the unmeasurable web of information that weaves through the galaxy. This is the half-billion-year-old birthright that every Citizen species swears to uphold, that every candidate species aspires to join. This gigantic rupture in spacetime is where the laws of nature break down, where the speed of light is a joke, where all ships, all data, all everything is packed together and hurled into nothingness—to emerge from one of the billions of identical tunnels stippled across the unimaginable volume of the galaxy. This colossal structure is a minuscule piece of what, quite literally, ties galactic society together. In a matter of seconds Riptide will touch the edge, and it will be vaporized, translated instantly into an unmeasurable quantity of—
Nothing.
And without realizing what she is doing Sarya opens her mouth to scream.
“Y’all ever tried nonexistence?” shouts a voice. It breaks into laughter. “Keep them eyes open! This is the best part!”
And Sarya exits subspace the same way she entered: mouth open, lungs inflated. The scream, when it comes, emerges as no more than a startled squeak.
[Now you get it], says Eleven.
“Yeah,” says Sarya softly, staring wide-eyed through the suit’s transparent walls. She is breathing hard, and she can feel her heart pounding in her chest. “I get it.”
Except she doesn’t. Her mind struggles, trying to make sense of what her eyes are seeing. At first it looks like Riptide is afloat in a gauzy white mist. It moves around the ship in patterns so slow they are almost still, in swirls, in slow-motion whorls. And then with a start, she feels her perspective expand. This isn’t a fog just outside the ship, this is a field of particles more massive than her mind can grasp. In every direction dance innumerable points of light in every conceivable color, so many that they blend together into a haze of white light.
“Lydies, gentlexirs, fuzzies, creepy androids, legal and sub-legal intelligences, so on and so forth,” crows Ol’ Ernie. “Allow me to introduce y’all to the family.”
“They’re ships,” she whispers. “Every single point of light is a ship.”
[Not ships], says Eleven. [My holo system doesn’t have that kind of resolution. Some of these points represent a million ships.]
A million ships per point. “How many—” Sarya begins, but her voice fails her. “How—”
[Exactly.]
It’s mind-blowing. It’s beyond anything Sarya has ever imagined. And yet, after a few moments of slack-jawed observation, she realizes that it’s also strangely familiar. “We’re backstage,” she breathes.
[Pardon?]
Sarya can’t take her eyes off the lights outside. Trillions of them, moving in such purposeful patterns, never with the slightest chance of a misstep or collision. “On Watertower,” she says—quietly, as if she could disturb this vast choreography with nothing more than her voice. “That’s how I thought of it, as backstage. You could get between any two places on the station if you went sort of…behind the scenes. There were so many intelligences back there, making things work. They moved exactly like this. Together, like one…thing. Thousands of them, all connected together, like this gigantic mind or something.”
[Thousands], says Eleven with a derisive rumble. [This is trillions. And that’s not even counting the Blackstar itself.]
The Blackstar itself. The thing she came here for. She peers out into the haze, searching. You would think it would be bigger than a point, though. It’s a whole station. It has to be many times the size of Watertower, but with trillions of points to choose from—
“Now y’all’s tiny l’il minds prolly won’t believe this,” says Ol’ Ernie, “but y’all are closer to a star now than you were on the other side. The only star in this l’il pocket o’ spacetime, believe it or not. Think of it like a transit station, if that helps y’all’s puny intellects.”
But Sarya sees no stars at all, only the field of shifting twisting lights. “Wait,” she says. “So if we’re right next to a star—”
[Then why can’t you see it?]
“Right. I mean, the sun was huge. This should be…” She searches for the word. “Huger. Right?”
[Spoken like a true high-tier.]
Sarya takes a breath for a retort, but again Eleven’s display interrupts. A simple diagram begins to draw itself over the drifting multitude of lights outside. Markers appear, then labels. Circular highlights trace the entrances to hundreds of subspace tunnels like the one they just came through. The openings are arranged as if on the inner surface of a sphere, though Sarya could not begin to imagine how large that sphere must be. In the center, another line begins to