4: The Taloned Sire

"The refugees moved into the Sagittarius Spiral Arm in a disbelieving shock. Betrayed, starving, alone; middle-aged bankers and college kids stared at worlds they did not make, and so began the slow and tedious work of wrestling from those worlds a way to move forward.
Children torn from ordinary family life and suddenly beset with Herculean tasks. Artists and construction workers, teachers and clerks, waiters and soldiers-all cast into strange scenarios where they were to begin again under the most daunting of circumstances. It was their defining moment when robbed of their birth rights and dispossessed of their homes, they found they were a right unto themselves and not the confine of a particular space. Their home but anywhere their feet would set. They became as platinum in their dogged will to survive."

"The Marauders live at the core and worship the black hole at the center of the galaxy. That," he pointed in the direction of galactic center and Vince's faceplate ran through several imaging programs, "massive antimatter plume that shoots up from the center, that's their god, of sorts.
"Nobody really knows, they don't make converts, they make sacrifices. Me, I think the Predecessors traveled through the event horizon at the center to some other universe. But I'll never follow to find out. Ha. Ha ha!"
Vince had seen the plume when he first went into the Taloned Sire's sensory array. It was beautiful, a simple jet stream stretching for light years. It was the first thing he learned about in the piloting tapes. The plume; it functioned as the great navigational beacon of the galaxy.
Such piloting courses leave out the details of Marauders, however. There should be an addendum: Sociopathic Raider Cultures presenting travel risks.They moved through the gloomy ship searching for Predecessor Booty.