[Witches' Horses] Sibir
Title: Middle management sucks.
'Verse/characters: Sibir; Ruslan Sergeievich, a sergeant, a lev
Prompt: 82D "addition"
Word Count: 1819
Notes: After bare shoulders and suns, before new arrival.
So far as I can currently determine (and lord knows this is subject to revision with future research), there's approximately two sergeants to a lievtenant, and three to four levs to a captain. A captain can either be infantry or cavalry, and depending on the situation and the rate of attrition his levs will be split as to whether they are infantry or cavalry. So a cavalry captain might have only riders in his druzhina, and an infantry captain might have only infantry in his, or they might be mixed with riders providing transportation for an infantry captain's soldiers or soldiers acting as gunners etc for a cavalry captain.
This is after Sergeievich is promoted to captain; yesterday's post he was a lievtenant.
---------
He blamed the suns he hadn't bothered to buy. He'd never ground his teeth when he was a lievtenant--he paused to correct himself. He'd rarely ground his teeth when he was a lievtenant. Fairness demanded he remember the headaches the supply sergeants had heaped on him every time he'd had to submit the same paperwork four or five times to get one replacement part.
Ruslan still wasn't sure why a combat promotion to Rotmistr had resulted in acquiring two lievtenants he'd never met. Especially when he only had one new sergeant. The new levs didn't like that the old sergeants would go over their heads when there was a problem--and there were many--and Ruslan, still accustomed to sergeants knocking on his door or inviting him to card games, hadn't noticed immediately.
Not least because Feodor Nikolaievich had enough seniority as a captain that he could arrange his own posts to be constantly closer to the supply trains and farther from the fighting than Ruslan's. Ruslan had very nearly asked a sergeant to find him a bottle that had a properly printed label when he'd made the mistake of running a search on how many of Captain Nicolaievich's druzhina had died in the last three months, and then compared it to his own.
Which had been how he'd found out who exactly had approved Lievtenant Berezko's request to transfer into his druzhina as soon as Ruslan's promotion had made it through the first few stops of the system. His pay raise was still imaginary, but Berezko had requested him by name. And Feodor Nikolaievich had approved it. Which had cost Ruslan Timofey Bogushevskii, since Berezko had more seniority than Bogushevskii, who'd been promoted in the same set of battles Ruslan had. In much the same way.
"Sir?" a more tentative than usual bass rumbled from the doorway to the office he had taken by right of occupation--his rank privileges were still more a courtesy of the supply and quarters sergeants than a system requirement--and Ruslan forced himself to stop grinding his teeth. Again. If Bogushevskii lived to see captain, he'd be back, and Ruslan would have an ally who also spoke fluent combat among his peers.
"Yes?" he asked when Sergeant Olegovich didn't immediately walk into the office.
"Lievtenant Valentinov is demanding we shut down the card games," the sergeant said, taking the two steps forward that allowed the door to close behind him.
Ruslan blinked up at him, surprised enough to show it. "Bad loser?"
"We didn't invite him to play," Olegovich corrected, a little wry. "He may have taken it badly when he found out Markovich has a standing invitation."
"Markovich was getting invited to the sergeants' game when he was wearing nickel on his shoulders," Ruslan said, unable to help the nonplused edge to his voice. "--I could probably walk into the sergeants' game."
"Give us some warning so Ivanovich doesn't choke," Olegovich agreed blandly, "I don't think he's used to Markovich yet. So we don't have to close down the game? Lev said he'd be getting an order from you."
"Move into the mess and switch to kopecks or glasses for a while," Ruslan commanded conversationally. "Tell 'em I said no betting percentages of pay, chores, or favours until we break in the new gents."
"Sir," Olegovich replied, saluting, then hesitated.
Ruslan waited for a moment, then growled "Spit it out, sergeant. I need to track down Valentinov and Berezko before they do something else stupid, like tell the riders they can't manually adjust their saddles."
"Probably not the best time to say so, sir, but Berezko's been borrowing a lot of records," Olegovich said. "The file sergeant's starting to use mat in the mess."
Ruslan groaned. "Dismissed, sergeant. If you can find out what Berezko's been borrowing, report to me, otherwise just pass the word about the games."
"Sir," Olegovich repeated, saluting again, and took his leave without being furtive about it. Ruslan pinched the bridge of his nose hard, trying to remember what it was like not to need to worry about his sergeants stopping by, or what his lievtenants were doing. When he remembered that he'd had to worry about what the nickels were up to and the captain stopping by to hand him yet another double shift, he growled to himself, stood up, and began putting the files scattered over his desk away.
Automatically sorting the resupply requests--one for the fourth time--ammunition and fuel accounts--several of which involved slightly faulty math to disguise the fact that Markovich had started crosstraining the new soldiers on live horses instead of just the practice systems--transfer requests and acknowledgements, and the growing stack of killed-in-the-lines into separate piles and then into his drawers, he started trying to calculate where Valentinov would be. The man's duty shifts were matched to Olegovich's, which he'd hoped would ease Valentinov's transition into Bogushevskii's boots but seemed to be backfiring. Markovich was busy with the cross-training, which nobody was willing to hand to Berezko without seeing what he rode like in combat; Ruslan and the sergeants were taking up the slack for the moment.
Ruslan sighed, gave up trying to guess where Valentinov would be spending his offduty hours, and asked the system if his lev had been logged present anywhere within the last hour. Once the system remembered that Ruslan was a captain, forcibly reminded by the manual codes the supply sergeant had slipped Ruslan the last time he'd been locked out of his own quarters, it told him no, Valentinov hadn't been anywhere in the last hour. But he had bought an extra banya slot for the space next to the gym, several hours ago.
The door of the office closed and locked automatically when he logged out of the system, which would have worried him if he hadn't prudently done it from the outside door-panel. Symon Gavriilovich had told stories about what happened the third time Captain Leonidovich had gotten locked into his own office. Ruslan had started carrying his own set of emergency tools and a pair of gloves on his person after the second repetition, but had so far avoided needing to use them. He suspected that hadn't been what Symon had intended to be taken away from the stories, given the Captain's essentially adversarial relationship with anything more elaborate than a horse, but Ruslan was more than willing to learn from other men's burns.
That habit included actually reading the environmental report before opening the door to a gym. Which stood him in better stead than usual when the door cycled and he didn't fall thirty degrees forward and sideways as he moved from one set of gravity coils to another.
Twisting as he launched himself into the room, he caught the upper corner of a bolted-down weight stand, letting himself hang loosely in the partial gravity as he tried to find his lievtenant. The room was a visual mess if he tried to reconcile the orientation of the equipment to the orientation of the gravity, benches padded in the wrong places and upper bars thrust out and down.
It was an oddly ingenious way to render a normal space unfamiliar, Ruslan thought, and wondered if it was Valentinov's idea or a standardised part of training.
"Fucking cocks!" the man himself shouted as he emerged from a tangle of tumbling equipment and had to try to change his angle of approach abruptly, since Ruslan was occupying the handhold the lev had been aiming for.
Ruslan blinked, then the rider's portion of his brain kicked in, calculating angles and trajectories, and he yanked himself up to his handhold, hard enough to launch at the gravity's ceiling when he let go.
Which put him out of the way when Valetinov's dodge turned into a tumble and then into a crash of barbells and boots meeting.
"Fuck, fuck off, fucking fuck," Valentinov remarked, bending the words for gravity, officers, and barbells into shapes they hadn't been designed for. Then, after a brief pause, "Sir."
Hand-over-handing himself into a more stable position, Ruslan replied "Should have said something. Sorry, Lievtenant."
"Not a problem, sir, I'm sure I didn't need that tendon," Valentinov muttered as he extracted himself from the barbells.
Ruslan couldn't help the snicker. It was unprofessional. But for the life of him he couldn't help laughing about the mat--for short notice impugning the barbells' ancestry was pretty good--and lord knew he deserved a curse or two for appearing out of nowhere in the middle of a obstacle course.
Valentinov paused in his cautious rotating of the leg he'd led with, blinked up-and-sideways at Ruslan, then flushed. "Sorry, sir."
"It happens, Lev," Ruslan replied, waving a dismissal with his free hand. "You should hear the sergeants when you've wandered right through the middle of something they were working on."
"Oh, for--" Valentinov trailed off into muttered mat again, then raised his voice to carry as he switched back to proper Russian. "I take it the sergeants complained?"
"Expressed a concern," Ruslan amended as he dropped several meters and caught himself a new rest with the front of his right boot. "I think Olegovich was surprised he beat you to my office."
"I thought better of it," Valentinov said, tilting his head to look at Ruslan's foot. "That a rider's trick?"
Ruslan glanced up at his foot. "No, actually, modified infantry--we did some practice with low gravity setups and the sergeants teaching 'em got creative when they were hungover."
"If they were anything like the sergeants I had during training that was every other morning," Valentinov remarked, a little cheerfully, as he jacknifed himself and started climbing up towards the control panel for the coils. "Since when do riders get infantry training?"
"I started in infantry. Made lev before they ever gave me a riding test," Ruslan replied, rearranging himself as his lev first reoriented the gravity, then increased it to zastava-normal.
"Oh," Valentinov said. "Hadn't heard about that."
Ruslan shrugged. "Don't worry about it. Oh--I told the sergeants to back down for a while. Thanks for the excuse to make them stop betting their nickels' chore rotations again, by the way."
Valentinov paused for a second, sweat dripping out of his hairline, then grinned. "Not a problem, sir. Think we can find something to blame on Berezko, next?"
"If we don't find out what he's borrowing and not returning from the file sergeants we won't need to blame him for anything," Ruslan muttered, then jerked his head at the banya's door, across the gym. "I'm sorry, I'm keeping you from the bath."
"Let me run Olegovich and his people through what I was doing and I won't hold it against you, sir," Valentinov replied, still grinning.
"Write up a precis of what you're training them to do and go for it," Ruslan told him, accepted the salute he got, and took his leave.
One small crisis dealt with.
Next.
'Verse/characters: Sibir; Ruslan Sergeievich, a sergeant, a lev
Prompt: 82D "addition"
Word Count: 1819
Notes: After bare shoulders and suns, before new arrival.
So far as I can currently determine (and lord knows this is subject to revision with future research), there's approximately two sergeants to a lievtenant, and three to four levs to a captain. A captain can either be infantry or cavalry, and depending on the situation and the rate of attrition his levs will be split as to whether they are infantry or cavalry. So a cavalry captain might have only riders in his druzhina, and an infantry captain might have only infantry in his, or they might be mixed with riders providing transportation for an infantry captain's soldiers or soldiers acting as gunners etc for a cavalry captain.
This is after Sergeievich is promoted to captain; yesterday's post he was a lievtenant.
---------
He blamed the suns he hadn't bothered to buy. He'd never ground his teeth when he was a lievtenant--he paused to correct himself. He'd rarely ground his teeth when he was a lievtenant. Fairness demanded he remember the headaches the supply sergeants had heaped on him every time he'd had to submit the same paperwork four or five times to get one replacement part.
Ruslan still wasn't sure why a combat promotion to Rotmistr had resulted in acquiring two lievtenants he'd never met. Especially when he only had one new sergeant. The new levs didn't like that the old sergeants would go over their heads when there was a problem--and there were many--and Ruslan, still accustomed to sergeants knocking on his door or inviting him to card games, hadn't noticed immediately.
Not least because Feodor Nikolaievich had enough seniority as a captain that he could arrange his own posts to be constantly closer to the supply trains and farther from the fighting than Ruslan's. Ruslan had very nearly asked a sergeant to find him a bottle that had a properly printed label when he'd made the mistake of running a search on how many of Captain Nicolaievich's druzhina had died in the last three months, and then compared it to his own.
Which had been how he'd found out who exactly had approved Lievtenant Berezko's request to transfer into his druzhina as soon as Ruslan's promotion had made it through the first few stops of the system. His pay raise was still imaginary, but Berezko had requested him by name. And Feodor Nikolaievich had approved it. Which had cost Ruslan Timofey Bogushevskii, since Berezko had more seniority than Bogushevskii, who'd been promoted in the same set of battles Ruslan had. In much the same way.
"Sir?" a more tentative than usual bass rumbled from the doorway to the office he had taken by right of occupation--his rank privileges were still more a courtesy of the supply and quarters sergeants than a system requirement--and Ruslan forced himself to stop grinding his teeth. Again. If Bogushevskii lived to see captain, he'd be back, and Ruslan would have an ally who also spoke fluent combat among his peers.
"Yes?" he asked when Sergeant Olegovich didn't immediately walk into the office.
"Lievtenant Valentinov is demanding we shut down the card games," the sergeant said, taking the two steps forward that allowed the door to close behind him.
Ruslan blinked up at him, surprised enough to show it. "Bad loser?"
"We didn't invite him to play," Olegovich corrected, a little wry. "He may have taken it badly when he found out Markovich has a standing invitation."
"Markovich was getting invited to the sergeants' game when he was wearing nickel on his shoulders," Ruslan said, unable to help the nonplused edge to his voice. "--I could probably walk into the sergeants' game."
"Give us some warning so Ivanovich doesn't choke," Olegovich agreed blandly, "I don't think he's used to Markovich yet. So we don't have to close down the game? Lev said he'd be getting an order from you."
"Move into the mess and switch to kopecks or glasses for a while," Ruslan commanded conversationally. "Tell 'em I said no betting percentages of pay, chores, or favours until we break in the new gents."
"Sir," Olegovich replied, saluting, then hesitated.
Ruslan waited for a moment, then growled "Spit it out, sergeant. I need to track down Valentinov and Berezko before they do something else stupid, like tell the riders they can't manually adjust their saddles."
"Probably not the best time to say so, sir, but Berezko's been borrowing a lot of records," Olegovich said. "The file sergeant's starting to use mat in the mess."
Ruslan groaned. "Dismissed, sergeant. If you can find out what Berezko's been borrowing, report to me, otherwise just pass the word about the games."
"Sir," Olegovich repeated, saluting again, and took his leave without being furtive about it. Ruslan pinched the bridge of his nose hard, trying to remember what it was like not to need to worry about his sergeants stopping by, or what his lievtenants were doing. When he remembered that he'd had to worry about what the nickels were up to and the captain stopping by to hand him yet another double shift, he growled to himself, stood up, and began putting the files scattered over his desk away.
Automatically sorting the resupply requests--one for the fourth time--ammunition and fuel accounts--several of which involved slightly faulty math to disguise the fact that Markovich had started crosstraining the new soldiers on live horses instead of just the practice systems--transfer requests and acknowledgements, and the growing stack of killed-in-the-lines into separate piles and then into his drawers, he started trying to calculate where Valentinov would be. The man's duty shifts were matched to Olegovich's, which he'd hoped would ease Valentinov's transition into Bogushevskii's boots but seemed to be backfiring. Markovich was busy with the cross-training, which nobody was willing to hand to Berezko without seeing what he rode like in combat; Ruslan and the sergeants were taking up the slack for the moment.
Ruslan sighed, gave up trying to guess where Valentinov would be spending his offduty hours, and asked the system if his lev had been logged present anywhere within the last hour. Once the system remembered that Ruslan was a captain, forcibly reminded by the manual codes the supply sergeant had slipped Ruslan the last time he'd been locked out of his own quarters, it told him no, Valentinov hadn't been anywhere in the last hour. But he had bought an extra banya slot for the space next to the gym, several hours ago.
The door of the office closed and locked automatically when he logged out of the system, which would have worried him if he hadn't prudently done it from the outside door-panel. Symon Gavriilovich had told stories about what happened the third time Captain Leonidovich had gotten locked into his own office. Ruslan had started carrying his own set of emergency tools and a pair of gloves on his person after the second repetition, but had so far avoided needing to use them. He suspected that hadn't been what Symon had intended to be taken away from the stories, given the Captain's essentially adversarial relationship with anything more elaborate than a horse, but Ruslan was more than willing to learn from other men's burns.
That habit included actually reading the environmental report before opening the door to a gym. Which stood him in better stead than usual when the door cycled and he didn't fall thirty degrees forward and sideways as he moved from one set of gravity coils to another.
Twisting as he launched himself into the room, he caught the upper corner of a bolted-down weight stand, letting himself hang loosely in the partial gravity as he tried to find his lievtenant. The room was a visual mess if he tried to reconcile the orientation of the equipment to the orientation of the gravity, benches padded in the wrong places and upper bars thrust out and down.
It was an oddly ingenious way to render a normal space unfamiliar, Ruslan thought, and wondered if it was Valentinov's idea or a standardised part of training.
"Fucking cocks!" the man himself shouted as he emerged from a tangle of tumbling equipment and had to try to change his angle of approach abruptly, since Ruslan was occupying the handhold the lev had been aiming for.
Ruslan blinked, then the rider's portion of his brain kicked in, calculating angles and trajectories, and he yanked himself up to his handhold, hard enough to launch at the gravity's ceiling when he let go.
Which put him out of the way when Valetinov's dodge turned into a tumble and then into a crash of barbells and boots meeting.
"Fuck, fuck off, fucking fuck," Valentinov remarked, bending the words for gravity, officers, and barbells into shapes they hadn't been designed for. Then, after a brief pause, "Sir."
Hand-over-handing himself into a more stable position, Ruslan replied "Should have said something. Sorry, Lievtenant."
"Not a problem, sir, I'm sure I didn't need that tendon," Valentinov muttered as he extracted himself from the barbells.
Ruslan couldn't help the snicker. It was unprofessional. But for the life of him he couldn't help laughing about the mat--for short notice impugning the barbells' ancestry was pretty good--and lord knew he deserved a curse or two for appearing out of nowhere in the middle of a obstacle course.
Valentinov paused in his cautious rotating of the leg he'd led with, blinked up-and-sideways at Ruslan, then flushed. "Sorry, sir."
"It happens, Lev," Ruslan replied, waving a dismissal with his free hand. "You should hear the sergeants when you've wandered right through the middle of something they were working on."
"Oh, for--" Valentinov trailed off into muttered mat again, then raised his voice to carry as he switched back to proper Russian. "I take it the sergeants complained?"
"Expressed a concern," Ruslan amended as he dropped several meters and caught himself a new rest with the front of his right boot. "I think Olegovich was surprised he beat you to my office."
"I thought better of it," Valentinov said, tilting his head to look at Ruslan's foot. "That a rider's trick?"
Ruslan glanced up at his foot. "No, actually, modified infantry--we did some practice with low gravity setups and the sergeants teaching 'em got creative when they were hungover."
"If they were anything like the sergeants I had during training that was every other morning," Valentinov remarked, a little cheerfully, as he jacknifed himself and started climbing up towards the control panel for the coils. "Since when do riders get infantry training?"
"I started in infantry. Made lev before they ever gave me a riding test," Ruslan replied, rearranging himself as his lev first reoriented the gravity, then increased it to zastava-normal.
"Oh," Valentinov said. "Hadn't heard about that."
Ruslan shrugged. "Don't worry about it. Oh--I told the sergeants to back down for a while. Thanks for the excuse to make them stop betting their nickels' chore rotations again, by the way."
Valentinov paused for a second, sweat dripping out of his hairline, then grinned. "Not a problem, sir. Think we can find something to blame on Berezko, next?"
"If we don't find out what he's borrowing and not returning from the file sergeants we won't need to blame him for anything," Ruslan muttered, then jerked his head at the banya's door, across the gym. "I'm sorry, I'm keeping you from the bath."
"Let me run Olegovich and his people through what I was doing and I won't hold it against you, sir," Valentinov replied, still grinning.
"Write up a precis of what you're training them to do and go for it," Ruslan told him, accepted the salute he got, and took his leave.
One small crisis dealt with.
Next.