“ ’Cause we’re all heroes,” came a reply.

“Yeah. We’ll all get medals for heroism,” someone else said, sourly.

“What’s the matter, soldier, don’t you like the army?”

“Maybe he’s not happy in his profession.”

“Well, you know what they say: You’ve gotta be born to it. ”

At that they all laughed, even the one who complained. Their laughter seemed harshly bitter to me.

“Can it, you mutts,” growled their sergeant. “Find your places and strap in. This isn’t a joyride.”

Kids. From my physical condition I was not much older than they, but I knew I had led many lives, died and been revived time and again. The Skorpis were bred for battle, were they? I had been created for battle. Aten built me to be a warrior, a hunter, a killer.

And so had these youngsters, Aten’s briefing told me. Cloned from long-dead ancestors, gestated in artificial wombs, they were trained from birth to be soldiers and nothing else. They were raised in military camps, never seeing anything except military life, never allowed to mix with the civilian society that they were created to defend. They knew nothing but war, except for the brief periods between battles when they were trained for their next mission.

Some of their senior officers had been born naturally, to normal families, and joined the military voluntarily. But very few, even among the top officers, had homes and families outside the military. Like me, these troopers had been created to fight, to kill, and then to fight again until they themselves were killed.

I remembered the Sacred Band of ancient Thebes, the warrior troop made of pairs of lovers, men who would die fighting rather than let their partners down. And they had died fighting, down to the last one, when Philip’s Macedonians met them in the battle of Chaeronea. I had been there with Philip and his son Alexander. I had taken part in the hand-to-hand butchery.