Going Home

The Empress of Rhea entered the wormhole. She didn't come out where she was supposed to.

Now she's stranded between the stars - half a light-year from the nearest inhabited system, with a crew of seven, a dead drive, and no way home. In the history of interstellar flight, nothing like this has ever happened. There is no protocol. No rescue coming. No plan.

Jack Conrad is a General Systems Flight Engineer. Not a hero. Not a leader. Just the one person aboard who understands the whole picture - and the only one who refuses to stop looking for the exit.

His idea, when it comes, is the most audacious thing anyone has ever attempted in the history of human spaceflight. It probably won't work.

But the alternative is worse.

The crew think he's lost his mind. The physics say otherwise. But physics and survival are two different problems, and the gap between them is filled with dwindling resources, failing hardware, a fractious crew, and the kind of bad luck that only reveals itself when you're already too far from help to matter.

The Empress of Rhea is hard science fiction at its most unsparing - a story of ingenuity, endurance, and one man's stubborn refusal to accept that the ledger can't be squared.
Some voyages make history.

This one nearly didn't make it at all.