by David Drake
Besides, there was nothing else Sten Moden could do except watch helplessly the destruction caused by his failure to do his duty.
The edges of the crumbled guard shack were jagged rather than sharp. Moden should have been wearing gloves for the job. The pain didn’t bother him, but the film of blood was slippery until it dried to tackiness.
Moden grasped a shard, found it set firmly, and stepped to the side to take instead the 80-kilo block that held the previous one in place. He lifted and threw the block aside. Filkerson’s head and torso were beneath. The man moaned softly.
A bunker on the other side of the dump erupted in orange flame. The initial open-air blast had shifted the armored doors of some bunkers. With the volume of sparks and larger chunks of burning debris, it was inevitable that the fire would spread.
The Lord only knew how it had started. Perhaps a fuze had been defective, perhaps a ruptured membrane had brought two reactive compounds in contact. Perhaps there’d been no manufacturing flaw whatever, but one of the crates had been crushed with disastrous results when the load was dumped unceremoniously.
If lightning had struck the pyrotechnics, it would still have been Sten Moden’s fault. The only reason the load was in the dump this night was that he had accepted it improperly.
Moden gripped the slab lying on Filkerson’s legs, so that the whole weight wouldn’t shear down on flesh like the blade of a roller mill. “It’s okay, Sergeant,” he murmured.
Only when Moden spoke did he realize how loud the background rumble was. The ground trembled at a low frequency that tried to loosen his bowels.
Filkerson’s eyes opened. “Via, Cap’n,” he said. “Get me out of here, right?”
He was still speaking on the unit push. Despite the radio augmentation, Moden understood the words only because he watched Filkerson’s lips form them.
Another bunker blew up, belching the roof of steel planks and tonnes of dirt overburden. Moden staggered forward. He turned and lifted Filkerson onto his back. His left hand cushioned the man’s buttocks while his right gripped Filkerson’s arms, flopped over Moden’s shoulders and across his chest.
Moden stepped carefully through the tumble of slabs and started for the nearby gate at a trot.
A bunker in the center of the dump detonated. The shock wave set off three more bunkers simultaneously. The cataclysmic blast hurled the two men over the four-meter-high outwork protecting the entrance.
The sleet of debris riding the wave front chewed off Sten Moden’s left arm, but Filkerson’s body saved the captain’s torso.
Nieuw Friesland
Tech II Niko Daun was one of the tough jobs for the Enlisted Assignments Bureau. He’d rejected his automatic assignment, and the first live clerk he’d seen hadn’t been able to help either.
That put Daun across the desk from Warrant Leader Avenial, the section head. Daun’s quick gaze danced out through the clear wall at the open bullpen where most of the section’s requests were processed, then back to Avenial. The technician looked nervous and very, very determined.
Avenial smiled. “Don’t worry, Daun,” he said. “If you get as far as me, the problem gets fixed. That’s as true as if the Lord carved it on stone.”
And it was. Not every disgruntled trooper got to the section head, but it was Avenial’s truthful boast that he never, in seven years in the post, had needed to pass an applicant up the line to the Brigadier in charge of the bureau.
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.
“—then it’s what you like to do, so why should we fuck with it? Right?”
“No argument, mister,” Daun said.
“So the trick’s to put you somewhere that you’re under Frisian command at all times,” Avenial continued. “That’s a survey team. Until the survey team makes its assessment, there’s no indig employers to report to. Even if your unit commander’s an asshole,
he can’t out-place you. You see?”
Daun nodded enthusiastic agreement.
“Now, the catch is,” Avenial said, “you’re out with—”
His eyes scanned for a figure on the screen.
“—five other guys, FDF troops. That’s not like being in the middle of an armored battalion. There’s not supposed to be any shooting going on, shooting at you, I mean. But I can’t tell you it’s safe.”
He raised an eyebrow at the technician.
Daun shook his head and smiled. “Mister Avenial,” he said, “I’m not …”
His hands flipped palms-up, then down again, in a Macht nichts gesture.
“I could have gotten a job with a communications firm, I could have found something safe,” he said. “I wanted the, you know, the travel.”
Daun meant danger, but he was ashamed to say it. Smart enough to be ashamed that he was a young man who wanted to be able to say he’d been there, the place civilians hadn’t been. Ashamed to be proud of being what he was, a member of the finest military force in the human universe.
But proud nonetheless, as surely as Jumbo Avenial was.
Daun swallowed. “I’m not afraid,” he concluded. “But I won’t be any place that I have to depend on indigs.”
Avenial nodded. “Just wanted to be clear about the situation,” he said.
His lips pursed, then grinned like those of a frog swallowing the biggest fly of its life. “There’s one problem remaining,” he said. “The slot in a six-man survey team is for a Tech Four. You’re only a Two.”
Daun looked stricken. “What does that—” he began.
His mind paused in mid-thought, then resumed smoothly like a transmission shifted from the lay-shaft to a front gear with only the least clicking of teeth. “If there were a way you could arrange for me to get the assignment on a provisional basis, mister, I would be personally grateful to you. I’ve got more saved up than you might think because there was no way to spend it—”
Avenial, still grinning, waved Daun to silence. There were times he’d been insulted by an attempt to bribe him, but this wasn’t one of them.
“What I thought,” Avenial said, “was that we’d just get you the extra stripes. Stripe, really. Like I said before, you’re due for your third already.”
“I—” Daun said. “I …”
He sat up very straight in his seat. “Mister Avenial,” he said, “you don’t need my money, I understand that. But some day you may need something from me. Let me know.”
“Just doing my job, kid,” Avenial said.
But someday it might be good to know a guy who could make walls talk and knew what anybody he pleased was saying, right up to the President …Yeah, that just might be.
Daun rose to his feet. “I’ll wait for my assignment, mister,” he said. “Ah—do you have any notion when it might come through?”
Avenial touched another button. “It just did, kid,” he said. “You’re bound for a place named Cantilucca.”
Earlier: Maedchen
As Technician Niko Daun dealt the last cards, Bondo, one of the two Central States soldiers in the game, grumbled, “If I get a decent hand this time, it’ll be the first tonight.”
A dripping soldier entered the twenty-man tent that served as living quarters for the battalion’s Technical Detachment. His boots slipped in purple mud as he tried to seal the tent flap. He thumped the ground, cursing in a monotonous voice.
“You’re only a rubber down,” objected Sergeant Anya Wisloski, Daun’s Frisian Defense Forces superior, partner, and—for the three months they’d been on outpost duty—lover.
“Yeah, but that’s on Hendries’ cards, not me,” Bondo said. “I want some cards of my own.”
Daun picked up his own bridge hand. Based on what the dealer had, everybody else in the game was looking at great cards.
“What I want,” said Anya, “is some decent weather. I haven’t seen the sun since we’ve been up here.”
Anya was short, dark-haired, and white-skinned. Her waist nipped in and her chest was broad, but the breasts themselves were flat. She was several years older than Daun’s twenty-one standard— how much older she’d avoided saying—and had gone straight into the Frisian Defense Forces while Daun had four years of technical school.
Daun trusted his own judgment inside a piece of electronics farther than he did Anya’s (or most anybody else’s, if it came to that). There was never any question about who was in charge of a group when Anya decided to take charge, however.
Another gust pelted the tent as a colophon to Anya’s statement. For the most part, today’s rain had been a drizzle, but occasionally big drops splattered to remind the battalion outpost that there were various forms of misery.
Support Base Bulwark was almost as isolated as a space station would have been. Weekly convoys brought food, replacements, and very occasionally a team of journalists from one of the major cities.
The journalists never stayed long. Sometimes the replacements didn’t either. Troops who shot themselves in the foot or, less frequently, in the head, during their first week at Bulwark were a significant cause of attrition.
The base was sited on a low plateau, chosen for its accessibility by road rather than for purposes of defense. Higher peaks surrounded it within a five-klick radius.
The sensors themselves were expected to alert friendly forces if the Democrats massed in numbers sufficient to threaten the outpost. Daun had his doubts, but he realized the Democrats might be just as sloppy as their Central States opponents.
Heavy construction equipment had encircled the perimeter of the base with an earthen wall. The same construction crews then dug bunkers into the sides of that berm. During the months of constant rain, the bunkers filled as much as a meter deep with water.
The infantry protecting the base lived in tents on the bunker roofs. They had no protection except—for the ambitious ones—a wall of sandbags. The tents weren’t dry either, but at least the troops didn’t have to swim to their bunks.
Conditions for support personnel within the base weren’t a great deal better. Walkways constructed from wooden shell crates led between locations, but for the most part the makeshift duckboards had sunk into the greasy, purplish mire. The Tactical Operations Center was an assemblage of the high officers’ four living trailers placed around a large tent.
The whole complex was encircled by a triple row of sandbags and dirt-filled shell boxes. The construction engineers had trenched around the protective wall to draw off water. Because of the lack of slope the would-be channel was a moat, but at least it prevented the TOC from flooding.
The 150-mm howitzers of the four-tube battery were on steel planking to keep them from sinking to the trunnions. The guns slid during firing, so it was impossible to place accurate concentrations when the sensors located movement. Because rain and the slick ground made it so difficult to manhandle the 45-kg shells, most firing was done at random when battalion command decided it needed more ammo crates for construction.
The remainder of the support personnel li
ved in tents and slept on cots. Most of the tents were sandbagged to knee-height, three layers. Higher than that, the single-row walls fell down when the slippery filling bled through the fabric.
The two Frisians’ assignment was for six standard months. The indigs were here for a local year—twenty-one months standard, and at least three times longer than Daun could imagine lasting under such conditions.
“Oh, sure, it’ll dry out in spring,” Bondo said as he scowled at his cards. “Dry out, bake to dust, and blow into every curst thing from your food to the sealed electronics. You think equipment life’s bad in this rain, wait until spring.”
The purpose of this Central States Army outpost in Maedchen’s western tablelands was to service a belt of sensors brought at great expense from Nieuw Friesland. In theory, the sensors and the reaction forces they triggered would prevent infiltration from the Democrat-controlled vestries on the other side of the divide.
Bondo was quite right about the sensor failure rate. The Belt no doubt looked impressive during briefings in the capital, but the reality was as porous as cheesecloth. Infiltrators had an excellent chance of penetrating the eastern vestries unnoticed, and an even better chance of evading the Central States Army’s half-hearted reaction patrols.
“One club,” Bondo offered.
Daun didn’t blame the rain or the quality of the hardware for the rate of sensor failure. Quite simply, personnel assigned by the Central States government weren’t up to the job of servicing electronics this sophisticated.
Central States field teams wouldn’t follow procedures. For example, they regularly used knives or bayonets to split the sensor frames to exchange data cartridges. The special tools that would perform the task without damage were lost or ignored. They didn’t understand their duties. At least a third of the cartridges were inserted upside down, despite the neon arrows on both casing and cartridge, and despite anything Daun could say to the troops he was trying to train.