“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.