"James Alan Gardner - League of Peoples 01 - Expendable" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

The message buzzer hummed and I found I had been sleeping. My neck was stiff and my clothing
rumpled. I rolled gracelessly to my feet and thudded over to the desk. "Ramos here."

Marque's face appeared on the screen. Wearing his dress gold uniform, he looked annoyingly fresh and
knew it. "Admiral Chee is arriving."

"Thank you. I'm on my way."

"If I were you, I'd do something with my hair first." The screen went blank too quickly for me to reply.
Clever retorts seldom come easily to me. I stomped angrily to the bathroom and fumbled a while with a
comb. Stupid people flustered me so effortlessly. I wished I had a quick mind.

Years of conditioning would not let me leave my room until my part was straight. That irked me too.
What fastidious programmer forced this obsession on me?

To smooth my feathers, I thought of childish ways to get even with Harque. Some scandalous story
about him passed to the admiral? No, I was too smart to lie to an admiral, and too ill-informed to know
any dirt that was really true. Some night Harque would pull down the sheets of his bed and find a
smashed egg there. The Sevro lizards of Malabar IV laid eggs whose yolks were more corrosive than
industrial acids.

Wearing a smile and taking great pride in my personal appearance, I stepped confidently out my door.




Part II

MISSION
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Worm, Sperm


WORM: The colloquial name for the envelope of spacetime distortion that surrounds each starship,
allowing the ship to circumvent relativistic and inertial effects that would otherwise make space travel
impracticable.

тАФExcerpt fromPractice and Procedures of Space Travel: An Overview for Explorers, textbook
published by the Admiralty



Only the Admiralty would have the nerve to claim that the colloquial name for our envelope was "the
Worm." To everyone else (except in the presence of admirals), it was "the Sperm."

REASON 1: When a ship was at rest, the region of interface between its envelope and normal space