"Back to where it all started."

"She means the vessel we crossed the stars in." Edith leans her back against the wall and flashes a nostalgic smile. "It has a small macro-fab facility on board that's no longer up to the task of assembling advanced devices--but I convinced the custodians to spin it up again for this job."

"Thank you."

The hub room with all the elevators and hallways continues to bustle.

Nobody present is a man, even those with short hair or who look tall or angular at first glance. In this, the hub is not different from any other place Aly has visited since being eaten by the snake.

She's starting to wonder if it's a single-sexed enclave for some reason but it doesn't seem important enough to construct a sentence in real time rather than between interactions.

The elevator arrives.

It has a somewhat rickety feel to it, but Sanjana and Edith seem confident enough in its functionality.

They both step inside.

She has numbers memorized and the elevators are labeled. "Two elevators?"

"Yes. It's a little obnoxious, isn't it? The dysofrag superstructure is too hard to feasibly tunnel through, so we have to make do with excavating hallways and elevator shafts from existing gaps in the superstructure."

She shrugs.

"This place can be a bit of a maze. You get used to it."

She looks up 'dysofrag'.

Dysofrag (noun): an irregularly-shaped solid body orbiting our system's star. Large numbers of these, ranging in size up to a couple thousand kilometers across, are found within a tight ring called the Debris Disk, though some have more eccentric orbits. Dysofrags may accumulate metallic, rocky or icy crusts but their cores consist of Advanced Carbon Structures.

Whoever wrote this dictionary was really not helpful. She looks up "debris disk" and "advanced carbon structures".

Debris Disk (noun): a ring-shaped volume encircling the MV3-581 dwarf star at a radius of approximately twenty-two million kilometers, which contains the vast majority of the system's orbital debris. The debris disk's contents total one hundred eighty-one thousand exatonnes in mass.

Advanced Carbon Structures (noun): materials created through nano-assembly of carbon molecules. The most prevalent type of ACS is the lightweight but ultrahard Dysofrag Superstructure that reinforces the internal components of most larger orbital objects in the Debris Disk, but other types exist.

(Subjective gravity continues to decrease as the elevator climbs higher)

Dwarf star? Kilometer? Nano-assembly?

Dwarf Star (noun): a star of relatively small size and low luminosity, including the majority of main sequence stars.

Kilometer (noun): a unit of length derived from the SI, equal to 1000 meters.

Nano-Assemble (verb): to mechanically restructure matter by positioning reactive molecules with mechanical precision.

(As Aly reads this third tier of definitions, the elevator screeches to a halt at the top of its shaft. Those within are now essentially weightless)

Meter? Molecule? (Floating is interesting.)

Meter (Noun): A basic unit of measurement, defined as the distance that light travels in 1/299,792,458 seconds in vacuum. The average adult woman stands a meter and a half in height. The average SLAYER stands thirty meters in height.

Molecule (Noun): The smallest particle of a molecular substance that still possesses the chemical properties of that substance. If a molecule were to be divided into even smaller particles, the chemical properties would change. A molecule is made up of atoms that are linked together in a fixed arrangement of chemical bonds. A chemical is defined by the atoms that make up the molecule and the mutual chemical compounds that exist between the atoms. The dimensions of molecules are in the order of nanometers. (1 nm = 1 × 10 ^-9 m, one millionth of a millimeter).

The elevator doors open. There's a huge cavern beyond, with rough metallic walls. Shock-absorbent scaffolding extends towards the cavern's center, though whatever it's supporting isn't visible from the elevator's interior.

SLAYER? Atoms? She's still approximately trying to follow her hosts but not well enough; she stumbles.

“Catch her!”

Stumbling in null-inertial conditions is a lot different than stumbling in an earth-like gravity well. Rather than hit the ground immediately, a person can find themselves ‘falling up’ or ‘sideways ‘ and—particularly in a space this massive—drifting for a long time before encountering a useful handhold. 

Sanjana kicks off the back of the elevator, rebounds off the floor of the cavern, and soars up at a trajectory very nearly intersecting Aly's.

"Your hand, please?" She offers Aly her arm as the two of them pass each other in midair.

Aly flings out her hand.

They clasp arms with each other. Sanjana pulls Aly close, tilts her head back and watches their heading.

Their trajectory has changed, becoming something between Aly's prior heading and Sanjana's prior heading. This places them en route for the nearest pillar of scaffolding, which Sanjana pivots around to land feet-first upon.

"Are you alright?"

"Yes. Thank you."

Atom (noun): the smallest constituent unit of ordinary matter that has the properties of a chemical element. Every solid, liquid, gas and plasma is composed of neutral or ionized atoms. Atoms are extremely small; typical sizes are around 100 picometers (a ten-billionth of a meter, in the short scale).

SLAYER (noun): the primary biomechanical space-superiority weapons platform fielded by the United Colonies. A pilot can plug directly into the nervous system of a SLAYER, which otherwise lacks a brain, and direct it as though it were an extension of their own body. SLAYERs are grown in the colony's biofabricators, just like most citizens.

The scaffolding they stand upon braces one rounded face of a massive metal cylinder. Said cylinder is braced by a dozen other scaffolds, and illuminated by powerful electric lanterns affixed to them.

Its surface is worn, pitted, even cracked in a few places. Human-sized recesses upon its face might be doors or windows? And written upon its side are huge block letters: C-I-R-D-A-N

Aly follows Sanjana with more care and doesn't follow up on additional definitions right at this moment.

Edith catches up with them a few seconds later, having taken a low-velocity approach to the same vantage point.

She then leads the way along the pillar (handholds are plentiful and weight is negligible) and up to the Big Thing overhead.

"I get a little sentimental, every time I visit this place. We've come so far. Dozens of settlements, hundred of thousands of humans? But it all started out with just the eight of us and this one little ship."