Bathing as usual - the harassment of dissidents, the destruction of freedom fighters... No, it's from other texts. Of course - with the planting of traditional values, with the propaganda of the greatness of the native planet, the ancient and great mankind, who built sailing ships even when the citadels just got to the nebula of the Snake ... No, again, not so.
With the creation of a completely new type of culture, modern and advanced? Well, it looks more like... But one dick, all of the above was present.
It was difficult to establish a mutual understanding. Practically impossible. Even by force - especially by force. It was the same strength, too, the laughter was the same.
But people tried, yes. Even despite the laughter and the fact that near the millions of people in the colony of Terra Nova and five hundred thousand - Eden-Prime - quietly and peacefully lived the many millions of settlements of the Citadel races, and provided local people with some kind of income in the galactic credits - for which they were ready to carry them in their arms. Sometimes literally.
But the Earth was not lost. Not that the Salisystem culture could break the power of the culture of galaxies - but the biological proximity still played its role. People did not understand but could play on the nerves of their relatives. They liked it - almost as Hitchcock said, "the viewer wants to be scared.
However, that's all - the little things in the background of what's happening in the Galaxy.
The first and most important result of the limited association agreement was the appearance of the Earth's exit to the extranet.
The information flowed - instead of lonely bottles of letters, thrown into the ocean, the earthlings flooded the same ocean of information.
Sort and disassemble it - uh-oh.
But something interesting happened almost at once.
Citadels praised some proteans - the race that emerged and disappeared fifty thousand years ago, leaving a lot of parcels with technology for those who went into space.
People have the freshest parcel, the Crystal Dome, built more than a hundred thousand years ago. The monolith Sphere is three and a little over a million years ago. Calcium city - five and a half million years ago. And there was no talk of usable technology. They had only one thing in common: the catapults.
When this information broke out into the Galaxy, it made a lot of noise - but against the background of the rumble of ordinary life, Extranet remained almost unnoticed, except maybe by some experts.
However, the extranet channel remained the main link between the Citadel space and the Earth. Of course, the trade was conducted, but it was not too active - the Citadel merchants were looking at the newcomers slowly and thoroughly. The cultural exchange was closed on extranet, rare tourists-galads, and very rare earthmen.
Nothing special has happened in fifteen years. The Earth developed the fleet, joined the colonies back, searched for the Ark-3, but did not aim at such unsightly colonization of such an empty space as at first. Yes, at first people thought that all the contenders for the Galaxy had died out millions of years ago - but for a hundred years, they knew that this was not the case and became more careful.
Even the citadels' revelation of the mystery of the inertial drive, which happened almost by drunkenness, did not make the weather - the scientists of the citadel concluded that the earthlings have not achieved in the use of matter-X - a kind of "element zero", as its xenons called - significant progress, and their inertial drive is based on it in the same way, even the original technical solutions are not interesting, because the existing technologies of the Citadel are more effective.
It wasn't quite so - it was used by earthmen more efficiently per kilogram, because it was needed only for "burning" the inertial field, and it was controlled by absolutely different ways. But, really, the mass-core of the Citadel ships exceeded the generators of the earthlings in power, compactness, debugging and poisoning by many times.
And all this is bullshit compared to Eternity.
In the year two thousand one hundred and eighty-sixth, the Azari settlement excavated on Eden Prime, studying the unexpectedly found burial of proteans. Complete secrecy, an orbiting fleet of cover around the planet, the best archeologists of the galaxy...
And a nuclear fungus sprinkled with powdered meteors falling from the orbit of fragments of the fleet's cover ships.
Catastrophe on Illyum, when the hordes of rachni broke into the planet's capital, the archeology of the Nose Astra.
Another nuclear fungus - prohibited by the Citadel to the spread of weapons, where did it come from? - over the planet Feros, unpopulated but covered with protein ruins.
And as an unexpected, but the natural ending - the capture of the Citadel by unknown forces. Lightning-fast. Instantaneous.
It's only been a few hours since the first panic message from the Citadel - and it's completely gone. Together with the entire covert fleet.