The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

Personnel files carried two kinds of carets marking a trooper for special treatment by Assignments. A white caret meant the trooper either had a valuable specialty or that the trooper had been noted as particularly valuable because of his or her behavior as a member of the Frisian Defense Forces.

A red caret indicated a trooper who’d had a service-incurred rough time, so Assignments was to cut an appropriate amount of slack. Treating veterans well is a matter of good business for a military force and the state which employs the force, though Avenial wouldn’t have cared to be the person who stated publicly that Colonel— President—Hammer had no interest in the subject beyond good business.

Daun’s personnel file bore both white and red carets.

The technician’s complexion was dark—darker than Avenial’s, though Mediterranean rather than African stock seemed to have predominated in his ancestry. He was short and slight, but the psych profile didn’t indicate a dose of the Little Guy Syndrome that had made many of Avenial’s assignment tasks harder than they needed to be. Most of that sort of fellow migrated to combat arms anyway, where they either learned to control the chip on their shoulder—

Or lost chip, shoulder, and life. Hopefully before they had time to screw things up too bad.

“I told the lady out front,” Daun said, nodding toward the bullpen. “I won’t serve with, with indigs. If that means changing my specialty, then all right. I don’t care about rank, you can have that.”

Avenial nodded. His eyes were on the screen canted slightly toward him from an open surface of the otherwise cluttered top of his desk. He wasn’t reading the data displayed there, just using it as an excuse to be noncommittal for a moment.

The clerk who’d dealt with Daun—hadn’t dealt with Daun—was new to the section. She might work out, but Avenial hadn’t been impressed so far. This particular problem would have been a stretch for any of his underlings, however.

“Well, I don’t think we want you to change your specialty, Daun,” Avenial said mildly. “We need sensor techs, and it looks like you’re about as good as they come. In line for a third stripe, I see.”

He crooked a grin at the applicant. As an attempt to build rapport through flattery, it was a bust.

“I told you, I don’t care about rank!” Daun said. “I’ll resign before I serve with indigs. I’ll resign!”

“Well, we don’t want you to resign,” Avenial said. “So we’re going to fix things, like I said.”

He gave Daun another kind of look—hard, professional, appraising. “You say you won’t serve with indigs,” Avenial said. “What other assignment requirements do you have?”

“None,” Daun said, meeting the section head’s eyes. “None at all.”

Avenial smiled again. “Fine,” he said. “That tells me what I’ve got to work with. Plenty for the purpose, plenty.”

He touched his keypad, changing screens in sequence after only a second or two of scanning the contents of each.

“The lady said she could assign me to a Frisian unit,” Daun explained, “but once I was out in the field, the needs of the service prevail. If the—the unit commander decided I was the only one who could do a job, it didn’t matter what I thought about it. And in my specialty, they might well put me in a sector staffed by indigs who couldn’t handle the hardware themselves.”

“She told you the truth,” Avenial agreed approvingly.

Enlisted people expected to be crapped on and lied to. It seemed to Avenial that some of them almost begged for it. It went with the image. He’d had troopers make false statements about a pending assignment, statements they must have known were false, in the obvious hope that by saying nothing Avenial would give their lie validity.

Avenial didn’t do that, and nobody in Avenial’s section did it more than once that Avenial heard about. He was funny that way; but then, he slept at night without knocking himself into a coma on booze or gage. Life has a lot of trade-offs.

Avenial’s finger paused on the next screen key. “Umm,” he said. He looked up at Daun. “What do you know about survey teams, kid?” he asked.

“I can learn,” Daun said crisply. His expression changed slightly. “So it’ll be out of sensors after all?”

“Hell, no, they need sensor techs,” Avenial replied. “Now, mind, everybody on a survey team better be able to do more than their base specialty. How’s your marksmanship?”

Daun shrugged, smiled—a little wryly. “I’ve been practicing since my last assignment on Maedchen. Not great, but I’m getting better.”

The lines of Daun’s face flowed naturally into smiles, but this was the first time his nervousness had permitted one. He hadn’t believed Avenial when he said that it was going to be all right. Well, they’d been lied to and lied to, why should they expect this warrant leader to be different?

“You see, kid,” Avenial explained, “your specialty’s too valuable for me to, say, reclassify you as a cook. Besides, if you’re that good at running sensors—”

Daun smiled again. He’d loosened up, sure enough.