To live through Hammer’s Slammers is to pay the piper, to understand that these blown-out functionaries are our own idealized selves no longer idealized. David Drake has through furious refusal to compromise, from refusal to special plead, taken us into the bowels and apparatus of wartime as has no science fiction writer; he is the inheritor of the cold flare of military fiction’s history and his rifle sight, his shot pattern is exact. Exact and exacting; a freezing, burning, incontestable body of work.
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.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Those of you who notice the 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 the crux of my plotting, I tend to talk at those around me. When I did 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.
THE SHARP END
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.