How secret is secret?

Like every book or movie ever made, you can tear it apart finding logical inconsistencies if you try hard enough. Even Rome's Revolution. Heck, there are whole YouTube channels with videos about "Everything Wrong With (fill in the movie)" so nobody's perfect.

So, too, it is with the supposedly hidden enclave of the Ibbrassati in the north woods where the Ark crash lands. Seriously, if the Vuduri wanted to find it, they would have found it. It turns out that the Overmind of Deucado not only knows about the enclave, it purposely doesn't expose that fact. When Rome was having her mental showdown with the Overmind, the topic of the phantoms later to be revealed as The Deucadons went something like this:

     “Maybe they are just well-hidden,” Rome observed.
     “Like your father and his little band of rebels?” The Overmind sounded bemused.
     “What do you know about my father?” Rome gasped, first in her mind, then out loud.
     “We know that he and his group are tucked away in the mountains north of Lake Eprehem. We know almost exactly where they are and what they are doing. We have had a spy among them since the beginning.”
     “What do you mean a spy?” Rome asked fearfully.
     “There is one of ours there. She feeds us information upon occasion,” said the Overmind cryptically.
     “So if you know where they are, why have you left them alone?” Rome asked.
     “Because we know the path they are blazing. They think they are developing technology. Nothing like the unexplained incidents I described earlier. In fact, what they are doing is so pitiful it is almost amusing. It would have taken them years before they come close to anything that we would need to worry about.”
     “Why did you permit it at all?” Rome asked.
     “Because it diverted their attention. It let them think they were doing something to improve their condition. It was such a trifling and they devoted so many resources, we considered it useful. However now we have your Ark. That we consider a problem.”

So if the Overmind knew about the secret enclave, why didn't it just send forces there to capture and destroy the Essessoni? Answer: it never occurred to the Overmind that is where they went. There is no way that Rome and Rei could have known. Fridone remarked about this when he first saw Rome.

So, in the Vuduri universe of the 35th century, the fact that the Ark crash-landed right near the secret Ibbrassati base was just an amazing coincidence. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.