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template, and that meant they were worthy of respect.
    “Good hunting,” Forry said to him.
    “Good hunting,” Nate replied. Then he paused. “You been given your next op yet?”
    “Nope,” Forry said. “Dealing me in?”
    “If you want it.”
    “One hundred percent. Let me check in and out, get my sack and tac.”
    “You’ll have orders within the hour.” A crushing handshake, and Forry went his way.
    Brother gone, Nate opened a window. “Request status.” A moment’s pause, and then medical stats blurred past. He nodded in approval. CT-36/732, nicknamed Sirty, had not been wounded by the JK. His nervous system had been momentarily overloaded, and he had consequently suffered a few hours of irregular heart rhythm. Nothing alarming, but of course he had been taken to a med droid for observation.
    Sirty would be in fighting shape soon, and would make a perfect team member: the only trooper who had fought the JK.
    “Special request CT-36/732 be seconded to the Cestus operation.”
    A “ Request approved ” message bleeped, and then the screen closed.
    For hours he studied, trying to get the kind of random background intel never covered in standard tac briefings. One just never knew which bit of data might save one’s butt once the capacitors started sparking. Nate himself would be dead now, blown to jelly in the battle on Geonosis, if he hadn’t studied power-cell recharge cycles and subsequently recognized when one of the wheel droids was entering a reflux pattern. Its capacitor’s whine was barely audible, but he’d taken a chance, leapt from cover, and blasted it, saving five of his cohort.
    That little maneuver resulted in a week’s free food at the base cantina and a fast track to his captaincy.
    He dictated notes into his personal file for transfer to the Cestus-bound transport ship. For hours he continued, fiercely maintaining focus.
    The lives of his brothers and, more important, the honor of the GAR were his to protect. And even more than that—this was his game, the game he was born and bred to play. In a way that no outsider could ever understand, this was fun.
    Chapter Eight
    Only two hours remained.
    Nate and six of his brothers stood in a bricked, walled-off area outside the ribbed arch of the barracks, beneath Vandor-3’s densely starred night sky, performing a cohort ship-out ceremony. Whenever a trooper headed off on assignment, his cohort wished him not only good luck, but good-bye. In the context of a trooper’s life, this was more practicality than pessimism.
    If he did return, congratulations on a job well done.
    If he did not, well… what needed to be said had been said.
    “It is the proudest duty of a trooper to serve and seek a good death,” said Glorii Profus, their Kaminoan mentor.
    The graceful, silver-skinned Profus was a combination psychiatric and spiritual adviser. Although clones never yielded to their fear, it would be wrong to think that they never experienced it. Emotion was as valuable as blasters and bombs, death an inevitable part of war itself. No trooper could, through any amount of skill or strength, avoid that unpleasant reality. And always, on all planets and through all times, soldiers had asked the same question: What if I die? And for a trooper, the most comforting answer was: You will die. But the GAR goes on forever.
    The Kaminoan gracefully arched his long silver neck and raised his cup, brimming with Tallian wine, the finest in the quadrant. His voice was cultured and comforting. “From water you are born. In fire you die. Your bodies seed the stars,” he said, the ritual words that had comforted a million clones before they marched to their deaths, and might comfort a billion more.
    They raised their cups as one. “We seed the stars!” they said, together.
    And then they drank.
    Chapter Nine
    The Jedi Temple dominated Coruscant’s cityscape for kilometers around, its five towering spires piercing the clouds like a titan’s outstretched