In late 2074 the second expedition to the Saturn system arrived on station. The development of a working, relatively small, nuclear-fusion reactor powering an ion-drive thrust system put the gas giant planets only months away. Chemical-powered rockets of earlier years would have meant many years of travel.
         

The second trip out had a single destination and purpose: to recover the alien spaceship that was found orbiting Saturn’s wayward outer moon Phoebe. The spaceship in question was spotted by the first manned mission to the Saturn area three years earlier. What made the discovery of even greater significance was the fact that the lights were on, although it appeared there was no one at home.
         

The alien ship was being powered internally, possibly left behind, reason unknown, to be retrieved by the original owners someday. Recovery of the alien ship went well and it was towed back to near Earth, parked in a high, stable orbit, and handed over to a bevy of scientists and engineers.
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 It was during the return trip to Earth that the crew aboard the recovery tug learned that a team of three physicists had cracked the math proving that Faster-Than-Light travel was going to be possible. In 2097 the first FTL test flight was made. In 2101 the first human FTL ship appeared in the Alpha Centauri system.
         

It took two decades for the scientists and engineers to reverse engineer most of what they’d found on the alien spaceship…the most amazing being the Artificial Gravity generators. Not a single human scientist had the slightest inkling that such a thing was possible; all of the speculative-science types said it was not.
         

By 2104 artificial gravity was being incorporated into most spaceships for control of the interior gravity and synthetic-gravity drives were being experimented with.
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 In 2120 the first synthetic-gravity drive system was used to power a spaceship from the moon to Mars and back in three hundred and one hours. The great emigration from Earth began less than a decade later.
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By 2282, where we pick up the story of Indigo Billy, there are nine major colony worlds, another seventeen fledgling colonies, and space-stations and orbital platforms in their many dozens.
           

As humanity moved out into the galaxy they carried with them that bright, shining light that is the human way of doing things, ready to share their wisdom and compassion with all those that lived in the shadows of ignorance. ​