“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 officer’s 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— generally to the detriment of the established government.

Hammer’s 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 Hammer’s 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 of men, and a lower percentage of women, would rather fight than not. Alois Hammer’s troops had always been the best there was at what they did: killing the other fellow, whoever he was.