"Alan Dean Foster - Damned 2 - the false Mirror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

arts of combat than oneself fighting on his flank?
So each trainee strove to outdo his or her competitors while simultaneously
urging them to greater achievement.
Until the monsters arrived on the scene, civilization had been advancing
steadily across the cosmos, spreading organization where hitherto had been only
chaos. The pace had been slow but gratifyingly inexorable. Occasional setbacks
were accepted and taken in stride until ground lost could, as it inevitably was,
be regained.
'Then a thousand or so years ago the alliance of monsters had been encountered,
and everything had changed.
Many were unpleasant to contemplate physically as well as intellectually, while
others differed little in appearance from Ranji's own kind. The worst were
utterly unpredictable, savage and cunning beyond belief, possessed of a feral
intelligence that made them awful to encounter on the battlefield.
With such as these in the vanguard, the alliance of mon-sters had wreaked
considerable havoc. But their recent advances had been halted, the situation
stabilized. Soon the civilized peoples would begin pushing them back, rescuing
as they advanced those poor, benighted populations who had suffered for
centuries under the monsters' domin-ion.
Ranji and his friends knew this to be inevitable. Their own training both as
soldiers and civilized citizens proved it so. No matter how strong, the forces
of chaos could never overcome and defeat those of civilization. Not as long as
determined fighters like Ranji-aar and his compan-ions continued to rise through
the ranks to take their place at the forefront of civilization's defense.
While there was no place in true society for jealousy, room was allowed for
pardonable pride. In the fifteen-to-seventeen-year-old cluster, he and his
trainee squad re-peatedly graded out at or near the top of their class. In fact,
on all of Cossuut only one other squad regularly posted scores matching those of
Ranji's. That was a group from Kizzmat Township, which lay just on the other
side of the Massmari mountains, near the junction of the rivers Nerse and
Joutoula. Near enough for a friendly rivalry of reputations to have been
invented by the media. As grad-uation exercises progressed, both squads
qualified easily for the planetary finals in their age group.
His mother and father took quiet pride in the effortless qualification of their


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son and his friends, as they had in all his achievements. Their delight was
perhaps magnified somewhat by the fact that neither of them had been a sol-dier.
Ranji's father worked in a factory which produced nanotronic components, while
his mother was a teacher. Certainly her tutoring abilities contributed to
Ranji's success. as well as to that of his younger brother, Saguio, and his baby
sister, Cynsa.
Though jealousy was unknown among the trainees, it was still a good thing that
Ranji was not the best at every thing. His friend Birachii-uun was stronger,
Cossinza-iiv much faster. But in Ranji was found the best combination of warrior
attributes, a fact which was reflected in his in-dividual scores. Certainly he
was the smartest of his com-panions.