"Timothy Zahn - Cobra 1 - Cobra" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zahn Timothy)

And with that attitude firmly settled in his mind, he gave his full attention to the viewport, eagerly
awaiting his first glimpse of a real star ship.



Skylark 407 was a commercial liner, the majority of its three hundred passengers business
professionals and tourists. A handful, though, were new recruits like Jonny; and as the ship made
stops over the next few days at Rajput, Zimbwe, and Blue Haven, that number rapidly went up. By
the time they reached Aerie, fully a third of the passengers were transferred to the huge military
transport orbiting there. Jonny's group was apparently the last batch to arrive, and they were barely
aboard before the ship shifted into hyperspace. Someone, clearly, was in a hurry.

For Jonny, the next five days were ones of awkward—and not totally successful—cultural
adjustment. Jammed together in communal rooms, with less privacy than even the liner had
afforded, the recruits formed a bewildering mosaic of attitudes, habits, and accents, and getting used
to all of it proved harder than Jonny had anticipated. Many of the others apparently felt the same
way, and within a day of their arrival Jonny noticed that his former shipmates were following the
example of those who'd arrived here earlier and were clumping in small, relatively homogenous
groups. Jonny made a few halfhearted attempts to bridge the social gaps, but eventually he gave up
and spent the remainder of the trip with others of the Horizon contingent. The Dominion of Man,
clearly, wasn't nearly as culturally uniform as he'd always believed, and he finally had to console
himself with the reasonable expectation that the Army must have figured out how to handle this kind
of barrier a long time ago. When they reached the training camps of Asgard, he knew, things would
change, and they'd all be simply soldiers together.

In a way he was right... but in another way, he was very wrong.



The registration foyer was a room as large as the Horizon City Concert Hall, and it was almost
literally packed with people. At the far end, past the dotted line of sergeants at terminals, the slowly-
moving mass changed abruptly to a roiling stream as the recruits hurried to their assigned orientation
meetings. Drifting along, oblivious to the flood passing him on both sides, Jonny frowned down at
his own card with a surprise that was edging rapidly into disappointment.

JONNY MOREAU

HORIZON: HN-89927-238-2825p

ASSIGNED ROOM: AA-315 FREYR COMPLEX

UNIT: COBRAS

UNIT ORIENTATION: C-662 FREYR COMPLEX:

1530 HOURS

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