[Icelander]

After the ceremony with Superintendant Isabo Wickramanaijke finished, Hart exchanged a few desultory words with classmates. Most of them were polite, but distant. Hart had formed few bonds of friendship in the six months of training. His only close friend in the Academy was Horus Vomact.

Vomact was pleased with his posting, but preoccupied with the problems of learning to adapt to the strange society on Nahal. They agreed that they should meet before heading out for their respective colonies, but no firm time was given and the commitment was vague.

Hart started for his quarters, reviewing data on his visor while walking. He’d need access to the Imperial Supply Net before he could properly get started on a list of what his people needed. He decided to get started on that. First he looked up the contact information for the Assistant Deputy Commissioner for Administration. He got a administrative assistant LAI telling him that the ADA (Administration) was busy and that queries could be directed to the Infonet Gateway for the Independent Commissioner for Justice.

No great surprise, Hart supposed. When he reached his quarters, he tried the ADA (Personnel) office, but didn’t get much further with them. After a few calls, he got a person who appeared to be in a great hurry and briskly explained to him that all access privileges for cadets assigned as Acting Marshals would come into effect after the graduation ceremony. She was not amenable to persuasion otherwise.

Hart sighed and leaned back in his chair. Then he smiled wryly at himself as he considered that he would get what he wanted after the ceremony was over. That was just a few hours away, while it could have taken days of alternating shouting, wheedling and filing reports to get anything like this done in the South Oceania Armed Defence Forces these days. Of course, that was in a peacetime service filled with the sons and grandsons of apparatchiks hoping a few years among the sword and shield of the fatherland would help them toward success. But the Empire is at least as efficient as we were when we were young, lean and at war for our lives.

Hart was pleased that he was working for a vast organisation filled with competent and intelligent people who were all as dedicated, efficient and selfless as he demanded from the picked soldiers under his command in a time when the whole of his nation was engaged in a desperate war. But some part of him, that part which watched the rest of him, found it vaguely disquieting.