“There is no piloting in FTL. Technically, there is no separate FTL drive, as such. The navigator sets coordinates and activates the system, and a wormhole is formed with one mouth in front of the ship and the other at the destination. The ship enters the wormhole, and from that point no further adjustments are possible.”

“Okay. So what about this control … ”

Patrick and Sheldon spent several minutes going over the various aspects of the conn, while Nat and I watched and occasionally kibitzed. I found it fascinating, but my mind kept going off on tangents when Sheldon explained some interesting aspect of space travel or the construction of the ship. Finally, Sheldon declared that Patrick knew enough to not immediately vaporize us and that he was reactivating the controls.

“And you’ll override me if I do something stupid, right?”

“Only as regards to piloting. The rest of your life is your problem.”

“Testy, testy.” Patrick eyed the Earth on the wall of the bridge. “Say, is this view like a window or like a monitor? Are we seeing the real thing, or an image?”

“The latter. No one builds vessels with windows.”

“Cool. Can you superimpose graphics and such?”

“Of course. What do you need? Some cartoon characters? Perhaps a frenetic music track? Porn?”

“Um, maybe a pointer to where our home is? It’s not like looking at a globe of the Earth. The clouds make it difficult to work out the geography.”

A red targeting circle appeared on a section of the wall. “Dunnville, Ohio,” said Sheldon.

“Thanks, dude.” Patrick manipulated the controls, and the view shifted as the Halo rotated to bring the targeting circle directly in front of Patrick’s position. Then the Earth began to expand as the ship shot forward.

“May I suggest a somewhat less enthusiastic re-entry?” Sheldon said. “We have no need to emulate a meteor.”

“Would we burn up?”

“No, not unless we took a run at it from much farther back. But we will ionize the air if we move through it too quickly. And that will show up both visually and on radar.”

“Oops,” said Patrick. The ship’s forward progress slowed to a relative crawl. “Thanks, Sheldon.”

“You are welcome.”

It took less than ten minutes before we were hovering over our hometown. The targeting circle had expanded until it now uselessly encircled the entire view. “Sheldon, please target Jack’s barn.”

“Certainly. Where is it?”

“It’s—” Patrick snorted. “Right. You don’t know where we live.” He turned and looked at me and Nat. “Little help?”

“Well, there’s the river,” Nat pointed. “And that big open area is the old textile mill, so the town should be over here … ”

“And once we have that, we can go from there,” I added.

“Got it.” A few more minutes of flying, and some further suggestions from the co-pilots, and the Halo was hovering over our barn.