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jump covers a distance almost as far as Jupiter from the Sun.”
    “Roughly, yes,” Whips agreed. “There are special drive designs that can do shorter, faster jumps, or ways to tune these for that, but . . .” he gave the rippling gesture of arms and color that was his equivalent of the human’s shrugs, “I’m an apprentice. I know the theory but no way am I going to try doing that in practice.”
    “We wouldn’t want you to!” Sakura agreed emphatically. “So that means we need to just let our own speed give us the parallax, and then we can deploy the Nebula Drive to get us to our target.”
    Whips actually looked forward to that. The “Nebula Drive,” or more technically the “dusty-plasma sail” had been originally invented by Bemmius secordii sapiens —not his direct ancestors, but the ones who’d seeded his ancestors on Europa. Human scientists such as Dr. Robert Sheldon had theorized it was possible, but it wasn’t until an ancient Bemmius relic had been uncovered and repaired that the Nebula Drive was simultaneously reborn and renamed, a method for using ionized plasma to inflate a magnetic field to immense sizes, confining dust and gas within the field and providing the most ethereally beautiful, and low-cost, way to move around a solar system.
    “ Can we get closer to the star?” her dad asked. “I don’t want to worry anyone, but I know the only other long-distance capability we have comes from the Nebula Drive, and that’s sort of like a solar sail, right? So I can see how it can push us away from the star, but . . .”
    “Remember that we’re not just sitting still with respect to the star,” Whips said. “So the real key is which direction you are orbiting the star, and at what distance.”
    “Right,” said Sakura, picking up the conversation, “To oversimplify, you just point your sail so you go against your orbiting direction, and that’ll make you go closer. You can tack with a dusty-plasma sail just like a regular sail. If we can find a good-sized gas giant somewhere, we can also use the gravity assist to send us in the right direction.”
    Hitomi spoke up. “And we need to find a planet to land on. So we should be looking for planets now!”
    Whips was impressed with his friend’s self-control, as Sakura managed to keep a smile on her face at Hitomi’s innocent assertion. Whips didn’t need to read the datastream from Sakura to know what thoughts were going through her head. There might not be a planet to land on. Probably won’t be. Only one of ten stars like this have good planets in the habitable zone—which is a whole ocean of a lot more than they used to think there would be . . .
    Aloud, Laura Kimei said, “Hitomi’s completely right. Caroline?”
    Caroline looked uncomfortable. Whips knew that she hated doing things halfway, or out of order, or, well, just not the right way—and there was nothing “right” about this situation at all.
    But she sat up straighter and nodded. “The most puzzling thing to me is that this star is just not on the charts. I checked with what I had from Earth, and if we did just drop off where I think we did, there aren’t any stars where this one sits. Nothing. If there was, the big wide-baseline telescopes in our home system would have mapped any planets in detail, especially habitable ones, even if no one actually went there. But there’s nothing. This star shouldn’t be here . . . but it is here, and I guess we should just be grateful it is.
    “But that does mean we’ve got to do all the survey work ourselves, without a single clue as to exactly what we’re looking for or where it is.” Caroline sighed, pursed her lips, then nodded again. “We’ll need to get all our omnis linked in to the different cameras and do running background comparisons. Stars don’t seem to move appreciably at orbital speeds, so what we’re looking for are dots that move with respect to the background of the stars.” She sighed. “If LS-5