"Steve Perry - The Man Who Never Missed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Steven)

Khadaji stared at the formula for Shin's Kiss, still glowing in the air half a
meter away. "Yeah. A bit."

"You don't need a degree on most worlds to challenge the pubtender's exam, but
you do need to learn a few things. We might as well get started."

Khadaji nodded. Well. It wouldn't be dull, not if there were other chemicals
like Shin's Kiss. My.

Khadaji had learned a good deal about falling, rolling and tumbling, he
realized, as he found himself flying through the air for the tenth time that
day. He nicked, hit the grass at a good angle, and came up, without injury or
even mild pain.

"You were sleeping," Pen said. He stood three meters away, enveloped in his
ever-present shroud. The wind was chilly, it was late fall shading into winter
and snow was expected in the mountains within a few days. Khadaji nodded. He
hadn't been concentrating and the result showed it. Sumito required total
attention for it to work; anything less was cause for instant loss of control.
After five local months, he was getting better, but he still had a long way to
go. Muscle memory had to be trained, Pen told him, and concentration had to be
sharpened to a needle's point. He could walk to the seventy-second step.

As for the planet, he was getting used to it, as well. The smells of the air
no longer seemed alien, nor the slight differences in gravity, nor the actinic
quality of the local sun's light. The people still waged their war against the
Confed, with no success. More troops had been sent to the world and the
numbers of the ready-to-die attackers could not overcome the firepower of the
Confederation machine. Khadaji wondered sometimes if he and Pen would
eventually be the only people alive except troopers....

The snow was piled half a meter thick upon the frozen ground. Khadaji and Pen
walked over it on flat, thin sheets of enforced plastic radiating from their
slushboots like artificial spider's webs. There was a flaw in the heating
system of Khadaji's suit-a spot over his left buttock the size of his hand so
cold it was going numb.

"Primary routes of administration?" Pen didn't wear a conditioned suit, only
the shroud of his order.

Khadaji's breath made frosty clouds as he spoke. "Oral, anal, vaginal, nasal,
ophthalmically, otically, cutaneously." He hit a patch of soft snow with his
left web and sank in that direction, almost toppling.
"You forgot poenile-the meatus urinarius," Pen said. "Use the mnemonic and you
won't."

Khadaji blinked. Damn. The memory device- flashed across his mental screen. On
Aqua, crafty people never open virginal orifices. The first letter of each
word stood for one of the primary routes of drug administration.