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

rigid film upside down as it appeared instead of waiting for the print cycle to finish so that he could clip
the document.

His face blanked; then he began to laugh. The captain at the next cage glanced at him, then away. The
clerk waited, hoping Coke would explain the situation but unwilling to press him.

Coke tapped the cutter, then tossed the sheet across the counter to the clerk. "It says my new
assignment is Category Ten Forty-seven," he said as the clerk scanned the document. "That's survey
team, isn't it?"

The clerk nodded. "Yessir," she said. "You'll be assessing potential customers for field force
deployments."
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She didn't understand Major Coke's laughter. "Isn't this what you were expecting, sir?" she asked as she
slid back the hardcopy.

"What I was expecting . . ." Coke explained, ". . . after the way I screwed up my last assignment on
Auerstadt . . ." He was smiling like a skull, as broadly and with as little humor.

"... was that they'd fire my ass. But I guess the Assessment Board decided I couldn't get into much
trouble on a survey team."

He began to laugh again. Despite the obvious relief in Coke's voice, the sound of his laughter chilled the
clerk.




Earlier: AUERSTROT




There was a party going on in the extensive quarters of General the Marquis Bradkopf, National Army
commander of Fortress Auerstadt. Next door in the Tactical Operations Center, Major Matthew Coke
of the Frisian Defense Forces was trying to do his job тАФ and General Bradkopf's job тАФ through a
realtime link to the pair of combat cars in ambush position thirty kilometers away.

The combat cars were namedMother Love andThe Facts of Life. They and their crews were Frisians;
and the sergeants commanding them were, like Coke, former members of Hammer's Slammers, the
mercenary regiment whose ruthless skill had transformed Colonel Hammer into Alois Hammer, President
of Nieuw Friesland.

"We're getting major movement into Hamlet Three, sir,"said 4-4 тАФ Sergeant-Commander Dubose in
Mother Love, stationed for the moment on a dike south of the three hamlets called Parcotch for
administrative purposes."Nearly a hundred just from the direction of Auerstadt. Most of them are