“Aye, sir.”

“Good. Helm, take us out of orbit,” Weston ordered, settling into the seat. “Thrusters only until we clear the debris, then take us up to full acceleration.”

“Aye, sir,” Daniels responded. “Thrusters only.”

The deck rumbled under them as the ship started to break clear of the planet. Weston was ready. Whatever else happened, they were on their way home now.

EPILOGUE

“Commodore…I think we’ve got a glitch in that new array they installed.”

Commodore Wolfe frowned, leaning forward. “Pipe it up to my station, son.”

The young ensign standing watch nodded in response and directed the information up to the commander’s pedestal, where Wolfe oversaw the Demos base. The facility was a hybrid between a ship repair base and a terraforming command center for the Martian Colony Project, which meant that the commodore had a lot to deal with on a daily basis.

The sensor glitch, however, brought a smile to his face.

“That’s not a glitch, son,” he said a moment later. “That’s a tachyon surge.”

“Sir? But…it didn’t match any of the profiles we have in the computer and—”

“It didn’t match the profiles because we don’t have one for a full-size vessel transitioning in-system,” Wolfe said.

“Sir?” The ensign’s eyes widened, his voice rising just a little as a smile started to form. “You mean…”

“Let’s roll out the welcome mat, boys,” Wolfe said, a little louder so everyone in the large command center could hear. “The Odyssey just came home.”

The command staff—the younger ones, anyway—let out a bit of a cheer. The station’s XO let it go for a few seconds, then quickly quieted them down while Wolfe examined the information the sensors had recorded.

His single array of sensors weren’t enough to give him an exact lock on the source of the surge, but even as his base obeyed protocol and transmitted the data back to Earth, Earth and the other outposts and ships in the area transmitted their findings to him. It took the better part of a half hour, but by the end of the little storm of signals, he had the transition pinpointed.

Weston’s gotten cautious in his old age, Wolfe thought as he locked the entry point right down on the heliopause, the farthest reach of the sun’s influence in interstellar space. That put the Odyssey about three days out by its fastest cruise, unless Weston planned to use some fancy flying to brake that monster of a ship.

He could have brought it in as close as the heliosphere and cut a day off that number—at least according to all the numbers Wolfe had seen—but Weston was the one on the gun, so it was his call.

That extra day of waiting was going to be one hell of a long time, though.