Matthew Coke was thirty-four standard years old—twenty-nine dated on Ash, where he was born, fifty-one 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 whatsoever, 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 Hammer’s Slammers before the regiment was subsumed into the Frisian Defense Forces. Its lonely splendor against the khaki meant that, like most of the other 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—”

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