“Transit complete,” Chief Tobias reported.

“Thank you, Chief,” Zachary told him, even as her eyes dropped back to the sail interface readout. She watched the numbers spiral downward even more rapidly than they’d risen, and nodded in profound satisfaction at their reassuring normality.

“Engineering, reconfigure to impeller now.”

“Aye, aye, Ma’am,” Hooja replied, and Harvest Joy folded her sails back into her impeller wedge and moved forward, once again at the same, steady ten gravities.

“Well, Dr. Kare,” Zachary said, looking up from her displays to meet the scientist’s eyes. “We’re here. Wherever ‘here’ is, of course.”

· · • · ·

“Here” proved to be a spot in space approximately five and a half light-hours from an unremarkable looking, planetless M8 red dwarf. That was disappointing, because the next nearest star, a G2 was just over four light-years away. That was a bit less than fourteen hours of travel for a warship, which wasn’t really all that bad in a lot of ways. But the local star’s lack of planets was going to deprive this terminus of any convenient anchor for the sort of infrastructure which routinely grew up to service wormhole traffic.

But if Zachary was disappointed by the absence of planets, the horde of scientists infesting her ship scarcely even seemed to notice it. They were too busy communing with their computers, Harvest Joy’s shipboard sensors, and the reports from the expanding shell of sensor drones they’d deployed even before Zachary reduced velocity to zero relative to the dim dwarf.

She was a bit amused by the fact that none of them seemed to have any interest whatsoever in the local star or even in determining where in the universe they might be. All of their attention was focused on their Warshawskis.

Actually, Zachary reflected, that was completely understandable—from their perspective, at least. And, upon more mature consideration, it was a focus she approved of heartily. After all, until they were able to nail down the precise location of this end of the terminus through which they’d come, it would be impossible for Harvest Joy to find her way home through it once more. Given how faint the readings which had guided them to the Junction end of the terminus had been, and how long and how hard the RMAIA had searched for it, Josepha Zachary was completely in favor of staying precisely where she was until Kare and his crew were totally confident that they’d pinned this one down.

But while they concentrated on that, the merely human hired help who had chauffeured them to their present location were busy with other observations. It was extremely rare—in fact, virtually unheard of—for any modern starship to be required to start completely from scratch in order to determine its location. Navigation through hyper-space depended heavily upon the hyper log, which located a ship in reference to its point of departure, since it was impossible to take observations across the hyper wall into n-space. In this case, however, even the hyper log was useless. There was no way to know how far Harvest Joy had come in Einsteinian terms, because a junction transit could theoretically be of literally any length. In fact, the longest transit “leg” for any known junction spanned just over nine hundred light-years, and the average was considerably shorter than that. Basilisk, for example, was barely two hundred light-years from the Manticore System, while Trevor’s Star and Gregor were both even closer than that. Sigma Draconis and Matapan, on the other hand, were each the next best thing to five light-centuries from Manticore, while Phoenix was over seven hundred light-years away, although in terms of actual transit time all of them were equally close.