evolved around that star. Its history might have ended there, as it was close to five times the maximum distance the Indi ships could reasonably supply a new colony, over 120 light-years away.
But when someone discovered that Tau Puppis was emitting faint EM radiation of demonstrably intelligent origin, the planet was moved to the front of Indi’s priority list. First contact with an alien race was important in and of itself, but also in the front of the mind of every Indi decision maker was the fact that the accidental contact between the Centauri arm and the delphinine natives of Paralia had resulted in the development of the first tach drives and Centauri dominance in the new Confederacy. So Indi routed money, people, and Paralian-designed tach- ships down a corridor from Beta Pictoris toward Tau Puppis.
The aliens from Tau Puppis met them more than halfway.
There was a lot of diplomatic dancing, as it became very clear that the birdlike aliens were the rulers of an interstellar empire as large or larger than man’s, an empire that claimed much of the 120 light-years of space between Beta Pictoris and Tau Puppis, a volume as great as the whole of the Confederacy at the time.
The end result was to deform the yellow dumbbell of human colonization, pushing it away from the galactic center and away from the red-outlined systems of the Voleran Empire.
None of the other red-outlined systems represented such an interstellar empire. Procyon, within the core of human space, was highlighted red. Familiar to any Occisian as the home system of the Race, the losers of mankind’s first, and so far only, interstellar war with another species.
Two remaining systems were outlined red. One embedded in the other lobe of the dumbbell on the opposite side of Sol from the Volerans. That was Paralia, home of the aquatic creatures that designed humanity’s first tach- drives.
The last red outline other marked Helminth, home to an enigmatic wormlike race that had cities, and a civilization, but with whom human scientists were barely able to communicate.
Like the Volerans, Helminth marked the edge of the human expansion toward the galactic center. But for a different reason.
The Voleran side of human space had been expanding for two centuries, and the presence of Voleran colonies simply forced the drift of mankind off in a different direction.
Helminth marked the edge of human space by coincidence. That end of human space stopped expanding for political and economic reasons. A hundred and seventy-five years ago, when the Confederacy fell, the planets of the old Sirius-Eridani Economic Community had fared the worst. Where the other arms of the old Confederacy managed to hold on to some sort of political identity, the SEEC began a decades-long inward collapse along ancient fault lines. The dual capitals of Cynos and Khamsin were untenable without the Confederacy to support it, and what was left after the breakup didn’t have the resources to move outward.
However, on Cardinal Anderson’s map, there were blue-outlined stars flung out beyond Helminth in a pattern that had never appeared in any publicly available chart or catalog; a pattern of half a dozen stars over a hundred light- years from Sol and over seventy light-years beyond the edge of human space.
“A decade ago, a Jesuit observatory discovered those colonies you see there in blue.” He adjusted the display and the view zoomed in on the blue systems so names on the stars were visible.
89 Leonis, HD 98354, HD 101534, Xi Virginis . . .
Mallory stared at the cluster of blue-outlined systems.
It was bizarre. Lost colonies were the stuff of tabloid holocasts. Too much time, resources, and people went into establishing a colony—especially one so distant—for the history of it to be lost in the short time that man had been traveling among the stars.
Father Mallory looked up at Cardinal Anderson. “These are alien outposts, some new species?”
“No,” Cardinal Anderson said quietly. “These are human colonies, at least six of them, founded as the Confederacy was collapsing. A hundred and seventy-five years ago.”
“Six? Why hasn’t this been made public? Six established colonies . . .”
“Possibly more,” the cardinal said. “These colonies were founded in secret. We believe by people escaping the rise of the Eridani Caliphate. Can you see why we would keep this secret?”
Father Mallory nodded. The Eridani Caliphate, successor to something more than half of the old SEEC, had never had good relations with the Vatican. Often open warfare was only avoided by the fact that the Roman Catholic Church wasn’t a nation, as such. However, the pope had many allies in the secular world as the only part of the body of Christ with an interstellar reach. There had been dozens of proxy battles over the past century, fighting the reach of the Caliphate into the remains of the SEEC.
However, the Caliphate currently controlled the area between the rest of human space and these newly discovered colonies. The Caliphate’s official position on the ascension of the Islamic government was that it was the rise of an oppressed people into power. The revelation of secular—or worse, Christian or Jewish—refugees from that ascension forming breakaway colonies would be a diplomatic embarrassment to the Caliphate.
