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. The 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's 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, lad," 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."