Taylor took a break while Mordin and Lela finished restarting the ship. The operation took several hours as every system they had turned off needed to be powered back on one by one and checked. It was highly likely that most ships never saw this kind of situation during their entire service life.

Once the lights were back on, it was time to test the slip drive. She had already uploaded the modified control software to the ship and all that was left was to turn it on. For their first jump, they would only move from one end of the system to another and at only a fraction of the maximum speed in case the drive failed mid-transfer. The chance of it happening was astronomically low, so low it needed to be expressed in scientific notation, but it wasn't zero.

"Ready to proceed," Taylor announced. She was at the helm since she was the most knowledgeable about the drive and how it was controlled.

"Engaging slip drive in three …" It was likely that everybody felt the drive spool up and envelop the ship with its distortion field.

"Two …" The view of space through the cameras shimmered slightly as the field solidified.

"One …"

"Zero!"

The slip drive sliced through spacetime like a hot knife through butter. In an instant, it was over, the stars outside abruptly changed positions and the sun to their right disappeared outright. Then, as fast as it had begun, it was over and everything was still again. The computer took a few seconds to compute their new position as Taylor turned the ship around. A few seconds later, the orange star came back into view and the massive gas giant they had been orbiting was only a small dot in the distance.

"Jump successful," she announced.

It had been at one percent of the theoretical maximum speed of the drive, not that she would dare push past thirty without overhauling the shields entirely. The slip field prevented most matter from crossing its boundary during transit but radiation was another matter entirely, the blueshift was so extreme that most light sources turned into extremely high energy gamma rays.

"Speed impressive," Mordin commented, "orders of magnitude beyond most advanced drives. From observation, drive likely operates on different principles than conventional FTL systems."

"It didn't feel anything like an ezzo drive," Niusa added. "It felt more like space was being … stretched? Split? Bent? It's hard to describe."

"Intuition likely correct," Mordin nodded. "Space warping drives prototypes exist but performance lackluster, energy requirements too high for most cases. Only known working system stealth salarian frigate, highly classified, STG use only."

"Should you be revealing state secrets like that?" Taylor asked.

"Irrelevant, Taylor possesses technology far in excess of salarian union. Examination of insectile drones and other constructs indicates understanding of universal laws beyond even Protheans. Should Taylor upgrade sensors in the ship, something likely, no current stealth system sufficient." Mordin was almost giddy at the thought, something very odd for the usually composed salarian. "Extrapolation, Taylor likely possesses knowledge of faster-than-light sensor systems. Not to mention weapons. Advantage, overwhelming. Possibilities, exciting!"

"How does the drive work exactly?" Lela asked.

"The drive warps space around the ship in a lens shape to, in essence, cut through the intervening space." Taylor explained. "It does this by expanding the space in front of the ship and compressing it behind to slip the bubble through the opening. One disadvantage of this method compared to subspace travel is that large gravity wells like stars or planets cannot be bypassed."

"Subspace travel?" Lela raised an eyebrow inside her helmet. "I thought this was something bad sci-fi writers cooked up?"

"It exists," Taylor chuckled. "It's essentially travel through the higher spatial dimensions, usually those closer to reality. The primary disadvantage is that navigation is extremely difficult due to the spatial relationships being a bit … funky."

"Maybe I shouldn't have asked," Lela chuckled.

Taylor turned the ship towards the edge of the system and performed a second quick jump. From there, she aimed at the next system and pushed the core to five percent speed.

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It took them five minutes to transit from P3X-2559 to the next system. They were only two relay jumps from alliance space and would need five more to reach Sol. Since it would be incredibly suspect if they randomly showed up in every system without ever being seen near any of the relays, Taylor opted to go through most of the chain as normal which left them with one more week of waiting before they would be in position to make the final jump to Sol.

Everyone mostly relaxed during that time since there were no pressing objectives.

Taylor spent some time with Mordin in his lab answering questions about various bits of technology she had created for him. With the new fabricator at their disposal, it was possible for her to print more advanced items without relying on her summoned drones. She also disassembled most of the old drive cover with his help. They left the inner containment vessel, the with a giant chunk of element zero inside, alone. She didn't want to poke the hornet's nest.

Movie night continued as usual. She enjoyed discovering the strange things, for her, that the other cultures had managed to come up with. They weren't completely alien either, there seemed to be common themes between all of them, but the way they approached things were novel to her.

Stolen story; please report.

She also continued her work to build powers for her friends with Designer. It took her quite a while to crack the interface side of things, especially as she built increasingly complex powers on the other end, but she managed after three days. The first person she asked to test it was Niusa who jumped on the opportunity with extreme enthusiasm. Taylor had only built the flight power originally present in the first generation bracelets for the initial testing. She wanted to know if the interface worked properly with someone other than her. She also didn't want to give someone any destructive powers lest they accidentally bore a hole through the ship.

"I'm thinking of making a personalized interface for each of you," Taylor said. "What kind of jewelry do you like?"

"Oh, you want to gift me some jewelry," Niusa said with a teasing tone, "I didn't know we were that far into our relationship."

Taylor did the mature thing and blew a raspberry at her friend. Niusa had been a bit more flirty than usual in the last few days but she hadn't pushed that far either. She had the feeling that the asari was trying to figure out where on the spectrum from platonic to romantic her attraction to Taylor stood. She had been asking herself the same questions too.

It had taken her quite a while to figure it out the first two times after all. She liked to think she was more perceptive than that but she held no illusions about it. Even with six of her, they were all equally clueless in matters of romance.

For the moment, she filed it under: figuring things out.

"Please be serious for a second," Taylor gave her a half-hearted glare.

"Maybe something like a necklace?" Niusa pondered. "I've seen some very nice designs on the extranet."

"It would need something that can't fall off when you're flying upside-down," Taylor reminded her. "Otherwise you'll have an unpleasant time."

"Yeah, good point," Niusa grimaced. "I'll think about something."

In between everything, Taylor also spent some time in the engineering bay. She had already upgraded the drive core but it was the bare minimum. Her tinker power gave her a million and one ideas to improve and rebuild every facet of the ship. Her current priorities were the propulsion system, better fabrication facilities, and the defenses. With the slip drive and good shields, they could run away from any unfavorable engagements without a possibility of being followed.

Her advancements on the power side, particularly with Designer and the interface system, provided her with another idea as well. She could create ways for people to use the powers present in her shard but there was likely a way to do the reverse as well. Create an anchor that would allow her to project her powers away from her body. She hated to divide her attention between multiple large projects but this one was important.

She started work on the project, as the inkling of a solution started to form in her minds, and hoped to complete it before they reached Sol.

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The last day arrived faster than everyone thought. Taylor barely managed to finish both of her projects in time though she hadn't talked to Mordin and Lela about the interfaces or installed her proxy in the ship yet. She hadn't wanted to do it while in relay transit to avoid any unexpected issues.

One alliance patrol had briefly stopped them in the previous system as they were on their way to refuel. Officially they were on their way to the citadel and it was the safest path. The captain hadn't seemed to be particularly interested in the why and how and just told them to keep an eye out. There had been some reports of a minor pirate gang in the area.

It was almost refreshing to see that even space cops gave no shits sometimes.

As Taylor moved the ship to the edge of the system, she checked their path one last time. Space was very big and empty but, annoyingly, not empty enough. There were various obstacles between them and Sol, mostly unexplored star systems far out of range of conventional FTL with no known relays.

Thankfully, the navigation system in the ship could determine their position even if they weren't in a known system. It was an exploration ship, after all, its job was to go where no quarian had gone before.

"Brace for jump," Taylor announced.

The drive spooled up and they disappeared from the Puria system in a flash. At twenty percent efficiency, the drive could cross around two hundred light years per minute. Their next destination was around eight hundred away.

When they stopped, it was to a beautiful view of the binary star system. The two B-class stars were engaged in a deadly dance as they perpetually fell towards each-other. Since they had no idea if any of the planets were inhabited, even if the database had none in the habitable zone, they quickly made their way to the other side of the system and oriented the ship towards their next destination.

"Brace for jump," Taylor announced.

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After half an hour and five jumps, they had arrived at their destination. Taylor had jumped the ship right into the system several light minutes above the elliptical plane where instruments would take several minutes to detect them. Not that they were easy to detect to begin with since their ship was mostly just floating in space, their active sensors were disabled and the fusion torches were turned off.

But it was theoretically still in range of the shard network.

The moment of truth.

Taylor held her breath.

Asteria dumped a massive amount of data in her head. She was ready, however, and started to input the destination coordinates into the navigation system. The shift drive started to warm up in preparation for the jump.

"Prepare for dimensional transition," Taylor announced. "In five … four … three … two … one …"

The change was almost imperceptible for anyone without sense like her. The drive fired and the ship was instantly transported to its destination. Through the viewscreen, the solar system seemed to skip to a different position in the blink of an eye. The stars in the background completely changed as well. The navigation computer oriented the telescopes towards its known reference points but everything was subtly out of alignment and it returned an error.

"Transition completed."

"It was a bit anticlimactic," Lela said. "With everything I've seen so far, I expected something more showy."

"The light show happened in the sixth dimension and higher," Taylor chuckled. "Now, let's see …"

She took control of some of the telescopes and pointed them at Earth. The image was a few minutes out of date, obviously, but she could see the planet clearly and it had seen better days. Several continents were missing entire chunks and the rest bore the scars of her battle with Scion.

"By the goddess," Niusa whispered, "what happened? Such devastation …"

"This is Earth Bet," Taylor said solemnly, "my home for eighteen years and now, only ashes remain. I doubt anyone still lives on this Earth but there were dozens of portals to alternate Earths by the end, I'm sure the survivors are somewhere."

She pushed the throttle of the ship and started to move towards the blue marble. It would take them a few hours to reach orbit so she flipped the auto-pilot on.

"There were survivors?" Lela asked. "After something like this?"

"It began in nineteen eighty-two," she began, "when a golden man was sighted floating over the ocean by a cruise ship …"