Chief Mackenzie knew that, and he knew that his men weren’t anywhere near that point just yet, but he figured it wouldn’t hurt to remind them of one bit of good news.

“This is the last one of these landings we’ll have to deal with—for a while, anyway,” he told them with a wry grin. “So stay on your toes, so to speak, and if they rocket the deck…Get the hell out of the way and leave them to me. Got that?”

The men nodded and acknowledged his words.

Mackenzie clapped his hands. “All right, get suited up. We’re taking over the deck at oh–fifteen hundred, and I’ll want it FOD checked by fifteen past. Move it!”

In his cabin, Weston sat behind his desk, looking over the proposed course for the trip home that Daniels had prepared according to his wishes. The doglegged flight path made fifteen different transition hops across almost four hundred light-years of space.

The lieutenant had plotted the course to make the best use of the Odyssey’s legs, which were pretty impressive despite the limitations her transition drive built into her.

While the transition effect had, in theory, no limit on distance, it did have a practical limit in the case of the Odyssey’s power supplies. They could effect a transition over a range of less than thirty light-years at any given jump, after which they had to recharge the massive superconducting capacitors that fed the drive.

The reason, according to the tech boys, was that while a tachyon could transit the entirety of the universe in an instant, it still required the energy to do so. That was the theory that the transition drive was devised to exploit, in actuality.

That, and the fact that nature abhorred tachyons about as much as it abhorred a vacuum.

The universe simply did not seem to like the little buggers and went out of its way to make sure that they didn’t stick around any longer than they had to.

The entire tachyon drive was actually little more than a tachyon-based laser system that actually fired itself, along with the entire ship, by forcing every molecule in the Odyssey to jump several energy states in one go while keeping the beam coherent over the length of its range.

When the power ran out, the universe exerted its influence on the tachyons to return to their former energy state, allowing the ship and its people to reform.

Not a particularly fun way to travel, Weston would be the first to admit, but it was fast and, hopefully, untraceable.

Each transition did have some energy leakage, just like any laser had a minute corona of energy particles that could be read with the right sensors. The Odyssey would pulse a tachyon surge, both when it left a system and when it reappeared. The upside to this was that, like lasers, the energy leakage wasn’t much. Calculating it before had only academic value, but recent events had brought that information to the fore-front of tactical data.