In hindsight, Ves shouldn't have been surprised. The Hexers may be bigoted, but they showed plenty of moments of foresight. It was a given that they were plotting an ambitious fallback plan related to the Red Ocean.
The dwarf galaxy opened up for colonization represented a new start to anyone who was discontent with life in the old galaxy.
While the Milky Way was the root of human civilization, many futurists predicted that their race would one day expand into the greater cosmos.
However, the distance to other galaxies was unimaginably far. Both the Andromeda Galaxy and the Triangulum Galaxy were millions of light-years away.
That hadn't deterred ambitious colonists from building ultra-durable generation ships in order to reach all of that untold wealth and plant their flag first, but it was far too difficult to expand to those distant stretches.
