Well, you have to understand, I'm not going to come right out and call one of the core volumes apocryphal - that would be silly - but, well, there are a lot of circumstances in Crossroads that seem oddly mismatched with developments in earlier periods of UF history that were developed later in real life. The whereabouts of the Zentraedi Alliance during the War of Corporate Occupation just... happens to be one of them.

If I were doing it today, the part played by the forces of the never-again-seen Discordian Confederation (which I mainly threw in for Zoner's amusement, as he was by far a bigger fan of the Illuminatus! Trilogy than I've ever been) would most likely go to the Kridanik Fleet instead; but I'm not, and that's the way the ball bounces sometimes.

If you really need a Marvel No-Prize-style explanation (that is, for those of you not familiar with Marvel Comics in the late Silver Age, an explanation of why what is obviously a mistake is not actually a mistake :), you can assume that the WDF's allied Zentraedi forces are fully engaged against other enemy forces elsewhere in the galaxy - if not another GENOM fleet, perhaps renegade Zentraedi co-opted by Largo - and cannot move to support the main fleet action at Zeta Cygni in time.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
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