"Who in Haldor do they think I am?" he moaned. "I just handed on to you the figures that they gave me. Me! And threatening me with duty on a space freighter ... and one into the Slug area at that!"
I thought, as I looked at my ruined script, that guard duty wasn't so bad, and that even combat wasn't rough all the time.
"See, Trontar," the four-striper said, calling me by my proper rank for the first time, "you did a good job, the Adjutant himself said so. But these figures...." he shuddered. "If the Accountant should see these we'd all be for it. Space-freighter duty would be getting off light." The Senior Trontar seemed almost human to me right then.
"I just put down what you gave me," I said.
"Yeah, sure, Ruxt. But I didn't realize, nobody realized, how bad the figures were till they were all together and written up. Look, this report shows that we shouldn't Terraform this planet—that we can't make a nudnick on the slavery proposition—and that maybe we shouldn't have even invaded this inferno at all."
"So what do you want me to do?"
"I'll tell you what you're going to do...." The Senior Trontar had regained his normal nasty disposition. "You're going to re-do this report. You're going to re-do it starting now, you're going to work on it all night, and you're going to have it on my desk and in perfect shape when I come in in the morning, or, by Haldor, the next thing you write will be your transfer to the space freighter run nearest the Slug Galaxy." The Senior Trontar ran momentarily out of breath. "And," he came back strongly, "you won't be going as no Trontar, neither!"
"It'll be on your desk in the morning, Sir," I said.
Deck hands on the space freighter run were, I'd heard, particularly expendable.