“Hylanx?” Phoebe’s ears had detected the oncoming new information and pulled herself front and centre.
“The Hylanx are a series of wormholes that network out from the Central system.  Although,” she hastened to add, “that system is not actually central to the galaxy, too many black holes and exploding stars there to be habitable, it is simply where all stabilized wormholes lead.”
“You know how to stabilize wormholes,” Phoebe sputtered almost incoherently, “seriously?”  She looked around at the rest of us as though she were expecting the same reaction.
The majority of my knowledge of wormholes stems from TV shows, fact based fiction.  From what I can tell, they are tunnels that join one point of spacetime to another, cutting out the thousands light-years in between.  Imagine the galaxy on a piece of paper, flat.  The paper is bent over so that two points align and then a pencil is pushed all the way through at those points.  The wormhole is the part of the pencil that is between the two holes in the paper.
I also knew the theory that wormholes could be used to time travel.
I will explain now how unsuccessful the effect of time travel experimentation has been upon our universe.  Rather than being allowed to travel into our own universe’s past, any wormhole or portal or gateway that has been explored, has created a paradox which, each and every time, created a parallel universe to which this one is entirely cut off from.
Such research has been undertaken for many thousands of years and is still continuing.  However, there has never been any successful return from those parallel timelines or any change been made to our current timelines.  The scientists that continue the research have approximated several more millennia before they discover the absolute answer that there is no way to integrate time travel wormholes to travel within our own universe or not.  They have already proven that there is no way to return from another universe.
Therefore, wormholes are only used for transportation within this universe, within our own galaxy in fact, as other galaxies are still centuries away from being traversable.
The energy generated by an open wormhole is what is used to power the space stations that keep them open and stable.
There are seven wormholes that are kept open.  All of them spider out from the Central system, an area of space that is the closest safe point to the centre of the galaxy.
It was at the Hylanx closest to our system to ours that we had arrived at.
“Can we see it?” my curiosity had been piqued.
“Of course,” Deia called up a console and made a few selections.
The texture of wood and leaves disappeared, the room became dark, broken up by the twinkle of starlight.
“What you are seeing is a live projection of what is outside of the Piti,” Deia explained.
Gasps of joy and awe floated through the room.
Stars were not all that could bee seen.  At one end, across a flat surface of wall we could see the Hylanx.
A city of a spaceship took the form of a ring.
It jutted out into the space around itself, spheres, spires and blocks stretching out in every direction.  Each different shape containing hundreds of beings, living, working, living around the powerful entity that could throw you across the galaxy in the blink of an eye.
Within the circle was the wormhole itself.  Not that it was very visible to the naked eye.  A faint blue glow lit up the parts of the station which were holding it in place.  The light rippled in place as though it were an ocean on a calm day.  It did not seem to extend very far, for the majority of the gap was simply taken up with more space.  Only a trained and knowledgeable eye could have told you that the stars that were seen through the hole were wrong, that the constellations did not make sense, that they did not belong in that region of space.  They were the stars that lived many thousands of light-years away, in the Central system.
We had drawn close to the city, although we did not seem to be docking.
With a slight strain I could hear Orthus speaking with another being over a communication system.
“Do we need permission to go through?” I asked Deia.
“In a sense,” she smiled, not quite fully, I have since figured out that it was her rueful smile, “there is a charge to use the Hylanx.  Each time a ship passes through, it causes an instability.  It is easily controlled, however the amount of energy needed to do so exceeds the amount that the wormhole produces, therefore it costs credits for the extra energy to be produced.” 
She shook her head, “the prices are extortionate, however it is marginally cheaper and less wearing on the ship than travelling at faster than light speeds.”
“How long would it take to get there going at a normal speed?”  The Screnac’s ships taking seven units to arrive as Virrion was beginning to make sense.
“About six units, maybe less in this ship, its drive core is the newest and fastest currently available.  Taking the slow route would certainly been more cost effective, however we need to get the facilities on Virrion up and running as soon as possible, which will require your people to have the adequate knowledge to do so.  This way, your people will reach Virrion and will have only a few extra units to wait before everyone here will rejoin them with the knowhow and skills needed.”
I had to fight the urge to ask the doctor not to refer to humanity as ‘my people’, she probably meant just in general, however my head was impressing upon me the degree of responsibility I had to them and how, in a very real sense, everyone was here, amongst the stars, because of me. 
The weight of the guilt will burden me forever, there is no reason for it not to.  Not so much because of the lives I saved, but those that I did not.  Every conversation that I had never had whilst waiting in a queue, every coworker that I never spent time with, every one of my friends and family’s friends that I never bothered to interact with above what was necessary…
I remember seeing an advert for coffee that said something along the lines of, ‘throughout your life, you come to know more than ten thousand people’.  There was no back up information, the time period may have indicated you would meet them all by the time you turn eighty.  Even so, that meant that by my age, twenty-seven, I should have known more than twenty-five thousand people.

Five-hundred and nineteen human beings had made it off of the planet, not including myself.
That is barely a fifth of the people an average person would have known.
If the neural link had activated in any one of the other seventeen-thousand and thirty-one people, there would be so much more of humanity alive beyond the Earth’s end.

I digress.
I fear these tangents filled with regrets and “what if”s will pop up occasionally.
Writing them out helps to process my thoughts and focus what is happening in my mind.
I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that there is no point in dwelling on the matter, that I am at no real fault.
Yet the mantle of guilt is heavy and potentially impossible to shrug off, even in the presence of facts and reasoning.

The Piti had come to a stop, lined up directly with the centre of the wormhole’s entrance.  It felt as though we were balancing at the top of a water-flume, one movement and we would be irreversibly swept away.
“Would everybody please return to your seats,” Orthus’s voice all but echoed in the awe filled silence that my companions were emitting, “our passage through the Hylanx will begin in less than five lals.”
A sudden burst of movement rippled around the room as everyone appeared to comprehend what he had said after a moment of lag.
The seats were reacquired and everyone was strapped in in under three lals.
It struck me as odd that passing through the wormhole was referred to as a passage.  From a visual perspective at one end or the other, it simply looked like we would be passing through the space equivalent of a door frame.
The Piti began to move forwards.
The moment that the front of it touched where the passage started, the entire ship began to shake, as though immediately hitting a maelstrom of turbulence.
In the three breaths that it took for us to have completely entered, what I saw was beyond what I used to think of as our dimensional boundaries. 
The parts of the ship that had already entered seemed to become, at least in visual terms, two-dimensional, flattening out as we moved further in.
As my body passed into it, I perceived that which had become flat, suddenly expand again.  Everything that followed behind still remained fully formed, the physics we had passed into giving us an enhanced view of the varying dimensions.
From what I can gather, there is a barrier across the entrance to the wormhole, generated by the Hylanx, to stop unauthorized passage or unsafe elements from crossing one way or another.
Once we were through the barrier, it was a straight, albeit turbulent shot to the opposite end.  To pilot a vessel through the wormhole, one must have undergone intense training.  Any ship that had no such pilot, would be forced to hire a temporary crew member from somewhere within the cities built on top of the portals.
The slightest drift or miscalculation and a ship could be vaporized or dropped into a completely different galaxy too distant to return from.
Orthus had undergone such training many years ago, his control of the Piti was harsh and masterful.
Not that we could tell.
It felt as though we were flung in a different direction with every passing second.  If it were not for the very eloquently designed chairs that we were strapped into, none of us would have survived being tossed about the room, you would be likely to snap your neck from whiplash alone.
The full spectrum of colours raged all around us, for many heartbeats, it felt as though we would be lost within this cyclone of a rainbow forever.
Only a couple of us could see the direction in which we were heading, the opposing Hylanx in the Central system.  No matter how far we traveled, it still appeared to be as far away as it had been when we entered.
Lals, auxes, units, even cycles passed.
With a final shudder, everything became calm.  I am fairly certain there were more than a few amongst us that thought we had we had passed into the afterlife.
Released from our chairs, every last one of us fought the tremors that threatened to throw us into fits. 
It took me a few moments to even realize that we were once again in the dreamlike zero gravity.
Clenching and stretching every possible part of my body helped me to get my pulse up enough to counter the tremble.  I drifted around the room, giving the same tip to others that were struggling.
For more than two years of my life I had been stuck in the most atrocious job that left me so run down that it, at one point, forced me to require high strength muscle relaxants prescribed to simply allow my pain killers and antibiotics to work.  During those years, I developed a slight tremor which would kick in any time I got even a little tired or deprived of oxygen (which was common due to the asthma/constant chest infections) or caffeine (caffeinated fizzy drink addiction which would give me super fun withdrawal migraines (sorry, headaches) whenever I went for more than twenty-four hours without any).
My point being that I had become quite adept at handling the odd tremor.
The space around us looked much the same, to the untrained eye.
However the further we moved away from the Hylanx, the more prominent became its sisters.
At a fair distance from one another, six more gates sat, each leading to another distant region of the galaxy.
From where we were, the furthest one was about as visible as the moon from Earth.  There seemed to be no obvious pattern in their distances from one another, however I am sure that there were some highly scientific and safety related reasons as to why they were at the specific locations that they were, however such information is apparently beyond my comprehension according to Orthus.  I did not feel at all patronized when he said that.  Not at all.
Each Hylanx was lit up from the lights that poured from each window and viewing platform, their collective twinkling, distinguishing them from the stars that surrounded them.
Before we could become accustomed to the view, the Piti began to move off.
Orthus’s voice instructed us to prepare for another FTL jump, although, he followed up quickly by adding that we should take our time, to allow our bodies to catch up with us.
Deia was sure to thoroughly check with everyone that they were ready, before giving Orthus the all clear to jump.
The second jump lasted less than a lal. 
The walls of the ship showed us the blackness that we were passing through.  Moving faster than the speed of light meant that we were traveling too fast for the light of anything that we passed to reach us.
Our deceleration came suddenly and with such a sudden bombardment of light that, if it had not been for the few lights inside the room, it surely would have been blinding.
The light emanated from the planet which had appeared before us.