The floodlights went out. The dump glowed red in a dozen locations, bunkers where further material had been ignited by the previous blasts. Moden thumbed his helmet visor to light-amplification mode and began shifting the ruin of the guard shack, chunk by chunk.
The choice was speed or caution, and under the present conditions speed won going away. Moving the mass of shattered walls was much like playing pick-up sticks. There was always a chance that when Moden’s huge muscles bunched to hurl a block clear, the remaining slabs would shift and crush Filkerson like a caterpillar on the highway; but if Moden waited for specialized rescue equipment, blast shocks were going to make the pile settle anyway.
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.”