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

I went anyplace the Admiralty didn't know what the hell to expect.

Officially, I belonged to the Explorer Corps. Unofficially, we Explorers called ourselves ECMs—short
for Expendable Crew Members.




Why


Listen. Here is what all ECMs knew.

Violent death is rare in the Technocracy. We have no wars. The crime level is low, and few incidents
involve lethal weapons. When accidents happen, victims can almost always be saved by sophisticated
local medical centers.

But.

There are no medical centers on unexplored planets. Death may come with savage abruptness or the
stealthy creep of alien disease. In a society where people expect to ease comfortably out of this world at
a ripe old age, the thought of anyone being killed in the prime of life is deeply disturbing. If it happens to
someone you know, the effect is devastating.

Unless... the person who dies is different. Not like everyone else.

Two centuries ago, the Admiralty High Council secretly acknowledged that some deaths hurt Fleet
morale more than others. If the victim was popular, well-liked, and above all,physically attractive,
fellow crewmates took the death hard. Performance ratings dropped by as much as thirty percent.
Friends of the deceased required lengthy psychological counseling. Those who had ordered the fatal
mission sometimes felt a permanently impairing guilt.

But if the victim was not so popular, not so well-liked, and above all, ugly... well, bad things happen, but
we all have to carry on.

No one knows exactly when the High Council solidified this fact of human behavior into definite policy.
In time, however, the Explorer Corps evolved from a group of healthy, bright-eyed volunteers into...
something less photogenic.

Potential recruits were flagged at birth. The flawed. The ugly. The strange. If a child's physical problems
were truly disabling, or if the child didn't have the intelligence or strength of will to make a good Explorer,
the full power of modern medicine would be unleashed to correct every impediment to normality. But if
the child combined ability and expendability in a single package—if the child was smart and fit enough to
handle the demands of Exploration, but different enough to be lessreal than a normal person...

...there was an Explorer's black uniform in that child's future.
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