"David Drake - Hammer's Slammers 13 - The Sharp End" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

You could also appeal to Hammer personally. In that case, you were cashiered if you didn't convince
him. Old-timers in the Assignment Bureau said that the success rate was slightly under three percent, but
every month or so somebody else tried it.

There were no large-scale deployments under way at the moment, but there were always glitches,
clerical or personal, which had to be ironed out. The clerk smiled at Coke, expecting to leam that he'd
been assigned to a slot calling for a sergeant-major, or that he was wanted for murder on the planet to
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which he was being posted.

Coke's problem was rather different.

"I'm here to receive sealed orders," Coke said, offering the clerk his identification card with the
embedded chip. He smiled wryly.

The clerk blinked in surprise. There were various reasons why an officer's orders would be sealed within
the data base, requiring him or her to apply in person to the bureau to receive them. Coke didn't look like
the sort to whom any of the special reasons would apply. He looked тАФ normal.

Matthew Coke was 34 standard years old тАФ 29 dated on Ash, where he was born, 51 according to
the shorter year of Nieuw Friesland. He had brown hair, eyes that were green, blue, or gray depending
on how much sunlight had been bleaching them, and stood a meter seventy-eight in his stocking feet. He
was thin but not frail, like a blade of good steel.

Coke was in dress khakis with rank tabs and the blue edging to the epaulets that indicated his specialty
was infantry. He wore no medal or campaign ribbons whatever, but over his left breast pocket was a tiny
lion rampant on a field of red enamel.

The lion marked the men who'd served with Hammers Slammers before the regiment was subsumed into
the Frisian Defense Forces. Its lonely splendor against the khaki meant that, like most of theother
Slammers veterans, Coke figured that when you'd said you were in the Slammers, you'd said everything
that mattered.

Considering that, the clerk realized that Major Coke might not be quite as normal as he looked.

"Face the lens, please, sir," the clerk said as she inserted the ID card into a slot on her side of the cage.
Electronics chittered, validating the card and comparing Coke's retinal patterns with those contained in
the embedded chip.

A soft chime indicated approval. Coke eased from the stiff posture with which he had faced the
comparator lens. He continued to smile faintly, but the emotions the clerk read on his face were sadness
and resignation,

"Just a moment," the clerk said. "The printer has to warm up, but тАФ"

As she spoke, a sheet of hardcopy purred from the dispenser on Coke's side of the cage. Coke read the