Chapter 3: JayaniJayani Kulitivo looked across the ecopreserve and knelt to pray to the Gods of Jaffna, grateful that the prophet Buddha had brought the message of peace to her warring forebears.
Below, from her redoubt in central Nuwara Eliya, stretched miles of Terran habitat, exported from Earth in the waning days of Lemuria, when political infighting had loosened imperial control of the outer Perseus arm, and only the occupants of the Orion Spur had anything to fear from their Lemurian overlords.
Jaffna had been the first of the outer protectorates beyond the Crab Nebula to declare its secession from Lemuria, and with its departure, the mother empire had rapidly come apart. As the most distant of those protectorates, Jaffna had suffered the least amount of upheaval as Lemuria's influ
