"Douglas Hill - Last Legionary 0 - Young Legionary" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hill Douglas)

Certainly, though, the ideas were put into practice. A society grew up that believed in equality, in mutual
support and responsibility, in communality. Its leaders were selected by all the people, and acted as
co-ordinators, not as rulers. Orders and discipline were not imposed, from above, in an authoritarian
way. They sprang from the self-discipline of the people, in which each of them was trained from birth.

For them, self-control and unselfish co-operation became the watchwords of their society, as solid and
binding as a blazing religious faith.

So they had to be, on Moros, to ensure survival. For the colonists had not been left in peace.

The planet itself seemed to oppose them, as if presenting them with a prolonged Ordeal to test their
fitness to live there. It was hard enough to wrest food and shelter from the rugged land, and the bitter
climate. It was far harder when they also had to face the ferocious life-forms of Moros.

Humanity had found no other intelligent beings in all the galaxy. But they had found life-forms in plenty,
and Moros was no exception. The difference was that a high proportion of the creatures on Moros were
vicious, merciless killers - using all their weirdly alien natural weapons in a savage, endless battle for
survival.

That was the lesson of Moros - and the human settlers learned it well. They also learned to fight, fiercely
and tenaciously, to survive. And over the generations, with the self-disciplined co-operation that was the
mainstay of their community, they developed their fighting skills to an amazing level. They became expert
- and more than expert - at every kind of combat, whether unarmed and hand-to-hand, or with the
high-technology weapons of human civilization.

So by the time contact with other colonized planets was made - as the Inhabited Worlds developed
interplanetary trade and communications - the people of Moros were found to be special, even unique.
The rigours of life on their world had turned them into the most skilled and effective fighters in the galaxy.

When they realized that fact, they also realized what the next step in their development might be. And out
of that realization had come - the Legions of Moros.

The Scattering, and the centuries that followed, had changed human nature very little. People had taken
their aggression and violence out to the stars, along with their hopes and faiths and dreams. They had
taken greed, bigotry, power, hunger, fear. And with these tendencies, or because of them, they took a
continuing readiness to make war. In time, some of the warring human worlds saw the special value in the
unique skills of the Legions. And the Legions began to be invited to hire out their skills, as mercenary
soldiers.

Some of those invitations they accepted. Their skills became their primary natural resource, with which
they could trade, and profitably. Yet all the while they had been turning themselves into an unrivalled
military force, they had not forgotten their traditions.

Equality, co-operation, communality remained the solid basis for the Legions as for the first settlers. So
deeply ingrained were these qualities, by then, that they might have been taken for mutations. Their world
knew nothing of greed, selfishness, destructive ambition or other anti-social tendencies. On Moros,
anything anti-social was also anti-survival.

And, as the Legions retained their traditional ethics, so they also retained their individual self-discipline