[I get it], says Eleven. [You don’t want to talk about it.]
“That’s not what I mean!” says Sarya. “I mean—goddess, Eleven, I just came down here so we could—”
Abruptly, the cargo bay full of ice and water disappears as the suit flicks its holo environment off. Sarya stares at the suit’s seamless matte interior for a moment, wondering how to salvage this. Is she…fighting with a pressure suit? Should she…say something? But before she has a chance, the holo flicks back on. Her stomach lurches. Now, instead of a dim watery hold, she is floating in the fire and fury of a red sun that takes up more than a quarter of the sky. The conversation, apparently, is over.
She squints, gazing directly into the inferno in front of her. This is her sun—the sun, as it was called on Watertower. She’s spent her whole life in its orbit, but she’s never seen it as anything more than a dim red dot in a holo. The stars are strewn more thickly than she has ever seen them, and for some reason they are all the exact same shade as the sun. There are great bunches of them here, crowding together, shimmering, glinting, moving even, which is weird—and that’s when she realizes that they are not stars.
They’re starships.
Of course they’re starships. This is the thickest and most crowded transit corridor in twelve lightyears. There’s only one way into or out of this solar system—if you don’t opt for a decades-long journey through empty void—and that’s through the Network. That makes Riptide one particle in a cloud of millions, a mote in a billowing mass that funnels into the Network’s maw.
“It’s…beautiful,” she says.
[It’s terrifying.]
Sarya gazes out into the void, trying to imagine how anyone in their right mind could call this terrifying. “It’s just…I mean, it’s just the Network.”
The suit hums. [It’s just the Network], it says. [I don’t think you know the first thing about the Network.]
“Oh come on,” Sarya ribs the suit, elbowing the wall just as she would a legal intelligence—and hopefully the suit is picking up on that. “Like you’re an expert. You’ve probably never even made a transfer.”
[Because of my low tier?] asks Eleven.
Oh, for the goddess’s sake. “No! Because—”
[I have made many transfers. And you might think differently yourself, in a few minutes.]
And once again the suit cuts off any possible reply by changing its holos. Sarya sucks in a breath as her viewpoint moves backward and out of the ship, and now she is looking at an upended brick drifting in the void. This side—the side away from the sun—is black, but its radiating vanes glow brightly enough to be seen through Eleven’s filters.
“What an ugly ship,” murmurs Sarya.
[Tell me about it.]
“How are you doing this, by the way?”
[I made friends with the tug behind us. She’s letting me borrow her sensors.]
“We’re cuttin’ her close!” breaks in Ol’ Ernie. “About ten seconds from our slot and a smidgen and a half from overheatin’, but remember: this is Ol’ Ernie we’re talking about! That said: hold onto y’all’s respective squishables!”
With a sustained low frequency that rattles Sarya’s teeth and brings tears to her eyes, the ship’s gravs slam to full. Eleven keeps the view steady as Riptide departs the gleaming cloud of starships. It is tumbling end over end, and Sarya’s stomach begins to feel yanks in several different directions as Riptide’s gravs make a noble attempt to apply the exact same acceleration to every particle of the ship.
“Something’s wrong,” she says in a tight voice, pointing with an unsteady finger. “No way should we be spinning.”
Ol’ Ernie, meanwhile, is making a sound that Eleven’s holo assures her is [laughter]. “See this, Fuzzy?” he shouts. “Trick is to keep the exposure even, bring you to a nice even tan. Better’n one side minty clean and one side slag, wouldn’t y’all agree?” The laughter ascends into near-maniacal territory. “Ol’ Ernie ain’t piloted a damn Foundation in decades!” he shouts. “It’s like two tugboats welded crosswise!”
Sarya’s eyes move from the tumbling ship to a minute black dot in the exact center of the sun. She stares at it with mounting anxiety as it expands like a cancer, swallowing the star from the inside. In just a few bone-shaking minutes, its unbelievable fury is reduced to a ring of flame, punctuated with solar prominences that thread their way through space like rivers of fire. On all sides she is surrounded with the otherworldly glow of thousands of maxed gravs as Ol’ Ernie’s brethren bring their respective charges home. Below her, innumerable icons mark where more ships whip past in the opposite direction. None but Riptide, she notes, are tumbling.
They are in the shadow cone of the tunnel now, in its very throat. Sarya has no way of judging its size, just as she would have no hope of numbering the massive fleet of ships racing into its mouth. They are near one edge, and she can see millions or maybe billions of gleams twinkling in an arc so vast it looks nearly straight. Those are the buoys, the city-sized drones responsible for keeping the tunnel open and this system on the Network. Their massive circle of lights marks the boundary, where realspace ends and subspace begins. Sarya feels herself pressing backward, as if a few centimeters’ space could save her from the tunnel. Suddenly she is a little more understanding of Eleven’s concern. It’s not black in there, it’s…indescribable. It horrifies her, it hurts her brain to even look at it, but she cannot look away.
This is it, the thing that has surrounded her for as long as she can remember. This is where civilization comes from. This is the Network, 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.