It was late summer at the Blue Forest Military Reservation, the day a preview of fall. Colonel Carlis Voker had just returned to his office after lunch, and sat reading a report on his terminal. His commset chirped, and he reached to it. "What is it, Lemal?"
"Kelmer Faronya is here to see you, sir."
Voker glanced at the clock: 12:59. Young Faronya was prompt. "Send him in."
A moment later a young man entered, well built and rather tall, like his sister before him. He'd come to lunch from a training exercise, a four-hour run with a sandbag on a pack frame. The sweat had dried on his face, but his bur-cut hair was still awry from it, and his shirt stained.
He saluted, a trooper's casual hand flip. It wasn't necessary; he was in fact a civilian, not a trooper. On the other hand he'd trained with the 6th Iryalan Mercenary Regiment for just eight days short of a year. He'd done almost everything they'd done, although in part a helmet camera had substituted for a weapon.
Also he hadn't done the Ostrak Procedures. After the early training difficulties of the original Iryalan mercenaries, the White T'swa, trainees had been run through the Ostrak Procedures before their training was begun. It had saved headaches of various sorts, as well as scheduling problems. But Kristal had decided that the "regimental historian"—actually an in-house journalist—should do without the procedures. That way he could write more nearly from a public point of view.
This did cause a complication, because without having been through the procedures, Faronya couldn't teleport without going psychotic. And die without quick and effective treatment. It had probably left him feeling a bit of an outsider, too, lacking a trooper's viewpoint, and major areas of a trooper's reality.
He wasn't even spiritually a warrior as they were. He had been born with the basic warrior underpattern, but not in warrior phase, not for that lifetime. Thus he lacked a warrior's script, and a warrior's psychic and mental tool kits. He did have the metabolic attributes though; without them he would have washed out in training.
At a glance he looked like a warrior: A year's mercenary training, strenuous to the limits of endurance, had given him a physical hardness that, even in a baggy field uniform, was quite apparent.
"Faronya," Voker said, "I'm transferring you out of the regiment." The young man's eyes widened, and his lips parted as if to object. Voker went on. "You're familiar with the White T'swa, of course."
Faronya's objection stopped unspoken; he'd hear this out. He knew a lot about the White T'swa. His sister had been with it during part of its training, and when she'd come home had talked of little else to him. Then she'd ported with it to Terfreya as a stowaway, and ended missing in action, no doubt with her camera busy. Her loss had hurt him, but the war—the war had been so necessary, and the troopers so brave.
"Yessir, I know a lot about them. As you're well aware."
"I'm attaching you to them. They have a contract to fight a war on a trade world called Maragor. A Level Three War; nothing technical. You'll record and report on it.
"You can refuse, of course."
Kelmer Faronya's lips were parted again, not with intended rejection now, but with surprise. "Refuse? No, sir! It's the sort of thing I wanted when I applied! I just hadn't expected it to happen so soon."
"Sooner than you think. A floater leaves here in an hour. That means you shower and pack and be at reception at 1:55, ready to leave. Someone will meet you when you arrive at Landfall. You'll leave there on a hyperspace courier later today, to join your new regiment on Splenn. Now jump!"
Kelmer Faronya sprinted to his barracks.