“Eat up,” he said. “Sounds like we’re going to be up half the night packin’.”

The moment they got home, Trent plugged in the truck to recharge the batteries. They hadn’t used much power just on a trip downtown and back, but he liked to keep them fully charged, and he always started a trip that way. You never knew when your next chance to plug in would be, especially when you were going off-road, and interstellar travel was about as off-road as you could get.

While Donna started packing food and clothing into the camper, he dug out the components for the hyperdrive and mounted them into their places. The field coil went into a cubbyhole between the camper and the cab, where it would be as close as possible to the center of the truck. The actual electronics went behind the seat, where they could get to it in an emergency even if they were in space. Not that they would be able to do much if anything went wrong. Neither he nor Donna were techie enough to troubleshoot more than a burned-out fuse, but they could at least do that much. The computer that controlled everything would sit on Donna’s lap during launch and on the dashboard afterward, Velcroed down so it wouldn’t drift loose in free fall.

The power to run the hyperdrive came straight from the truck’s plasma cells. They were good for about 200 miles on the ground, or maybe fifty hyperspace jumps, depending on how close to a planet you were for each jump. According to Allen Meisner, the more mass you were near, the more energy it took. It had something to do with the way space was bent around planets and suns and stuff. Trent had a hard time seeing how you could bend something like space, but Allen had sworn it was true, and the guy had designed an engine that not only bent it but folded it in two, so he ought to know.

Trent plugged everything in and tested the connections, then went inside to see if Donna had the computer ready. She was still working at it, her face glowing pale blue in the screens light.