Naomi looked up at the little slice of stars. The galactic disk looked the same as it had in Sol system, but the constellations not quite like her own. Parallax, she knew, was how they’d started mapping which systems were on the other sides of the gates. She’d seen a map once—the splash of systems that the gates connected. Thirteen hundred stars in a galaxy with three hundred billion of them. They’d been clumped together, the gate-network stars. The two farthest systems were hardly more than a thousand light-years apart. A little more than one percent of the galaxy, and still unthinkably vast.
