"David Drake - Hammer's Slammers 06 - The Sharp End" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

THE SHARP END
Copyright ┬й 1993 by David Drake
e-book ver. 1.0
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 93-10739
ISBN:0-671-87632-5


DEDICATION
To our architect and builder Derwood Schrotberger

Writing a novel and moving to a new house are both stressful occupations. The fact that I was able to combine them is a
comment on Derwood's consummate skill, which reminds me that architect originally meant Master Builder.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Those of you who notice echoes of The Glass Key and Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett in this book are correct. Those
of you who don't should go off and read Hammett's splendid novels at your earliest convenience.
When I'm at a crux in my plotting, I tend to talk at those around me. When I did that this time on the way to the state fair
with friends, my wife, Jo, and Mark Van Name made suggestions which were precisely on point. I adopted both.



NIEUW FRIESLAND

The room housing the Officers Assignment Bureau was spacious enough to have three service cages and seats for
twenty around the walls of colored marble. Nobody was waiting when Major Matthew Coke entered, though a single
officer discussed alternative assignments with a specialist.
Coke stepped into an empty cage. A clerk rose from her desk in the administrative area across the divider and
switched on the electronics,
"Yes sir?" the clerk said pleasantly. "Is there a problem with your assignment?"
The Frisian Defense Forces reassigned scores of officers every week. Normally the operation was impersonal, a
data transfer to the officers present station directing him or her to report to a new posting, along with details of timing,
transport, and interim leave.
This office handled problems. President Hammer, in common with other leaders whose elevation owed more to
bullets than ballots, felt most comfortable with a large standing army under his direct control. Professional soldiers are
expensive, and unless they are used, they either rust, or find ways to employ themselves тАФ generally to the detriment
of the established government.
Hammers answer to the problem was to hire out elements of the Frisian Defense Forces as mercenaries. This
provided training for the troops, as well as defraying the cost of their pay and equipment.
Sometimes the troops engaged were merely a few advisers or specialists. When somebody, a planetary government
or the rebels opposed to it, hired a large force, however, the OAB would be standing room only.
Officers on Nieuw Friesland knew that the only sure route to promotion was through combat experience. The
Frisian Defense Forces had sprung from Hammer's Slammers, a mercenary regiment with the reputation for doing
whatever it took to win . . . and a reputation for winning.
So long as Alois Hammer was President and the commanders of the Frisian Defense Forces were the officers who'd
bought him that position in decades of bloody war, bureaucratic 'warriors' weren't on the fast track to high rank. You
paid for your rank sometimes in blood, and sometimes with your life; but all that was as nothing without demonstrated
success at the sharp end, where they buried the guys in second place.
Not everybody was comfortable with Hammers terms of employment, but the Forces were volunteer only and the
volunteers came from all across the human universe; just as they had to Hammer's Slammers before. A certain number