Space, as some twentieth-century philosopher succinctly put it, is big. Really big. So big that even a single medium-sized galaxy, such as our own Milky Way, has plenty of room to he pretty damn huge all by itself.

So huge that even at a Quadrail train’s incredible speed of a light-year per minute, if you followed the curve of the spiral arms it would take well over three months to get from one end of the galaxy’s populated regions to the other.

Three months is a long time for business moguls of the Twelve Empires, who can make or lose millions in a single day. It’s even longer for the galaxy’s politicians, who can gain or lose a lot more than that, including both their careers and their skins.

Thus it was that, a few hundred years ago, when the Spiders and their secretive Chahwyn masters began building their multiple light-years of Tube across the voids of interstellar space, they looked for a way to shorten the cross-galaxy trip.

And they found one.

In theory, the super-express lines weren’t any different from the rest of the Spiders’ vast interstellar travel network. Inside each Tube were several sets of the Spiders’ signature four-rail tracks on which all Quadrail trains ran. Down the geometric center of the Tube ran the Coreline. a brightly coruscating inner cylinder that was the actual driving force behind the light-year-per-minute speeds the trains could make, though that fact was a closely guarded secret.

In practice, though, there was something especially impressive, and especially disturbing, about the super-express system. A typical Quadrail train made frequent stops as it journeyed among the stars, rolling into station after station to drop one set of passengers and pick up the next. Even the express trains, which blew straight through the smaller stations without stopping, still gave their passengers those brief views of new scenery, new places, and new people.