into pure focus on the motion.
A kind of moving meditation.
That’s just the entry point, though.
What I actually need is the full combat trance, where the body runs on instinct and honed reflex with total precision.
So, carefully, I slip over toward the sinks behind the wall, lucky there’s just an open archway there instead of a door.
Doesn’t look like anyone noticed.
More training, technically.
I start easing into the half trance.
Thoughts go short.
Clipped.
Like a round fired.
Precise.
Corner spot, between the sinks.
Quiet the mind.
No flash, just function.
Into stance.
The body doesn’t remember.
The mind does.
That’s the hard part.
And that’s control.
I am water.
A step, and an open palm rises from my chest, feeling the air ahead of it.
Weightless.
Fluid.
The body flows into a turn, legs shifting with some current only I can feel.
I can’t see it, but I feel it.
The body bends, hands catching an invisible hold, pushing off, flowing into a grip.
I am everything around me.
Tilt, turn, strike, transition.
I am the shadow, I am the light.
Jump, flip, land soft, feet meeting the cold floor, roll out of it.
Gone.
Back on my feet, transition, stance, hands still at my sides.
Again.
I am water.
Smoother this time.
Quiet.
Again.
And also, I’m a clumsy mess who’s botched every step he could.
And there’s the siren.
Morning, Kell.
Breathe in, breathe out.
Settle down.
Time to wash up.
Right, so, according to the computer, we’ll be issued weapons soon, and team based drills will start after that.
Which means platoons and reshuffling can’t be far behind.
What does that mean for me?
If the neighboring company’s telling the truth, and I’ve got no reason to doubt them, we’re about to get folded in with a fresh batch of new clones.
Some of us will get pulled for specialized training, and it keeps going like that until we’re fully grown.
Supposedly that’s about a year out.
After that, growth slows to normal, and we start looking like young copies of the original template.
I saw his photo in the database once, the only real image of him in there.
Worth mentioning, you can pull up basically anything in there during class.
Military stuff especially; they’ve got just about everything.
Or almost everything, since I never did find any access to a wider network, and cadets aren’t allowed to communicate with each other during lessons either, but within what’s actually there, it’s thorough.
I tested it out yesterday.
Asked what the weak points are on a Geonosian.
Figured that’ll be our first real fight.
The computer stalled for a second, said no data available.
Today, first thing, the moment I logged in with my ID, my earlier question had apparently expanded the results, since now there’s a whole new section on dealing with almost every insectoid species in the galaxy.
All sixteen thousand seven hundred twenty three of them.
Worth noting, not every species had full entries.
Funniest part, across nearly all of them, the recommendation was the same, gas them from a distance with something like industrial strength bug spray.
Grenades, basically.
Some kind of convention against chemical weapons?
Don’t get too excited.
Not in this galaxy, apparently.
So, we’re getting reshuffled soon.
Where does that leave me?
Barely any free time, not much room to actually improve myself or dig back through what I remember from my old life, and our sergeant keeps looking at me like I’m interesting.
Don’t ask how I can tell; you can’t see anything under that helmet, but I’ve felt him paying particular attention to me since training started.
I don’t talk much with my “brothers,” if you can call it that, and honestly, what would we even talk about?
Our batch just isn’t sociable; it’s obvious even at mealtimes.
But that pilot comment from Manduke is still bugging me.
I don’t want to fly.
From what I remember of my old life, pilots are a certain type, full of themselves, a whole separate breed that looks down on everyone else.
Bad stereotype, sure, especially since we’re all supposed to be brothers here, but…
I’d rather bank on small unit tactics and sabotage work behind enemy lines.
We’ll see how it actually shakes out, though.
This same paste is really starting to wear on me.
If it weren’t for the computer terminals in class, I’d have lost it by now.
Could use a haircut too; my hair’s gotten long enough to fall in my eyes and get in the way.
Time here just drags on, same texture as the slop they feed us.
I can feel myself getting a little duller, even though I shouldn’t be.
Nobody to actually talk to, nothing worth talking about anyway.
Motivation’s basically zero when you’ve got no idea what any of this is even building toward.
Never thought I’d hear myself say this, but honestly, I’d almost rather the war just start already.
At least that’d be something different.
com/Hezzario