Phase Three, Sol, 4053.11.11 CE

22.7 megaseconds since the catastrophe

Her name was Rowan Moran. On this particular day, at this particular hour, it was not a famous name. Even within Humanity's Hold, few people knew who she was. Her area of study was so mind-bendingly obscure that even other physicists didn't really know what she was talking about half the time. The result was that she didn't really talk much except to give excruciatingly careful instructions to the people and machines who needed to build what was in her head.

It wasn't that she was unfriendly by nature. It was just that the one person who might really understand her was an alien she'd never met. She knew his name and his work, though, and that of his family. She wondered what it would be like to at least have family to talk to about her work and have them understand her. She was a little envious of that.

Which meant she was a little smug about what she was about to do. If everything went well, then at some point Ari ben Yosef Espinoza would hear about it. Then, it would be his turn to be envious.

Still, she wondered if she'd ever just get to talk to him. He was an alien, for certain, but he'd understand what she was doing.

About to do.

A countdown she'd been all but ignoring to keep herself from fidgeting came to 00:00:00. She flipped a toggle.

Invisible to the naked eye but projected on her monitor, a dozen of the Phase One solar collector stations began sending their power to the somewhat rough, awkward looking hexagonal shape centered in that screen. It was not large—only a probe would fit through it—but if it worked, scaling it up was the easy part. They had power enough at their disposal, now. The only question was whether the equations—the brain-twisting, impossible equations she understood and no one else seemed to—would actually produce results when that power was applied correctly.

The timer began counting upward again. Five seconds. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. Twenty-three—

—the patch of starry space she could see through the hexagon wavered, twisted in a way as visually undefinable as the equations were to most people's brains. Then, on the other side, the image was different.

She pushed a button, and the probe shot forth through the center. Telemetry sprang to life as the probe sent back data and confirmed that it was where it was expected to be.

Now, for repeatability. She flipped the first toggle back to its original position. The reversion to the original view was instantaneous. No eye-bending antics. Just normality reasserting itself. The probe's telemetry cut off sharply.

The countdown clock reset to five minutes. When it reached 0:00 again, she flipped the toggle again.

At precisely twenty-three seconds, space twisted in front of her. The probe's telemetry resumed.

She was not the most perceptive person, but she could still tell that everyone else in the control room with her was holding their breath.

She pressed a third control. The probe spun on its attitude jets, reacting to commands passed through the gate, and puffed back through in the other direction, arriving intact as if it had done nothing more special than pass through a metal doughnut.

As if it had not just traversed fifty light-years of space, sent signals back to confirm its location, and then returned, all through a device orbiting Sol well inside the heliopause.

Behind her, her assistants began a cheering ruckus. They might not understand the science of what she'd just accomplished, but they understood what it meant on other levels. She was buffeted by their congratulations, and smiled through the contacts knowing they were well-meant.

This would be the day generations would remember changed everything. How they felt about that, and about her, would depend on their point of view, of course, but everybody would know Rowan Moran's name.

For now, though, even as her staff began passing around drinks to celebrate, she packaged up and encrypted her report, and sent it to one of the few people who currently knew who she was, her patron on the council of Humanity's Hold, with a single sentence for a cover letter.

"Phase Three Trial 4-A results: perfect success."