A blood vessel that carries blood from the heart to the body

Usage examples of arteria.

Being on the outermost reaches of the galaxy - and hanging well underneath the galactic plane, where the last vestiges of stars and gas gave way to the emptiness beyond - did not necessarily mean that a place was inaccessible, providing it was close to an arteria portal.

That arteria lasted for seventy million peaceful, productive years, during which several Quick species, none of them native to Ulubis, came and went, leaving only the Dwellers to bear consistent witness to the slow turn of life and events.

The Arteria Collapse had plunged Ulubis into solitude once again, along with ninety-five per cent of the connected galaxy.

Even with the near-instantaneousness of portal-to-portal Arteria travel, it was an unfeasible, economically unsupportable number.

One might even - knowing the importance that the Mercatoria attaches to reconnecting all the many, many systems which have been without Arteria access all these millennia - wonder why the expedition from Zenerre to Ulubis with a new portal was dispatched with such alacrity, given the arguably still greater claims that more populous, more classically strategically important and more at-the-time obviously threatened systems might have had upon the resources and expertise of our esteemed colleagues in the Engineering faculty.

Dwellers had better construct an arteria web which they controlled - and which preferably nobody else knew about - if they wanted to voyage from gas-giant to gas-giant reliably and without fuss.

Then, the arteria total had been falling from its earlier - and then all-time - high of nearly 39,000 to under a thousand.

It contained over two million sets of alleged portal coordinates, implying more than one million arteria, presumably linked in a single enormous network.

A swathe of portal destruc- tion had swung across the million-star volume all around Leseum back in the time of the Arteria Collapse, leaving only the bunched Leseum systems themselves connected inside a vast volume of backwardness.