Even so, starships require a phenomenal amount of thrust to accelerate up to a decent percentage of light speed, and Connexion Corp’s modern designs achieve in excess of eighty percent. Before Rindstrom, that would have required carrying vast amounts of energy and reaction mass on board. Now, all you do is drop a perfectly spherical portal into the sun. Meta-hot plasma slams into that hole at near-relativistic speed. At the same time, the portal’s exit is fixed at the apex of a magnetic cone, which channels the plasma into a rocket exhaust. There is no limit on how much plasma from the sun you can send through, and the starship masses very little—just the portal and its nozzle, guidance units, and a smaller portal communication link to mission control. It can accelerate fast.

When it reaches a star, it decelerates into orbit, delivering a portal link back to Earth’s solar system. That means you can start sending through entire preassembled asteroid industrial complexes straight away. Within a day you’re ready to start crunching minerals and begin manufacture. The pioneer crews build habitats that house the workforce, which builds the next generation of starships, which fly off to new stars. It’s almost an exponential process. And in their wake, the newly discovered exoplanets are ripe for terraforming.

Connexion Corp has been one of the major players when it comes to sending starships out from Earth, building and flying them for more than a hundred years. Every new Universal settled star system is another huge income source for the company. Beta Eridani is the farthest star humans have reached. Eighty-nine light-years from Earth.

One step.

I felt the slight drop in gravity as soon as I was through the portal. Not quite enough to mess with my balance, but I took the down ramp carefully just in case.

The dome was a smaller version of the egress chamber back on Earth, piled high with pods and equipment cases. A quarter of it was given over to life support equipment: big spherical tanks, air filters, pumps, ducts, quantum batteries, thermal exchanges; everything to keep humans alive in a hostile environment. If the main portal and the redundant emergency portals were closed for whatever reason, those chunks of machinery could sustain the base personnel for years if necessary.

Sandjay coupled to the base camp’s network and splashed local schematics across my tarsus lenses. Connexion Corp’s foothold on Nkya was laid out in a simple triangular array, with passageways leading out radially from the main dome to a trio of slightly smaller domes.

“Ordinarily, this would be full of geologists and exobiologists,” Geovanni said as he headed for one of the three big airlocks at the edge of the dome. “But right now we’re keeping base staff to an absolute minimum. We’ve taken local samples, but further field trips are on hold. The only people here today are engineering support and your security teams.”