Two of the smaller hatchways had passenger shuttles like ours already snugged up to them, ready to pick up incoming passengers. Another ten or twelve of the cargo hatches were similarly occupied, which meant there must be at least one freight train arriving soon as well. Cargo was the true economic backbone of the operation, of course, given that the Quadrail carried every gram of trade that passed among the galaxy’s thousands of inhabited star systems. Passenger transport was nice to have, but in the larger scheme of things I suspected all of us together barely registered as a footnote on the Spiders’ balance sheet.

Our shuttle eased past a drifting maintenance skiff and zeroed in on a hatch marked with bright lavender lights, rolling over to press its upper surface against the alien metal. There was a click of lockseals, and the shuttle’s dorsal hatch slid open. Sensing the presence of air against it, the station’s hatch irised open in response, and the passengers unfastened their restraints and floated their way into a civilized line at the ladder.

The information cards everyone received with their tickets emphasized the fact that, unlike the transfer station’s rotational pseudogravity or the Shorshic-style vectored force thrusters that everyone else in the galaxy used, the Tube’s system of artificial gravity began right at the inner edge of the entrance hatch. But there was always one idiot per shuttle who hadn’t bothered to read the directions. Ours was six people ahead of me, floating with brisk confidence up alongside the ladder and then abruptly changing direction as his head poked through the hatch and the Tube’s gravity grabbed him and shoved him straight back down again. On his next try, he made sure to hang on to the ladder the whole way up like he was supposed to.