Scattered throughout the galaxy are a series of space-time anomalies called wormnets. A wormnet is a set of two or more interconnected portals through which your ships can travel to distant portions of the galaxy in a single turn. Travel through a portal is possible through the use of a wormnet drive installed on every spacecraft. If a ship enters a sector containing a portal it can activate its wormnet drive and traverse the portal to one of its possible exits.
 
Until one of your ships travels through a particular portal, your empire knows nothing about its behavior, and your exit from the portal will be determined randomly. Once your ship has traveled through the portal your empire will acquire the navigation data for that portal, which gives you detailed information that allows non-random travel thereafter. Navigation data may be shared between empires. The prudent wormnet traveler should be aware of some interesting portal characteristics:
 

• Some portals function only as entrances or exits, but not both, thus leaving the unwary traveler stranded on the far side and forcing him to take the slow route home through normal space.
• Wormnet portals can become unstable and collapse altogether for some number of turns. During this time, the portal is unusable, and does not even appear on ships' scanners.
• Some portals drift from sector to sector each turn. It is not uncommon to use wormnets to launch attacks on far away enemies, and a drifting portal can distrupt -- or enhance -- those plans. Portals that drift may do so in deterministic patterns, while other simply drift randomly from sector to sector. A portal that drifts into a sector containing a world or another portal collapses until it drifts out of such a sector.

 
Only through diligent exploration and sharing of information will you learn the details of the galaxy's wormnets.