). If you've ever read Your Inner Fish, you realize how tricky it is to make this sort of thing plausible. But something occurred to me: We have no idea what the evolutionary history of the Pak is--perhaps they're the ones who are transplants.It wouldn't be the first (well, last, technically) time aliens thought uplifting another alien into their shock troops would be a good idea, and Pak Protectors are certainly well-suited to the task. Unlike the ones who unleashed the Kzinti on the universe, these aliens decided to make their warriors dependent upon them, and hence, tree-of-life, without which the Pak are literally nothing more than animals. The Pak, being Pak, eventually find a way to destroy their masters, anyway, seize the supply of tree-of-life, and head off to find a world where it will grow. This happened somewhere between three and six million years ago.
Much later, three million years ago, a group of Pak decides that they want to GFO and create their own colony, but where? Any time anyone tries to set up a colony world anywhere within scouting range, the homeworld sees it as a threat and destroys it, and outside of scouting range is, well, outside of scouting range. You'd basically be depending on blind luck for the world you settle on to be even habitable. But fortuitously, someone found the map to the Pak's home star, and if there's one world guaranteed to be habitable to the Pak, it's the one they came from. There's some worry--there must be a reason Pak didn't colonize it in the first place...or, worse, maybe they did, in which case the would-be colonizers would be in for an unwelcome surprise once they reach their new home. But still, it's better than a blind-ass shot in the dark. They calculate the star's path, find it, and the rest is history.