“Saloninus,” I told her, “says that there are basically two kinds of invasion. There’s conquests, where you get hordes of savages streaming across a frozen river, cities burned to the ground, every living thing slaughtered right down to chickens, the end of civilisation as we know it, followed by a dark age, followed by something very much like what you had before. The other kind is called a takeover. That’s where you clear out the people at the top and take their place and everything else goes on as normal. Takeovers are better because you inherit all the nice things your predecessors had,
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