Several days later, longer than I wanted because we were cutting it close on the wormhole rebooting on its own, and not long enough according to the scientists and engineers both aboard and back home, we stopped near where Skippy intended the wormhole to reopen. Skippy had wanted to zoom out to the wormhole's track as soon as possible, to leave extra time for restarting the wormhole, and he saw no reason to delay. Our technical people wanted the Dutchman to take it slow at first, to rest and retest all critical systems. I was with Skippy on that issue; he was already constantly running diagnostics and controlling the robots that performed maintenance around the ship, and having our human crew double check Skippy's analysis seemed pointless. Our best scientists had no idea how a jump drive worked, same with the reactors, artificial gravity, or pretty much any other Thuranin system. What I agreed to, against the strenuous objections of our scientists, was a 36 hour delay. Mostly, I agreed to 36 hours to give Simms and her logistics team extra time to get all our gear stowed away, and to double check that we hadn't forgotten anything vital, like ketchup. When UNEF, which still technically controlled the mission, urged me to delay another 24 hours, I overruled them and ordered Desai to jump us away. If we delayed another day, and found something wrong with the ship, it wasn't like Earth could supply spare parts anyway.

Skippy reactivated the wormhole just as he predicted, and the Dutchman now hung in space, close the weirdly glowing wormhole entrance.

"Skippy, you need to let us handle this." I insisted.

"No, I really don't. If you monkeys screw up a wormhole transition in the future, it will be tragic for the ship. If you screw this one up, I won't be able to shut down the wormhole, and that will be tragic for Earth. Put your egos in check, and let me program the insertion course. Come on, Joe, I'm reactivating a wormhole here. There's a lot of variables involved that you'll never need to deal with again."

Desai turned to look back at me. We were about to enter the wormhole near Earth that had been shut down, a wormhole Skippy had recently rebooted. The displays showed that in front of the Dutchman was a glowing pool of flickering light, in the corner of the display was a clock, counting down until the wormhole shifted to its next point. One minute, thirty two seconds and counting. "Captain, I think we should let Skippy program the course this time, I don't mind watching again."

I bit my lip while I considered. "Skippy, how do we know there isn't an armada of Thuranin ships on the other side, anxious to see why this one wormhole suddenly shut down?"