It was shaped like a dragon, with a long, serpentine central hull and vast swept-back extensions that looked like wings. The entire thing consisted of curves and smooth edges, and there was no detailing on its robin's-egg-blue surface, no sign of seams or windows or vents, no obvious engines. The whole thing must have been glowing, since there were no stars nearby to illuminate it, and no shadows fell across any part of its surface. Keith had thought Starplex beautiful before its recent battle scars, but it had still always seemed manufactured and functional. This alien ship, though, was art.

The dragon ship was moving directly toward Keith's pod.

The readout on his console said it was almost a kilometer long. Keith grabbed the pod's joystick, wanting to get out of the approaching ship's path, but suddenly the dragon came to a dead stop relative to the pod, fifty meters ahead.

Keith's heart was pounding. Whenever a new shortcut came on-line, Starplex's first job was to look for any signs of whatever intelligence had activated the shortcut by passing through it for the first time. But here, in a one-person travel pod, he lacked the signaling equipment and computing power needed to even attempt communications.

Besides, there had been no sign of the ship when he'd surveyed the sky moments ago. Any vessel that could move that quickly then stop dead in space had to be the product of very advanced technology. Keith was in over his head. He needed if not all of Starplex, at least one of the diplomatic craft it carried in its docking bays. He tapped the key that should have started his pod back toward the shortcut.

But nothing happened. No — that wasn't quite right.

Craning his neck, Keith could see his pod's maneuvering thrusters firing on the outside of the ring around the habitat bubble. And yet the pod wasn't moving at all; the background stars were rock steady.

Something had to be holding him in place, but if it was a tractor beam, it was the gentlest one he'd ever encountered. A travel pod was fragile; a conventional tractor would have made its glassteel hull groan at the seams.

Keith looked again at the beautiful ship, and as he watched a — a docking bay, it must have been — appeared in its side, beneath one of the curving wings. There had been no sign of a space door moving away to reveal it.

The opening simply wasn't there one instant, and the next instant, it was — a cube-shaped hollow in the belly of the dragon.

Keith found his pod moving now in the opposite direction he was telling it to go, moving toward the alien vessel.

Despite himself, he was starting to panic. He was all in favor of first contact, but preferred it on more equal terms.

Besides, he had a wife to get back to, a son away at university, a life he very much wanted to continue living.

The pod floated into the bay, and Keith saw a wall. wink into existence behind him, closing the cube off from space.

The interior was lit from all six sides. The pod was presumably still being held by the tractor beam — no one would pull an object inside just to let it crash into the far wall under its own inertia. But nowhere could Keith see a beam emitter.

As the pod continued its journey, Keith tried to think rationally. He had entered the shortcut at the right angle to come out at Tau Ceti; no mistake had been made. And yet, somehow, he had been — been diverted here…

Which meant that whoever controlled this interstellar dragon knew more about the shortcuts than the Commonwealth races did.

And then it hit him.

The realization.

The horrible realization.

Time to pay the toll.

It had been like a gift from the gods: the discovery that the Milky Way galaxy was permeated by a vast network of artificial shortcuts that allowed for instantaneous journeys between star systems. No one knew who had built the shortcuts, or what their exact purpose was. Whatever hugely advanced race created them had left no other trace of its existence.

Scans made by hyperspace telescopes suggested that there were four billion separate shortcut exits in our galaxy, or roughly one for every hundred stars. The shortcuts were easy to spot in hyperspace: each one was surrounded by a distinctive sphere of orbiting tachyons. But of all those shortcuts, only two dozen appeared to be active. The others clearly existed, but there seemed to be no way to move to them.

The closest shortcut to Earth was in the Oort cloud of Tau Ceti.

Through it, ships could jump seventy thousand light-years to Rehbollo, the Waldahud homeworld. Or they could jump fifty-three thousand light-years to Flatland, home of the bizarre Ib race. But the shortcut exit that existed near Polaris, for instance, just eight hundred light-years away, was inaccessible. It, like almost all the others, was dormant.

A particular shortcut would not work as an exit for ships arriving from other shortcuts until it had first been used locally as an entrance.

Thus, the Tau Ceti shortcut had not been a valid exit choice for other races until the UN sent a probe through it, eighteen years ago, back in 2076. Three weeks later, a Waldahud starship popped out of that same shortcut — and suddenly humans and dolphins were not alone.

Many speculated that-this was how the shortcut network had been designed to work: sectors of the galaxy were quarantined until at least one race within them had reached technological maturity. Given how few shortcuts were active, some argued that Earth's two sentient species, Homo sapiens and Tursiops truncatus, were therefore among the first races in the galaxy to reach that level.

The next year, ships from the Ib homeworld popped through at Tau Ceti and near Rehbollo — and soon the four races agreed to an experimental alliance, dubbed the Commonwealth of Planets.

In order to expand the usable shortcut network, seventeen years ago each homeworld launched thirty boomerangs.

Each of these probes flew at their maximum hyperdrive velocity — twenty-two times the speed of light — toward dormant shortcuts that had been detected by their tachyon coronas. Upon arrival, each boomerang would dive through and return home, thus activating the shortcut as a valid exit.

So far, boomerangs had reached twenty-one additional shortcuts within a radius of 375 light-years from one or another of the three homeworlds.

Originally, these sectors were explored by small ships. But the Commonwealth had realized a more comprehensive solution was needed: a giant mothership from which exploration surveys could be launched, a ship that could serve not only as a research base during the crucial initial exploration of a new sector, but also could function as embassy for the Commonwealth, if need be. A vast starship capable of not just astronomical research, but of undertaking first-contact missions as well.

And so, a year ago, in 2093, Starplex was launched.

Funded by all three homeworlds and constructed at the Rehbollo orbital shipyards, it was the largest vessel ever built by any of the Commonwealth races: 290 meters at its widest point, seventy decks thick, a total enclosed volume of 3.1 million cubic meters, outfitted with a crew of a thousand' beings and fifty-four small auxiliary ships of various designs.

Starplex was currently 368 light-years due galactic south of Flatland, exploring the vicinity of a recently activated shortcut.

The closest star was an F-class subgiant a quarter-light-year away. It was surrounded by four asteroid belts, but no planets. An uneventful mission so far — nothing remarkable astronomically, and no alien radio signals detected. Star-plex's staff was busy winding down its explorations. In seven days, another boomerang was due to reach its designated shortcut target, this one 376 light-years away from Rehbollo.