Page 89 of Veiled Vixen

“Unless what?”

“Unless it wasn’t a nebula you saw, but the core of a galaxy.”

“What do you mean?”

“Old stars which are tightly clustered together in the center of a galaxy look yellow inside a nebula.”

“OK. So that’s it. How many of those are there?”

“Not many.”

“Great. Let’s map them out.”

“It won’t do any good.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not a nebula. It’s another galaxy.”

“What are you saying? The second gate leads to another galaxy?”

“That’s… that’s not a gate, Draden. That’s a wormhole. And those don’t technically exist. There’s no way to get to another galaxy. Even the closest galaxy is too far away. There are no gates. Not even the known spin nodes can transport things that far.”

“Well, I went somewhere. And who says all the spin nodes are known?”

“That’s true,” Booty said. “Jimmy and Delphi did claim to travel to another galaxy while they were on Mighty Minions. And they assumed that was a spin node.”

“See. There you go.”

“But they didn’t know for sure. It could’ve been a hologram. And even though Luck and Nyleena took Tray and Valor through a spin node on Harem, I never did get the full story of where they actually went. ALCOR was the one who debriefed Tray and he didn’t share any of that information with me. But I don’t think it was another galaxy.”

“Well, we can’t ask either of them now,” Draden replied, frustrated. “Just show me any route that took us past a yellow nebula. Even if it was really another galaxy.”

All the routes on the table disappeared. But one.

“There we are!” Draden exclaimed. “Where is this?”

“This… this is Serpint’s manual route home from Cetus System,” Booty said. “Where Serpint stole Corla, you died, and I was corrupted.”

And now they were right back to the beginning of where this whole story had started.