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a G-2, right?” Whips asked.
    “That’s right,” Sakura answered, glad she knew some of this. “A G-3 will be just a little tiny bit cooler and smaller than the Sun, I think, but we won’t notice the difference.” If there’s a planet to land on, anyway.
    “Well, in that case,” Akira said, “I think it’s time to get things started and for me to get out some food. It’s past lunchtime, after all. Hit the jump, Sakura.”
    He looked apologetically at her friend. “I’m afraid . . . we don’t have very many rations for Bemmies, Whips.”
    “I didn’t expect you would,” Whips said calmly. Sakura bit her lip. The Europan Bemmies weren’t obligate carnivores, but they did need a lot more protein—of the generally animal sort—than anything else. The more “balanced” human rations wouldn’t be terribly good for Whips, and he’d have to eat a lot more of them, even in proportion to his size. How long would their supplies hold out?
    “We’ll have to make do,” her mother said. “I know they’re not ideal for you, Harratrer, but we have I think three months’ supplies. Even with you onboard, we should be able to keep going for two months, and that should be more than enough now.” Unspoken was the fact that immersion issues might become acute long before then.
    “Thank you, Dr. Kimei.” Sakura could tell that Whips’ formal-sounding voice hid much more relief and gratitude.
    They’d found a good star. The drive was working. Maybe they’d get out of this after all.

Chapter 5
    The unnamed star glowed before them, a visible disk, as LS-5 came out of the Trapdoor Drive. Now the next cycle of worry begins , Whips messaged to Sakura, who gave a tense, wry grin. Finding a good star was excellent luck . . . but we cannot live on a star .
    Yeah. But let’s take one problem at a time. He saw her shove the worries out of her mind and concentrate on trying to figure out their location. We’re already moving some with respect to the star, so if I can get any parallax at all that will give me a good idea of distance. I can sorta guess based on the likely diameter of the star, probably about one and a quarter million kilometers, but it could be significantly more or less than that.
    Finally she shook her head and sat back. “I’ve got a rough guess as to our distance, but it’ll take a while to refine that and get a velocity vector. At a guess, we’re maybe two AUs from the star.”
    “I thought the star looked a lot more than Europa-sized,” Whips said. “I mean, the size the Sun looks from Europa.”
    “Yeah, that was really all I had to go on, given the uncertainty in the Trapdoor transit distance. If it’s a yellow supergiant I’d be totally wrong . . . but I don’t see all the gas and stuff it should be shedding if it was a supergiant, and if that’s what it was we’d be pretty much out of luck anyway, so it has to be a regular G-class.”
    Caroline nodded. “Besides, if it was a yellow supergiant it would have been incredibly bright at a quarter light-year distance. Trust me, it’s a regular G-3.”
    “Why do we have to wait to get parallax?” Laura asked reasonably. “Just do a quick jump with the Trapdoor Drive.”
    “We could do that,” Whips said, since he saw Sakura looking uncertain. “But the Drive doesn’t come up and go down fast; what happened to separate us from Outward Initiative is almost certainly partly due to something trying to do a fast adjustment on the field. You’re deforming spacetime itself, after all, and that’s something you need to do very, very carefully. So . . . in practice you don’t want to do jumps shorter than, oh, thirty seconds or so, which since that’s going to be a full continuous jump instead of one that’s interspersed with recharging moments, that’s a minimum jump of . . . well over seven hundred million kilometers.”
    “Oh.” Laura’s brow wrinkled as she accessed the data. “Ah. That means that even the shortest practical