Sigrund experienced many changes as he continued to captain the Babylon Excavator in a dwarf galaxy gone mad.
Before the Great Severing occurred, the reconnaissance cruiser under his command conducted leisurely trips into the periphery of alien space.
The fleeters always meant to eradicate the native aliens, but the urgency had never been too great.
With the crushing warmaking potential of human civilization in the Milky Way, the real question was not whether the indigenous civilizations would be able to resist, but how expensive it would be to root them out of every star system.
Since the prevailing thought at the time was that there was no need to spend more money to conquer the Red Ocean than they needed to, the fleeters did not mobilize their fleets at a larger scale.
That came back to bite them when the Great Severing cut off the human immigrants from their powerful home civilization.
