"Drew Karpyshyn - Mass Effect 01 - Revelation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Karpyshyn Drew)

for the commanding officer of the ship. On most missions even VIPs were expected to use the common

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 [Mass Effect 01] - Revelation

mess or the communal sleeping pods. But Grissom was a living legend, and for him exceptions could be
made. In this case the captain had generously offered his own quarters for the relatively short trip to
Arcturus.

Grissom stretched, trying to work the knots out of his neck and shoulders. The admiral rolled his head
from side to side until he was rewarded with a satisfying crack of the vertebrae. He made a quick check
of his uniform in the mirror—keeping up appearances was one of the burdens of fame—before stepping
out the door to make his way to the bridge in the bow of the starship.

Various members of the crew paused in their duties to stand at attention and salute as he marched past
their stations. He responded in kind, barely aware that he was doing so. In the eight years since he had
become a hero of the human race, he’d developed an instinctive ability to acknowledge the gestures of
respect and admiration without any conscious awareness.

Grissom’s mind was still distracted with thoughts of how much everything had changed with the
discovery of the alien bunker on Mars … a line of thinking that was not surprising given the unsettling
reports from Shanxi.

The revelation that humanity was not alone in the universe hadn’t just impacted Earth’s religions, it had
far-reaching effects across the political spectrum as well. But where religion had descended into the
chaos of schisms and extremist splinter groups, politically the discovery had actually drawn humanity
closer together. It had fundamentally united the inhabitants of Earth, the swift and sudden culmination of
the pan-global cultural identity that had been slowly but steadily developing over the last century.

Within a year the charter for the human Systems Alliance—the first all-encompassing global coalition—
had been written and ratified by Earth’s eighteen largest nation-states. For the first time in recorded
history the inhabitants of Earth began to see themselves as a single, collective group: human as opposed
to alien.

The Systems Alliance Military—a force dedicated to the protection and defense of Earth and its citizens
against non-Terran threats—was formed soon after, drawing resources, soldiers, and officers from nearly
every military organization on the planet.

There were some who insisted the sudden unification of Earth’s various governments into a single
political entity had happened a little too quickly and conveniently. The info nets were swarming with
theories claiming the Mars bunker had actually been discovered long before it was publicly announced;
the report of the mining team unearthing it was just a well-timed cover story. The formation of the
Alliance, they asserted, was in fact the final stage of a long and complicated series of secret international
treaties and clandestine backroom deals that had taken years or even decades to negotiate.

Public opinion generally dismissed such talk as conspiracy theory paranoia. Most people preferred the
idealistic notion that the revelation was a catalyst that energized the governments and citizens of the

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 [Mass Effect 01] - Revelation