The Drath Verse spreads across a good portion of the Milky Way galaxy. Not all of it. The Drath have humanity firmly contained in one section of it, pending discussions on how humanity will integrate with the other five intelligent species in the galaxy. Which is, of course, another story. But the events that Shahnaz and Caelan deal with in A Simple Life started far away on another planet. They came to a head in Fragments of a Chain. I thought you might like a sample of that story as it's the other half of this one.