Let’s be honest. I told myself that I was fulfilling my ambition to see the stars, but the truth of the matter was that I was running away from a woman who, through her silence, had told me that she wanted nothing more to do with me.
But still, I continued to write to her. It had become a habit, a way of passing time when I was off-duty. I had no idea whether Jordan was receiving my letters, let alone reading them, but nonetheless it was something I had to do.
For the next year, I visited worlds that were once beyond my reach. At Tau Bootis, I walked upon the shores of a methane sea beneath the ruddy glow of a variable star. At HD 150706, in the Ursa Minor constellation, I found myself on the moon of a superjovian whose orbit about its primary was so eccentric that its summers were hot enough to boil mercury and the carbon dioxide of its atmosphere froze solid during the winter; no indigenous life was possible in such a hellhole, but the kua’tah had established a mining outpost there, and so the Texas Rose took on a load of iron ingots in exchange for vids of ice medusae. From high orbit above the sorenta homeworld in the HD 73256 system, I saw one of the wonders of the galaxy: a continental mountain range, larger and higher than even the Andes, which primitive sorenta had spent countless generations carving into the likeness of the god that they’d worshipped in ancient times, until it resembled a vast, somber face perpetually staring up into the sky.[5]
All these worlds, and many others, I told Jordan about in my letters. For even though I’d tried to run away, I couldn’t escape my memory of her. I traveled hundreds of light-years, visited nearly a dozen planets, and yet every night I lay awake in my bunk and wished that she was there with me.
And then, at the farthest point in the Rose’s circuitous route, we arrived at Hex.
Humans didn’t learn about Hex until we made contact with the nord, and even then it wasn’t until after their homeworld was destroyed when a rogue black hole passed through its system at HD 70642. The nord met our people at Talus qua’spah, and when they found that we had something they wanted—did I mention that they really loved bluegrass?—they offered to reveal to us the starbridge coordinates of the place where they’d gone after they evacuated Nordash. At first, we were only politely curious… but then a Federation Navy ship went there, and realized that this information was worth its weight in banjos.[6]
HD 76700 is a G-class star located in the Volans constellation, about 194 light-years from Earth. It’s also the home system of the danui, a rather reclusive race that, although capable of interstellar travel and hence a member of the Talus, wasn’t much interested in visiting other worlds. Instead, the danui did exactly the opposite: they made something that would guarantee that other starfaring races would visit them instead.
They built Hex.
Once, several millennia ago, HD 76700 was home to a fairly modest solar system, with a couple of terrestrial-size planets in stable orbits within its habitable zone and a small gas giant in close proximity to the star itself. Except for the hot jupe,[7] those planets no longer exist; the danui dismantled them—don’t ask how; no one knows, and the danui aren’t telling—to construct the largest artificial habitat in the entire galaxy.
Picture a geodesic sphere—the technical term is geode, or “twisted dual geodesic dome”—comprised of hexagons, with empty space at the center of each hex. Now, make that geode 186 million miles in diameter, with a circumference of 584,337,600 miles; the legs of the individual hexagons are hollow cylinders 1,000 miles long and 100 miles wide, with a total perimeter of 6,000 miles. Construct this enormous sphere around a small yellow sun at the radial distance of one a.u., leaving the hot jupe where it is in order to furnish the hexes near the equator with an eclipse once every four days. Rotate the entire thing so that centrifugal force provides gravity within each cylinder, ranging from 2 g’s at the equator to nearly zero-g at the poles; the top half of each cylinder is a transparent roof comprised of some polymeric substance that provides radiation protection while also retaining atmospheric pressure.
The result is a habitat the size of a planetary system, comprised of nearly 100 trillion cylinders, each with its own individual environment.
The danui did this. And then they opened the doors and invited their neighbors to move in.
Why go to such effort? Damned if anyone knew, except that they liked company but hated to travel. But what everyone agreed upon was that only the danui would even conceive of such a thing, let alone pull it off. As a race, they had what, in a human, would be diagnosed as Asperger syndrome. Shy, inept at communication, and ugly as sin—they looked like gigantic tarantulas with enormous, lobster-like heads—the danui nonetheless were genius engineers, capable of focusing their entire attention on a single goal and working at it obsessively until it was brought to completion. At some point in their history, they’d decided to pull apart their homeworld, along with its closest neighbor and a nearby asteroid belt, and turn it into Hex.
That’s what humans called the place. The other races of the Talus, of course, had their own names for it. And nearly every one of them had accepted the danui invitation to establish colonies within individual hexes. There was no reason for anyone to push or shove—plenty of room for everyone, and then some—and the danui were willing to help newcomers transform their hexes into miniature replicas of their native worlds. The only stipulation was that the inhabitants live together in peace.
Which was an easy thing to agree to; wars are fought over territory, after all, and who’d go to war over a place where there’s more elbow room than anyone could possibly want? Besides, the other Talus races had already seen what had happened to the morath when they’d attempted to invade the kua’tah hex: the danui had simply sealed off the morath hex, then jettisoned it into space, toward the sun. It had taken nearly three months for the morath colony to fall into HD 76700, and the few survivors were told to leave Hex and never return.[8]
Humans were only the latest race to stake out land on Hex. Our six habs were located about halfway up the northern hemisphere where the surface gravity was about .7-g, less than Earth’s but just a little more than Coyote’s. The Texas Rose entered spherical node between habs One and Two; a mile in diameter, it was spacious enough to hangar the entire Federation fleet, and indeed two other vessels were already docked there. Our ships had been coming to Hex for over a year now, bringing materials necessary to turn our hexagon into a little version of Coyote. Now that the Rose had completed its circuit, about half of our cargo would end up here, most of it various items we’d acquired in trade with other races.
So far, only Hab One—christened Nueva Italia by those who lived there—was settled, and even so its population was still less than a thousand. Not many people on Coyote were willing to pull up roots and relocate so far away from others of their own kind. A small town, Milan, had been built near the western end of the cylinder, not far from the tram station that connected Nueva Italia with the other habs in our hex. The dwellings were prefab faux-birch yurts shipped from 47 Uma, but it was hoped that, once sufficient forestland was cultivated, the colonists would have their own supply of lumber.