Book 5: Chapter 14: Network Tours
Icarus
April 2321
Wormhole Network
We could have very easily just hopped from hub system to hub system, pausing only to identify the next hub jump. But there was enough of the scientist in us to keep us on track. In six months, we managed to do eight hub hops, taking us about sixty degrees around the galaxy. We’d long since left the Orion Spur and were now hopping through the Perseus Arm, which was a lot thicker with star systems. Each hub we investigated connected to local systems up to a couple hundred light-years away. Most of the hub systems had somewhere between two hundred and five hundred connections, but the last one, a real monster, had more than a thousand.
We had also become increasingly aware, as we circumnavigated the galaxy, that the Milky Way had a previously unknown near neighbor—a large dwarf galaxy that was invisible from home because of the intervening galactic core, but became increasingly spectacular as our travels brought it more into view. I’d been taking pictures whenever possible and bundling them up into the reports we were preparing for if and when we got back to our own neighborhood.
I was examining the data window that listed the wormhole counts and locations while Dae sat and patted Spike. I said, “Y’know, the number of connections in the hub systems is trending upward as we go.”
“It’s not just this one skewing the stats?” Dae replied.
I shook my head. “Naw, the other seven graph generally upward. I wonder if we’re getting closer to the center of the empire.”
“Empire?”