Chapter 7: Grand Traverse
Table of Contents
Transit through the first intergalactic Trunk Line took ninety-one seconds — far longer than any previous wormhole crossing. The hull sang with unfamiliar harmonics. The frame-dragging effects produced visual distortions so profound that several crew members closed their eyes rather than watch space become something their visual cortex was never designed to process. Ninety-one seconds of falling through a tunnel of warped light that connected two points separated by four hundred million light-years of ordinary space.
They emerged into the core of a barred spiral galaxy.
Not a system. A galactic hub. Another nexus of wormhole mouths in precise geometric arrangement — this one larger, more elaborate, with seventeen intragalactic Trunk Lines radiating outward, two lateral extragalactic links to neighboring galaxies, and one flagship gate. Twenty kilometers across. Throat Engines more massive than anything in the Milky Way. The deep pulse of an active tether.
“Same pattern,” Ren said, staring at the topology readout. “Self-similar. One big gate. Pointing inward.”
Maren stood behind him, reading over his shoulder, her stylus already moving on the tablet’s margin — sketching the hub topology without looking down, the unconscious cartography of a mind that mapped every new reality before it finished seeing it. Nolan watched her face — the expression of a theorist who had extended her framework to intergalactic scales only weeks ago and was now watching the first confirmation arrive, hub by hub, exactly as her new mathematics said it would.
Ren leaned back from the console. “I’d like to note for the record,” he said, “that the reviewer’s suggestion to ‘extend the analysis to intergalactic scales’ has been addressed.” Nobody laughed, but Maren’s mouth twitched — the closest thing to levity the moment could hold. It was the last time Ren’s humor would come easily for a while.
But Yuki was not looking at the hub. She was looking at the hull resonance data from the transit, and she had stopped humming.
“The harmonics are cumulative,” she said. She pulled the readings up on the main display: a spectrogram of structural vibration, the Thread’s skeleton rendered in frequency and amplitude. “The flagship throat produces resonance patterns that the intragalactic transits never did — low-frequency modes that couple with the hull’s primary structural members. And they don’t reset between transits. They accumulate.” She highlighted a cluster of micro-fractures in the forward hull reinforcement, each one barely visible, each one a hairline flaw in metal that had been flawless when they left Ceres. “These are within tolerance. For now. But if every flagship transit adds to the pattern rather than resetting it, I need to track the curve.”
“How many transits before it becomes a concern?” Herrera asked.
Yuki hesitated — the hesitation of an engineer who understood the difference between a model and a guarantee. “If the wormholes stay at this scale, perhaps fifteen to twenty before we approach rated limits. But Maren says the flagship wormholes get larger at each stop. Larger throats, different harmonic profiles, more energy in the tidal gradient. I can’t model what I haven’t measured.”
“Keep measuring,” Herrera said. “Full instrumentation on every transit. I want to see that curve after every hop.”
Nolan registered the exchange and moved on. The numbers were within tolerance. There was a hub to study.
They spent a week at the first intergalactic hub. Yuki fabricated a dozen autonomous survey probes from the Thread’s manufacturing reserves — torpedo-shaped instruments, descendants of the design that had threaded the Saturn capillary years ago, each one carrying a compact spectrometer, atmospheric sampler, and enough propulsion for a single wormhole transit and return. They launched them through six of the hub’s seventeen intragalactic Trunk Lines, and waited.
The probes returned over three days, carrying data from six star systems in a galaxy no human eye had ever seen. The life they reported was older than anything the crew had found in the Milky Way — complex multicellular ecosystems on dozens of worlds, organisms with differentiated tissues, functional analogues of circulatory and nervous systems. All sharing the same deep biochemistry: left-handed amino acids, right-handed sugars, the universal recipe.
“This galaxy was seeded before ours,” Adaeze said, studying the probe telemetry with an intensity that bordered on reverence. “The biology has had hundreds of millions of years more to develop.”
Yuki noted the cost without being asked. The twelve probes had consumed eight percent of the fabricator’s remaining raw material — stock she was already rationing for hull maintenance. She logged the expenditure and did not recommend a second round.
But it was the gravitational wave data that consumed most of Yuki’s time at the hub. At this depth in the network, the signal that had started as a faint anomaly at 97 AU was a torrent — dense, layered streams of structured gravitational radiation flowing through the flagship gate, carrying what her analysis software increasingly identified as encoded information. Not random structure, not engineering residue, but data. Vast quantities of it, compressed into the geometry of spacetime itself, streaming inward at the speed of light.
She spent three days on pattern analysis before she found the correlation that made her stop humming.
“Biosignatures,” she said to the crew gathered over a meal, her voice carrying the flat affect it assumed when she was suppressing the implications of her own findings. “I can’t decode most of the stream. But there are repeating structures that correlate with the biological survey data Adaeze has been collecting. Spectral fingerprints of seeded worlds. Atmospheric compositions. Markers of biological activity.” She set down her utensil. “The network isn’t just connecting the seeded worlds. It’s reporting on them. Sending data about what’s growing back toward the center.”
The table was quiet for a long moment.
“The wormholes are microphones,” Ren said.
Nobody laughed. Adaeze stared at the viewport, at the alien galaxy’s Trunk Lines radiating outward to thousands of seeded worlds, and thought about the thing she had always believed: that the bridges were a gift. Gifts did not watch you.
They deployed the next beacon in the chain — the same protocol Herrera had maintained at every node since the first hop out of Viridis, the signal thread that connected them, relay by relay, back to Earth. Herrera checked the telemetry twice before clearing departure. The thread home was intact. Then they went through the flagship gate.
The second intergalactic hop covered six hundred million light-years in just over two minutes. The destination was a lenticular galaxy, its star formation long since quieted, its stellar population ancient and red. The hub here had twenty-three intragalactic connections, three lateral extragalactic links, and a flagship wormhole twenty-five kilometers in diameter.
Yuki updated her resonance curve. The micro-fractures had deepened. New ones had appeared in the port-side structural ribs. She reinforced the worst of them with the ship’s fabrication system — a process that consumed raw material from the maintenance reserves and took the better part of a day.
“Spare parts aren’t infinite,” she told Herrera privately. “The fabricator stock is designed for a two-year mission with normal wear. I’m burning through it faster than the maintenance schedule assumed.”
“How much faster?”
“If every hop costs what the first two have cost, I’ll be rationing by hop six or seven.”
Herrera noted it. He filed the number alongside the return-trip calculations Ren updated after every hop, alongside the hull integrity reports that arrived on his console each morning like a medical chart for a patient whose condition was slowly worsening. The responsible decision was forming in the data — a decision any captain should make, a decision Vasik would have made three hops ago.
But Herrera carried something the data could not quantify. At the first intergalactic hub, Yuki had confirmed what he’d suspected since the gravitational wave anomaly first appeared in her reports back in the Milky Way: the network was watching. Not passively, not incidentally — systematically. Every wormhole a sensor, every transit catalogued, every seeded world reported on in a stream of data flowing inward toward whatever waited at the end of the road. The stream had been flowing for four billion years. It had been flowing since before humanity existed. And now it carried data about the Thread, about Earth, about a species that had stumbled into a network it did not build and could not comprehend.
Turning back would not sever that connection. The wormholes would still be there. The surveillance would still flow. Earth would still be catalogued in a ledger maintained by something that had been keeping records since before the sun ignited. Going home without understanding what was watching — without being able to tell his sons, his species, what lived at the other end — felt less like caution and more like a man hearing footsteps in the dark and choosing to pull the blanket over his head.
He was afraid. He had been afraid since Yuki’s first anomaly report, when the word directed had settled into him like a stone. The fear was not of the journey. It was of what the journey had revealed about the world he’d left behind — a world connected, whether it knew it or not, to something vast and attentive and unknown.
Another beacon. Another transit.
The third hop. Seven hundred million light-years. An enormous spiral galaxy embedded in a rich galaxy group. The hub was the most elaborate they had seen — thirty intragalactic Trunk Lines, four lateral connections, and a flagship gate thirty kilometers wide, its Throat Engines the size of Jupiter.
It was here, at the periphery of the hub’s gravitational influence, that Ren found the first derelict.
A ship. Not human — the hull geometry was wrong, the material composition unlike anything in the Thread’s database. It tumbled slowly in the void, catching the light of distant stars, a dark irregular shape perhaps twice the Thread’s length. Ancient. The surface was pitted and scarred, and in places the hull had been breached, exposing internal structures to the vacuum — compartments, conduits, the frozen architecture of a vessel that had once carried someone, somewhere, through this same network of doors.
The crew gathered at the observation port and said nothing for a long time.
“How old?” Herrera asked.
Ren ran the analysis: surface erosion from interstellar medium, cosmic ray exposure, the decay products of the hull’s exotic alloys. “Millions of years. Perhaps tens of millions. Hard to be more precise without better material models.”
“Cause of destruction?”
This was less clear. The hull breaches were extensive, but the damage pattern was ambiguous — it could have been impact, or systems failure, or the accumulated degradation of deep time. There were no obvious weapons signatures. Just a ship, dead and drifting, carrying the silence of a civilization that had followed the same thread and stopped.
Adaeze stood at the port longest. “Someone else came this way,” she said quietly. “They found the Lacework in their own galaxy. They followed it to the center. They went through the flagship gate, the way we did. And somewhere along the road, they stopped.”
“Millions of years ago,” Nolan said. “An isolated case. We don’t know what happened to them.”
“No,” Adaeze agreed. “We don’t.”
She turned away from the viewport and went back to her lab. But Nolan noticed that she touched the folded letter in her lab coat pocket as she went — the unconscious gesture she made when she was thinking about home.
Hops four and five carried them deeper into the cosmic web. The galaxies grew larger, older. Spiral arms gave way to smoother elliptical profiles — ancient stellar cities whose star formation had quieted billions of years ago. The flagship wormholes swelled to thirty-five, then forty kilometers across, and the transit harmonics deepened with them.
They had stopped launching survey probes. The decision was never formally made — it accumulated the way fatigue accumulates, silently, through a series of small concessions. At the second hub, Yuki had fabricated six probes instead of twelve. At the third, three. By the fourth, no one asked. The fabricator stock that had seemed generous at launch was now a diminishing balance sheet, every gram of raw material weighed against the hull patches and structural reinforcements that kept the Thread alive between transits. Adaeze watched each hub’s intragalactic Trunk Lines recede in the aft sensors — doorways to galaxies teeming with life she would never catalogue — and said nothing. There was an obsession building in the ship, a forward momentum that had begun to eclipse everything else. Each hop had cost them something — hull integrity, spare parts, the careful survey protocols that had defined the mission in the Milky Way — and each hop had been followed not by retreat but by another hop. The pattern had the quality of a compulsion: one more door, one more system, one more data point, because the next one might be the last, because the center was always just a little farther, because stopping meant admitting that everything they had already sacrificed had bought them something less than the answer.
After the fourth hop, the long-range spectroscopic suite failed — not the primary navigation instruments, but the array Adaeze used for biosignature surveys and Ren used for stellar population analysis. Yuki traced the failure to resonance fatigue in the mounting brackets: the cumulative vibration from four flagship transits had work-hardened the metal past its fracture point. She could rebuild the brackets, but the fabricator stock was dwindling, and she chose to prioritize structural reinforcement over instrument repair.
“We can do biology without the long-range suite,” she told Adaeze. “We can’t do anything without a hull.”
Adaeze accepted this without argument. She was a scientist who understood triage. But she noticed — and filed the observation in the place where she kept things that frightened her — that no one on the crew had objected. Not Ren, who would normally have fought for his stellar population data. Not Maren, whose framework depended on characterizing each hub’s topology. The science was being shed like weight from a sinking vessel, and the crew was letting it go, because the thing driving them forward had stopped being curiosity and started being something harder to name.
After the fifth hop, Herrera asked Ren for the first formal return-trip assessment. Ren presented the numbers to the full crew over dinner — not because Herrera wanted to alarm anyone, but because he commanded by transparency, and the crew deserved to see what he saw.
“Five flagship transits out,” Ren said. “The same five back, minimum, plus the intragalactic hops once we reach the Milky Way’s hub. He overlaid Yuki’s structural data. “Current hull integrity is at eighty-one percent of rated capacity. Yuki’s resonance models project that each subsequent transit will cost more than the last, because the wormholes are getting larger and the harmonics more energetic. The curve is nonlinear.”
He let the room do the math.
“We have margin,” Nolan said. “Eighty-one percent with at least six transits of margin —”
“The margin narrows with every hop,” Ren said, not sharply but with the precision of a man who had spent his career making sure numbers were not misrepresented. “At the current rate of degradation, we’ll be at roughly sixty percent by hop eight. Rated minimum for safe transit is fifty. That gives us a window, but it’s not the window it was when we started.”
Herrera listened to both men and said nothing. He wrote in his leather journal that evening, and if anyone had read it, they would have found two entries separated by a line drawn with enough pressure to dent the page. The first: Vasik was right that the destination would always seem to justify one more step. The second, written later, in handwriting that was smaller and less steady: But whoever is watching us already knows where we live. And I cannot go home and tell my sons I turned back because the numbers were uncomfortable, when the thing that watches their world is still unknown. I do not know if this is courage or the kind of reasoning that gets crews killed. Vasik would know. She would tell me it is the second.
The sixth hub sat in the core of a giant elliptical galaxy, surrounded by hundreds of satellite galaxies, the intergalactic medium glowing in X-ray wavelengths. The flagship wormhole here was fifty kilometers in diameter, its Throat Engines defied comprehension — Casimir cavity arrays the size of entire star systems, their metamaterial surfaces shimmering with quantum vacuum fluctuations visible to the naked eye. A hundred intragalactic Trunk Lines radiated outward. A dozen lateral extragalactic links fanned to neighboring galaxies in every direction.
It was also where they found the graveyard.
Not one ship. Seven. Drifting in a loose cluster near the hub’s inner perimeter, caught in a gentle gravitational eddy that had collected them over time the way a river bend collects driftwood. Seven vessels from at least four different civilizations — different hull geometries, different materials, different scales. One was barely larger than the Thread. Another was enormous, a vessel built for hundreds or thousands of occupants, its hull a sweeping organic curve that suggested a species whose engineering aesthetic was nothing like humanity’s.
And the damage was not ambiguous.
Yuki scanned the wreckage while the rest of the crew watched from the observation port. “Energy weapon scoring on four of the seven hulls,” she reported, her voice flat in the way it went flat when she was suppressing an emotional response that would interfere with the data. “Consistent signatures — the same weapon type across multiple targets. High-energy directed beam, probably particle-based. The other three show kinetic impact damage — hypervelocity projectiles.” She paused. “This was a battle. Multiple civilizations, multiple ships, engaged in combat at an intergalactic hub.”
“When?” Herrera asked.
“The youngest wreckage is approximately two million years old. The oldest, perhaps fifty million. These ships didn’t arrive together. They accumulated. Whatever happened here happened more than once, over tens of millions of years.”
Silence held the observation bay. Outside, the derelicts tumbled in their slow gravitational waltz, lit by the glow of a galaxy that had been burning since before the Earth existed.
Adaeze spoke first. “The Lacework connects everything,” she said. “Every seeded world, every civilization that arises, every species that builds ships and follows the thread inward. Including species that are hostile. Including species that hunt.” She looked at Nolan, and for the first time since Viridis, there was something in her expression that was not wonder. It was fear. “We’ve been thinking of the network as a gift. Bridges between gardens. But a bridge doesn’t choose who crosses it.”
“Millions of years ago,” Nolan said. The same argument as before, delivered with less conviction than before.
“Tens of millions of years,” Adaeze corrected. “Spanning fifty million years of recurring violence at a single hub. This isn’t an isolated incident, Nolan. This is a pattern. And we’ve connected Earth to it.”
“The Lacework was already there,” Ren said quietly. “Earth was connected to the network four billion years before we noticed.”
“But now we’re using it,” Adaeze said. “We’re following the thread, and we’re leaving beacons behind us. A trail that leads back to our galaxy, to our system, to a species that doesn’t have energy weapons or kinetic interceptors or anything that could defend against —” She stopped herself. Drew a breath. “I’m not saying we turn back. I’m saying we should be thinking about what we’re leading home.”
The argument did not resolve. Nolan marshalled counterpoints: the derelicts were ancient, the network had been traveled by thousands of species, the probability of encountering a hostile civilization in a cosmos this large was vanishingly small.
Maren, who had been quiet throughout, offered a temporal frame. “The wreckage spans fifty million years,” she said. “Seven ships across fifty million years, at a single hub. That’s one hostile encounter per seven million years at this location. The probability of the Thread intersecting with an active threat during the weeks we spend at any given hub is —” She ran the calculation on her tablet with the fluency of a woman who had already run it privately, perhaps more than once. “Vanishingly small. The graveyard looks alarming because we’re seeing the cumulative record. But the instantaneous risk at any given moment is negligible.”
It was a rigorous argument. It was also, Adaeze noticed, the first time Maren had deployed her mathematics in the service of a conclusion she clearly wanted to reach. The woman who had wept at the scale of the network, who had whispered I need time at the Milky Way’s core hub when her framework shattered — she was now building statistical frameworks that pointed toward continuing, and building them with the same focused precision she brought to topology proofs, the same certainty in her voice, the same steady hands. But her eyes, when they met Adaeze’s across the common room, held something that the mathematics did not: the look of a woman who knew what she was doing, and was not entirely sure it was honest.
Herrera listened to everything and made no decision, because no decision was required yet. They were going forward. The question was how much farther.
But something had shifted. The Thread felt different after the graveyard. The corridors were quieter. Adaeze stopped touching the letter in her pocket and started keeping it in her quarters, pinned to the wall above her bunk where she could see it when she lay down at night. Ren’s return-trip calculations moved from a background process to a permanent display on his personal console. His humor went underground — not absent, but rare, surfacing only in small, careful doses, as if he had decided that levity now required rationing as strictly as water.
That night — or what passed for night aboard a ship whose clocks bore only a ceremonial relationship to any star — Maren walked the corridors at three in the morning, as she always did, tablet in hand, stylus moving in the margins. She passed Adaeze’s quarters and saw the light on. The door was open. Adaeze was sitting on her bunk, the letter unpinned from the wall and held in both hands, not reading it — she knew the words by now — just holding it, the way you hold something that tethers you to a place you’re afraid you’ll never see again.
Maren stopped in the doorway. She did not ask if Adaeze was all right. The question would have been an insult to them both.
She sat down on the edge of the bunk, uninvited, and for a long time neither of them spoke. The ship hummed around them — the diminished hum of systems running on backup, the sound of a vessel holding itself together through engineering and stubbornness — and outside the viewport, the ancient elliptical galaxy turned its trillion red stars in a slow, indifferent waltz.
“Ife’s favorite subject is mathematics,” Adaeze said, eventually. “She’s fourteen. She’s better at it than I was at twenty.”
“Of course she is,” Maren said. “She’s yours.”
Adaeze folded the letter along its old creases and held it against her chest. “When I left, she didn’t cry. She just looked at me and said just come back. Not why are you going or don’t leave. Just — come back. As if she’d already done the calculation and decided that asking me to stay was a variable she couldn’t control, so she was optimizing for the one she could.”
Maren was quiet. Her stylus had stopped moving. “She sounds like a scientist.”
“She sounds like her mother. And her mother is sitting on a bunk four hundred million light-years from Nairobi, on a ship held together with patches, in a galaxy where seven dead crews are drifting outside the window.” Adaeze’s voice was steady, but her hands on the letter were not. “I chose this. I chose to be here. And I would choose it again, because the work matters, because what we’ve found matters. But tonight I need to sit with the cost of that choice for a while, and I need someone to sit with me.”
So Maren sat. She did not offer comfort or analysis or the mathematical framework she had for everything. She sat with Adaeze in the light of a dying galaxy and did not try to make the silence mean anything other than what it was: two women, far from home, afraid, choosing not to be afraid alone.
Herrera wrote in his journal, and what he wrote was: Six hops. Seventy-three percent hull integrity. Seven dead ships from four dead civilizations. The crew is still cohesive but the arguments are real now. When does the return become the mission?
On the sixth day at the hub, the hull breach happened.
Not during transit — during preparation for it. Yuki was running pre-transit diagnostics on the forward structural members when a resonance-fatigued section of hull plating on the port side gave way. The failure was sudden and undramatic from inside — a metallic crack, a rush of air toward the breach, and then the emergency bulkheads slamming shut with the speed of systems designed to react faster than human thought. No one was in the compromised section. No one was hurt. But a storage compartment containing backup fabricator stock and half the remaining hull patching material was now open to vacuum.
Yuki and Ren went EVA to assess and repair.
The scene outside the Thread was one that neither of them would ever adequately describe, though both would try for the rest of their lives. They floated along the hull of a small, damaged ship — their ship, the only human artifact within four hundred million light-years — and around them, in every direction, the infrastructure of the sixth hub spread across the void like the architecture of a god’s workshop. Throat Engines the size of star systems, their surfaces etched with structures at every scale from planetary to atomic, pulsing with the slow rhythm of quantum vacuum fluctuations. The flagship wormhole, fifty kilometers of engineered spacetime, its mouth wreathed in the glow of stabilization fields that had been burning longer than the Earth’s sun. And beyond it all, the galaxy itself — a trillion ancient stars in a smooth elliptical haze, attended by hundreds of satellites, the whole structure embedded in a bath of X-ray plasma that Ren’s suit instruments registered as hotter than the surface of any star in the Milky Way.
Against this, two humans with welding tools and a hull patch.
Ren worked in silence for the first hour. Then he stopped. His hands went still on the welding tool, and he hung motionless against the hull, tethered by a single line, staring outward at the Throat Engines. Yuki noticed the silence — the absence of his breath sounds on the suit channel, the stillness that preceded whatever came next.
“Ren.”
“I’m here.” But he didn’t move. The Throat Engine nearest to them — a structure that dwarfed planets, whose Casimir cavity arrays operated at scales his instruments could measure but his mind could not metabolize — turned slowly in the gravitational current, catching the light of a trillion distant suns. His whole life had been spent mapping. Measuring. Reducing the universe to numbers that fit on a page or a display. And here, in the void, with the welding tool growing cold in his gloved hands, the thing he was looking at refused to be reduced. It was not data. It was not a topology. It was there, vast and patient and real in a way that made his entire career feel like a man describing the ocean by counting grains of sand on the shore.
“Ren. I need you to hold the strut.”
He blinked. Turned back to the hull. Picked up the welding tool. “Sorry. Scheduling conflict.” The joke was thin and they both knew it, but Yuki hummed in response — three notes, a pause, three notes — and the melody pulled him back into the small world of metal and tools and the damaged ship that needed them. He did not mention the moment to anyone afterward.
Yuki hummed through the entire repair — the lullaby rising and falling in her suit mic, an anchor of normalcy in a scene that was the farthest thing from normal any human being had ever experienced. She cut away the failed plating, ran her gloved hand along the exposed structural members the way a veterinarian examines an animal in pain — reading the damage by touch, listening through her fingertips for what the metal was telling her. “I know,” she murmured to the ship, her voice carrying the same matter-of-fact tenderness she used for every machine she’d ever tended. “Hold still. This is going to itch.” She fabricated a patch from the materials they had left. The work took eleven hours. When it was done, the hull was sealed, but the repair was ugly — visible from inside, a scar on metal that had been smooth when they launched.
“How many more of those can we take?” Herrera asked when they were back aboard.
Yuki didn’t answer immediately. She ran the updated structural model, incorporating the lost material, the patch, the reduced fabricator reserves. When she spoke, it was with the careful honesty of a woman who understood that lives depended on her not being optimistic.
“The hull will hold for the return trip as it stands today. But I’ve used forty percent of our patching material on a breach that happened outside of transit. The next six or seven flagship transits will each put cumulative stress on the remaining structure, and I have less margin to repair what breaks.” She met Herrera’s eyes. “Every hop forward takes something from the return. That’s the math. I can’t make it say something else.”
Herrera nodded. He didn’t look at Nolan. He didn’t need to.
That night, Maren walked the corridors at three in the morning, as she often did, tablet in hand, equations scrolling. She found Nolan in the observation bay, staring through the viewport at the flagship gate.
“The numbers are getting worse,” she said. It was not a question.
“The numbers have always been getting worse,” Nolan said. “That’s what happens when you go farther than anyone has gone before. The numbers get worse until you arrive.”
Maren studied him. In the light of the flagship gate’s distant shimmer, his face looked older than his years — the face of a man who had been carrying something heavy for a very long time and had grown so accustomed to the weight that he no longer noticed it.
“And if you arrive and there’s nothing left to get you home?”
Nolan was quiet for a long moment. When he answered, his voice was low and certain and utterly without self-pity.
“Then at least you arrived.”
Maren said nothing. She walked back to her quarters and did not sleep, and in the morning she said nothing about the conversation to anyone.
They deployed the sixth beacon, transmitted the full survey data, and entered the flagship wormhole.
The hull sang. The stars blurred. And the Thread — scarred, patched, burning through reserves it could not replace — fell deeper into the universe.