"Threshold!" Evans said sharply.

"Rig foresail for transit," Zachary ordered.

"Rigging foresail, aye," Hammarberg responded instantly.

Harvest Joy's impeller wedge fell abruptly to half strength as her forward beta nodes shut down. At the same moment, her forward alpha nodes reconfigured, dropping their own share of the cruiser's normal-space impeller wedge to project a Warshawski sail's circular disk of focused gravitational energy, instead. The sail was perpendicular to Harvest Joy's long axis, and over three hundred kilometers in diameter.

"Stand by after hypersail," Zachary said, watching the flickering numerals in the Engineering window opened in one corner of her own maneuvering plot as the cruiser continued to creep forward under her after impellers alone.

"Standing by aft hypersail, aye," Hammarberg replied, and she knew he was watching the same flashing numbers climb steadily higher on his own displays as the foresail moved deeper into the terminus. They weren't climbing anywhere near as quickly as they could have been, given the absurdly low speed with which anyone but a madwoman approached a first-transit through an uncharted terminus, of course, but—

The numbers suddenly stopped flashing. They went on climbing, but their steadiness told Zachary the foresail was drawing enough power from the terminus' grav waves to provide movement.

"Rig aftersail," she said crisply.

"Rigging aftersail, aye," Hammarberg said, just as crisply, and Harvest Joy shivered as her impeller wedge disappeared entirely and her after hypersail spread its wings at the far end of her hull.

Senior Chief Hartneady's hands moved smoothly through the tricky maneuver, and Zachary felt her stomach trying to turn over as the cruiser slid into the terminus' interface with equal smoothness.

The inevitable queasiness of crossing the hyper wall was briefer but substantially more intense in a wormhole transit, and she ignored it with the practice of several decades' experience, never looking away from her maneuvering display. She watched it narrowly, eyes focused, and then it flashed again.

No one had ever been able to measure the duration of a wormhole transit. Not from the inside of one, at any rate, and no chronometer aboard Harvest Joy managed to measure this one, either. For however long that fleeting interval was, though, the cruiser simply ceased to exist. One instant she was sixty-four light-minutes from the star called Torch; the next she was somewhere else, and Zachary felt herself swallowing in relief as her nausea vanished.

Harvest Joy's Warshawski sails radiated the brilliant blue flash of transit energy as she continued to slide forward out of the far side of the terminus under momentum alone, and Zachary nodded in satisfaction.

"Transit complete," Hartneady reported.

"Thank you, Senior Chief," Zachary acknowledged. Her gaze was back on the sail interface readout again, watching the numbers spiral downward as her ship moved further forward.

"Engineering, reconfigure to—"

An alarm shrilled with shocking suddenness, and Zachary's head whipped around towards the tactical display.

"Unknown starships!" The professionalism of merciless training flattened the stunned disbelief in Lieutenant Keller's voice without making his report one bit less jarring. "Two unknown starships, bearing zero-zero-five by zero-seven-niner, range one-zero-three thous—"

Twelve battlecruiser-grade grasers, fired at a range of just over a third of a light-second, arrived before he could complete his final sentence, and HMS Harvest Joy, Josepha Zachary, and every man and woman aboard her ship disappeared in a single cataclysmic ball of incandescent fury.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

April, 1931

"But what could have happened to them?" asked Berry Zilwicki. The young queen's face was creased with worry.

Dr. Jordin Kare's face showed concern also. But he was doing his best to maintain a calm composure. "There could be any number of reasons they're not back yet, Your Majesty. I know TJ and I both emphasized how unlikely it was, but, frankly, the most probable explanation is that this time, for one reason or another, they didn't manage to chart the gravitic stresses accurately enough on their way through. Harvest Joy's instrumentation is damn good, but if they didn't get a good read when they make transit, it could take months for them to nail things down with sufficient accuracy for a return transit without additional support."

"For that matter, assuming they did fail to get a good map on their way through, they may have come out someplace close enough to Torch for Mike and Linda—I mean Dr. Hall and Dr. Hronek—to figure it'd take longer to do the survey than to come home the long way round, through hyper, and head back with better support," Dr. Wix interjected.

"In either of those cases," continued Kare, "then they've already begun returning through hyperspace. But that could take them some time, before they get back."

"How much time?" asked Berry.

Both physicists shrugged simultaneously. "There's simply no way to know," said Kare.

Berry shook her head. "Sorry, I said that stupidly. What I should have asked is what's the probable range of time, given past experience?"

Wix ran fingers through his long and thick blond hair. "At the short end, a few days. That'd be unlikely, though. At the other extreme . . . Well, the longest recorded voyage—well-documented, anyway—through hyperspace for a wormhole survey ship was a little under four months."

"One hundred and thirteen days, to be precise," said Kare. "That was the Solarian survey ship Tempest back in . . . what? 1843, TJ?"

Wix nodded, and Berry made a face. "Four months!"

Kare's look of concern was replaced by one of reassurance. A good attempt at it, anyway. "It's not as bad as it sounds. For one thing, there's not much danger involved. Like Captain Zachary said before they ever headed out, survey ships are designed with the possibility in mind that this might happen. They've got plenty of endurance and life support."

"Absolutely," Wix agreed with an emphatic nod. "The real thing to worry about on a trip that long is boredom, Your Majesty. It's not that big a ship, you know."

Their attempt at reassurance didn't help. Berry grimaced, as she imagined being trapped in such a vest-pocket world for almost four months.

"But of course survey ships are designed with that in mind also," Kare added, a bit hurriedly. "I can assure you, Your Majesty—I speak from personal experience here—that a survey ship has as much in the way of stored entertainment as even a big city. Well . . . not live entertainment, of course. But there's about all you could ask for in the way of reading material, vids, games, music, you name it."

"Sure is," said Wix. "I once took the opportunity on a long survey voyage—almost certainly the once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity—to watch the entirety of The Adventures of Fung Ho."

Berry's eyes widened. The Adventures of Fung Ho had been the longest-running fictional vid series in human history—aside from soap operas, of course—with forty-seven continuous seasons.

"All of it? That's—" She had a knack for math, and did the calculations quickly. "That's over a thousand hours of viewing time. A thousand and thirty-four, to be precise, except that I think there were a couple of years when they had shortened seasons."

Wix nodded. "Three seasons, actually. 1794, due to an actors' strike, where they lost almost a third of the season. 1802, from a writer's strike—but that only lasted for a few weeks. And the biggest loss, over half the season in 1809, when Lugh came under severe bombardment and just about all activity on the planet had to be suspended for the duration of the emergency."