"Sir, I'm from northern Maine, we first got the internet a week before the Ruhar attacked." I could see he didn't appreciate my attempt at humor. "I've never heard of the Thuranin, sir."

He twirled his finger in the air. "This station, the elevator, that's all Thuranin technology, the Kristang don't even have artificial gravity aboard their ships."

"Sir?" Jesse 's face began turning green when he heard that. Everyone in the line was looking queasy at the idea of experiencing no gravity. "Zero gee? We haven't been trained for that, at all."

"That's why you're in line here, to get meds to prevent space sickness. We can't have humans puking their guts out, in a Kristang transport ship."

"We're not going on a Thuranin ship?" I asked, feeling queasy already. I was deeply regretting that second cheeseburger. The line moved forward, and we shuffled our feet along the deck.

"Thuranin star carriers rarely venture down into a gravity well, they stay well out in the Oort Cloud of any star system." Seeing more blanks looks, although I was feeling smug that I knew what an Oort Cloud was, he added "That means out beyond the orbit of Pluto, where spacetime is flat, and it's easier for their star carriers to form a jump field. Kristang ships can only jump short ranges, we guess six to eight light hours, which is about here to Neptune. They make a series of small faster than light jumps like that, out to where a Thuranin star carrier is parked. A star carrier is a big, long spine, with hardpoints for short range ships to latch on. The star carrier has an advanced jump drive, way beyond what the Kristang have, so the Thuranin carry Kristang ships between star systems. G-2 thinks the Kristang ships can't actually travel between stars; with their short jumps, and the need to recharge engines between jumps, overall they travel at less than the speed of light. It would take them more than four years to get to the nearest star from here. The Thuranin, we think, can travel something like three hundred times the speed of light, in jumps of about one lightyear."

I didn't like the math that was running around in my feverish brain. Three hundred times the speed of light was incredibly fast, but it also meant that if we were going to a planet that was, say, a mere hundred lightyears away, it would take four months to get there! Four months. Stuck on an alien ship. In zero gravity. And a hundred lightyears sounded like a lot, but the galaxy is huge. Somewhere in school, I'd learned that Earth is twenty seven thousand lightyears from the center of the galaxy, and the whole galaxy is something like a hundred thousand lightyears across. I hadn't considered any of this when I was so eager to get of Earth and fight the Ruhar. "Sir," I asked slowly, "where are we going?"