In the chairs around the AC, her command crew sat at their stations, attention on the monitors that provided navigational data. The swelling feeling of relief at having made the transition, not only from Solar System, but to the exact place and time they’d hoped, was like instantaneously being given new life. Especially when, according to the ship’s clocks, they’d only spent nineteen months in what should have been a twenty-three-month transition.

When the reactors had reestablished symmetry so many months ahead of schedule, Margo Abibi had been terrified. Especially given the amount of fuel Turalon had consumed. The tanks had been down to sixteen percent. So where had it all gone? Why was this trip so different from the first voyage to Donovan? With the missing ships—not to mention Freelander and Ashanti lurking like the specter of the Lost Dutchman in her mind—Margo had almost broken out in tears of joy when her navigation officer, Sunyap Tamiki, had announced, “From the spectral reading, that star to our right is Capella, Captain. We’re right where we’re supposed to be.”

So, she wondered, what explained the missing months? Why the rapid transition?

God, traveling outside the universe using inverted symmetry is crazy!

Yeah, whatever. They’d made it. She was alive, her crew was safe, and her passengers were spared a gruesome fate.

Margo thought she could walk on air.

“Got a plot on Donovan,” Sunyap called. “Inputting the course now. Estimate establishment of planetary orbit in, let’s see. Yes, that will be eighteen days, ten hours ship’s time, ma’am.”

“Input course and initiate, Mr. Chin,” she ordered.

“Yes, ma’am,” First Officer Tadeo Chin acknowledged in a voice that almost sounded musical with delight. He bent to his controls, ensuring that Turalon’s computers were sending the proper instructions to the massive thrusters where they were mounted on pods below the giant spherical reactor.

Abibi felt the familiar shift as Turalon began to change attitude and accelerate.

“All systems are go and reading in the green,” Turalon’s voice assured as the AI monitored the initial burn.

“Couldn’t be more perfect,” Second Officer Madra Arapava said as she straightened from her console. The forty-year-old gave Abibi a smile. “Think we’ll get home as quickly?”

“Hope so,” Abibi told her. “I don’t think I could take another couple of hours like these last ones. I’m getting too old for this.”

“Go right ahead, Captain,” Chin quipped from the first officer’s chair. “Retire. With reluctance, I’ll have to move from my wonderfully comfortable chair to yours. Took me months to adjust this one perfectly. Settling into yours, I’ll have to start over from scratch.”

“Dream on,” Abibi told him. The joke came from the fact that Chin stood a little over two meters tall and Abibi barely cleared a meter and half.