The Complete Hammer's Slammers: Volume 3 by David Drake

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