“I am nowadays,” Oscar told him grumpily. The helmet was identical to those they used at the starship complex on Anshun. He still hated his trips to the assembly platform, but Wilson was a real believer in hands-on management—obviously a relic of his gung-ho NASA days. There wasn’t a week since Oscar had joined the project that he hadn’t been on some kind of inspection tour.

“The gateway itself is marked by the black rim,” the steward said, pointing ahead down the corridor. “After that you’re in zero gee; please use the fusetos and do not float free. Your shuttle is waiting at dock five. Now if you’ll all follow me.” As he arrived at the black line, he reached forward and touched his fuseto cuff on the wall. He eased himself gracefully across the line and his feet floated off the floor. Oscar grimaced in resignation, and followed suit.

After five meters, the corridor opened out into the middle of a hemisphere measuring fifty meters across. There were no windows, only eight big airlocks set equidistantly around the rim. Number five was open. The steward led them carefully along the curving surface, adhering to it from his wrists and toes, like some giant insect. He waited by the airlock, ready to give assistance as they stopped to maneuver themselves through into the shuttle.

The little craft was a basic tube, ten meters long, with a double line of couches. Oscar strapped himself in, and looked up. Five thick windows were set into what passed as the fuselage ceiling above him. All he could see was the curving outer wall of the departure port.

There were only fifteen passengers on board. Their steward went along the couches, checking that everyone was settled, then the airlock irised shut. “High Angel does not permit CST to put a gateway inside itself,” the steward said. “So we’re about fifty kilometers away. The journey over will take approximately fifteen minutes. If anyone has any real difficulty, please let me know. I have some strong sedatives which will probably help. In the meantime please familiarize yourself with the sanitary tube on the seatback in front of you.”

Oscar grimaced at the flexible hose with its freshly replaced nozzle. Still, it was an improvement on the bags he’d taken to carrying with him around the starship platform.

The shuttle vibrated quietly as it disengaged from the locking mechanism, chemical reaction control rockets nudged it away from the docking port. After drifting for a few seconds, the more powerful main rockets flared, accelerating them away. As they retreated from the port, more and more of the structure flowed into view through the shuttle windows, until after a minute Oscar could see the entire gateway station. It reminded him of a quartz cluster, long hexagonal tube sections all rising up out of a central disk; with the twin shuttle departure and arrival ports extending out from the disk’s rim. The end of the hexagonal tubes were giant airlocks where cargo tugs delivered their shipments; sealed pods containing completed satellites, sophisticated solid-state devices, compounds, crystals, and biologicals that could only be fabricated in microgee environments. Cargo tugs also used the airlocks to load up with consumer goods and food that the gateway delivered, ferrying them over to the High Angel.

The rest of the archipelago drifted into view through the window; over a hundred free-flying factories ranging from tiny independent research capsules barely larger than the shuttle up to the corporate macrohubs, kilometer-wide webs with production modules sitting on each junction where they glinted like jewels of prismatic chrome. Behind them the gas giant world, Icalanise, dominated the starfield as the little shuttle rotated slowly. Their orbital position showed it to them as a massive crescent striped by saffron and white cloud bands whose fluctuating edges locked together by counterspiral curlicues, as if each was extending talons into the other. A pair of small black circles were close together on the equator, eclipse shadows thrown by two of the gas giant’s thirty-eight moons.

After ten minutes, the shuttle turned again, aligning itself for the deceleration burn. Oscar found himself looking straight at the High Angel.

The exploratory division wormhole that opened in the star system in 2163 was unable to locate any H-congruous planet, and the Operations Director was almost about to close it and move on when the dish picked up a powerful, regular microwave pulse from Icalanise. They obtained a position lock to a point orbiting half a million kilometers above the brimstone atmosphere, and shifted the wormhole in for a closer look. It was a confusing image at first. The telescope had centered on a dark, rocky moonlet sixty-three kilometers long, and up to twenty wide. But it appeared to be sprouting petals of pearl-white light—an angel’s wings. Moving in, and refining the focus, revealed the rock was actually the host body to twelve giant artificial domes of crystal sitting on the end of tall metallic stalks. Not all of the domes were translucent and radiant; five were clear, revealing the alien cities contained inside. Street grids were illuminated in ruby, turquoise, and emerald light, while thousands of windows set into the strange architectural silhouettes of towers, hoops, cones, and spheres blazed away in the spectrums of many different suns.

What they’d found was a starship, a living behemoth capable of FTL travel. It was not any kind of life that humanity understood, being neither a machine that had risen to sentience nor a spaceborn life-form that had evolved or been engineered into its current nature. However, the High Angel wasn’t forthcoming about its origin, saying only that its purpose was to provide a habitable environment to the planet-based species it encountered in the hope of learning about them. It was “resting” in orbit around Icalanise—for how long was also not divulged. After some negotiation over a radio channel it agreed to open three of its domes to humans, who would use the space primarily as a dormitory town for the astroengineering companies. The two most prominent clauses in the settlement agreement were High Angel’s veto on visitors and settlers, and its promise to inform its new human residents before it took flight again, whenever that might be.

Their shuttle maneuvered underneath the vast base of the New Glasgow dome and down along the tapering stalk underneath. The dome’s spaceport was situated just above the point where the pewter-colored stalk sank into the starship’s rocky outer crust, a thick necklace of airlocks and ports that ringed the structure. Several of them had shuttles attached, while larger docking cradles were holding cargo tugs that were unloading.

They docked with a slight tremble, and the plyplastic airlock irised open. “Thank you for traveling with us,” the steward said. “Please remember that after you disembark you will still be in freefall until the lift is moving.”

Oscar waited until all the passengers in front of him had gotten out before releasing his own straps. The corridor outside the airlock was disappointing: a wide silvery tube with a shallow curve taking it deeper into the stalk; there was no exotic feel to it at all. He drifted across it to the lift opposite. Like everyone else he let his fuseto soles stick him to the floor. Just before the doors closed, he saw Paula Myo and her companion glide past the lift, heading farther down the corridor.

Gravity slowly built as the lift slid up the inside of the stalk. That much Oscar could understand, they were accelerating, after all. When it stopped, he was still in a full standard gravity field. The High Angel had never explained that, or any other technical ability it possessed, like its power source, the nature of its FTL drive, how it shielded itself from particle impacts, where the mass came from to extrude its new domes.