Unlike them, Zachary’s ship did have a hyper generator. Which mean Harvest Joy could pass safely through the hyper-space interface which had destroyed the probes… probably. Whether or not she would survive whatever lay on the other side of it was another matter, of course. After all, there were all of those deliciously terrifying, venerable legends about the rogue wormholes whose termini deposited doomed travelers directly into the heart of a black hole or some other suitably lethal destination. Not that anyone had ever actually found a wormhole where warships made transit in but never made transit out again.

As if anyone were about to let anything as boring as reality interfere with perfectly good legends, she told herself, and glanced sideways at Kare.

If the astrophysicist cherished any concerns of his own, they were admirably concealed. He stood at the astrogator’s shoulder, blue-gray eyes intent as he watched Harvest Joy’s progress with total concentration, and the mere fact of his presence ought to be reassuring. Certainly, the RMAIA would scarcely have allowed its chief scientist, his three senior assistants, and over two hundred of its other scientific personnel to depart aboard Harvest Joy if it hadn’t been completely confident of their safety, Zachary thought.

Then she snorted. From what she’d seen of Kare and Wix, it would have taken armed Marines to keep them off Harvest Joy, danger or not. If a first transit was exciting for Zachary, it represented the culmination of Kare’s entire academic and professional life, and the same was true for Wix.

“We’re starting to pick up the eddy right on schedule, Ma’am,” Lieutenant Thatcher reported from Astrogation. “The numbers look good.”

“Thank you, Rochelle.”

Zachary gazed intently at her display, and her nostrils flared as a bright crosshair icon ahead of Harvest Joy’s light code blinked the sudden, brilliant green of a transit threshold. The survey ship was precisely where she was supposed to be, tracking straight down the precalculated vector into the frozen funnel of hyper-space which was all a wormhole junction truly was.

“Dr. Kare?” Zachary said quietly. She was the captain, and hers was the ultimate authority to abort the transit if anything looked less than optimal to her. But Kare was the one in charge of the entire expedition; the official organization chart in Zachary’s orders from Admiral Reynaud made that clear, whatever Makris thought. Which meant he was the only one who could finally authorize them to proceed.

“Go ahead, Captain,” the scientist replied almost absently without ever looking up from Thatcher’s plot.

“Very well.” Zachary acknowledged, and looked back down at the face on the small screen beside her left knee. “Prepare to rig foresail for transit, Mr. Hooja,” she said formally, precisely as if Arswendo hadn’t been prepared to do just that for the last twenty minutes.

“Aye, aye, Ma’am. Standing by,” he replied with equally redundant formality.

“Threshold in three-zero seconds,” Thatcher informed her captain.

“Stand ready, Chief Tobias,” Zachary said.

“Aye, aye, Ma’am,” Tobias responded, and Zachary consciously reminded herself not to hold her breath as Harvest Joy’s icon continued to creep ever so slowly forward.