"...we go."
The Muggle crew set to work, Bernard on the transmission, the other two on the Apparition enhancer equipment. Hermione drifted there outside the magnetic chamber, thinking as hard as she could of Earth, of home: of Harry, Ron, her parents, her children, the smell of old books, the thrill of setting right what was wrong, the rolling hills of Scotland, the cliffs of Dover...
A semi-remembered bit of science fiction she'd read as a little girl came back to her now; a song sung by a young man on Ganymede unlikely to ever stand on Earth again. Far drive the sons (even then, the gender bias had annoyed her) of Terra/Out rides the thundering jet/Up leaps a race of Earthmen/Thus far, and onward, yet.../We've gauged each tumbling space mote/And reckoned its true worth/Bear me back to the fleecy skies/And the cool green hills of Earth.
"Can I see it?" she asked Bernard.
"See what?" he answered, lining up the antenna.
"Earth. Physically, I mean."
"No, it's right between us and the Sun, so it'll be lost in the glare and have no light reflection besides. And even this far out, staring at the Sun isn't a great idea. Oh, and don't start thinking about the Sun now, because I'd prefer not to be vaporized the moment we exit hyperspace."
"I could do it, Hermione, if you don't feel up to it," Cho offered.
"Sorry for the bluntness," Nate retorted, "but Hermione's got a lot more for her on Earth than you do."
"I have to concur," Henry added, after a pause, without looking up from his work. "Right, that should be the last of the synchronization checks. How's the power?"
"It appears to be O.K.," Pierre answered.
"I sent everything to Earth twice," Bernard told Lawrence.
"Right then," Lawrence directed, "Mrs. Granger, into the chamber, if you please. Miss Chang, get yourself strapped down."
Cho, somewhat angrily, thrust herself into her couch and began tightening the straps. The Muggles ran through their checklists, priming the chamber. Hermione focused all her thoughts and will upon Earth, home, rain and clouds and the smell of wet grass and fresh parchment, the myriad variations of humanity, the music, the light, the all-pervasive life...
"Induction two hundred millitesla, three, four hundred now -"
"Main relay grid is go, distribution nodes reading normal."
"GBAR shutdown confirmed, ADOP at specified power."
"Five seconds."
Hermione was thinking about that all-pervasive life, when she suddenly recalled a large cockroach that had recently startled her in the bathroom. She desperately tried to shake the image, but as usual, couldn't force herself to not think about something.
"Induction critical, all systems go!"
"Mrs. Weasley, three, two, one, now!"
Hermione, still unable to shake the image of the cockroach completely, whirled into the black.
It was a long, dark trip. Hermione was almost blase about the hellish compression, the choking feeling, the total darkness, by now, but she had no idea where they would end up. To her horror, several very undesirable exit points flashed through her mind, which she frantically refocused on the sights and sounds and smells of Earth. But suddenly, she felt a violent yank, clearing everything else from her mind.
Their return to normal reality was heralded by a tremendous crash, a moment of gravity, and a sudden return to free fall, followed by a less noisy but much rougher collision with something else. Hermione was slammed against the inside of the chamber several times, colorfully expressing her opinion of the space program each time, until the spacecraft stopped tumbling and ground to a halt. The lights flickered and went out.
"Is everyone all right?" Lawrence shouted after a moment.
"I'm fine," came Bernard's voice.
"All right here," Gaston said from what was now the ceiling. "Alzo, I am not certain how to get myself down."
"I'm just perfect," said Cho sarcastically.
"Bit banged up, but alive," Hermione put in. "Do you know where we are?"
"We're under gravity," Lawrence said slowly. "So either we're accelerating, which is very unlikely because the main engine isn't oriented that way, or we're on the surface of a planet." Sudden happiness leapt into his voice. "If it was Venus, or one of the gas giants, we'd be dead by now, and it's too strong for anywhere else -"
He yanked open the hatch. Warm sunlight and the smell of green grass flooded in.
"- but Earth!"
This was the sort of moment that seemed to call for cheering, but everyone was too worn out. Broad grins were on every face, though, as Lawrence climbed out.
"AHAC-1, this is Houston, do you read?!" burst from the radio. "Where are you? Your signal's very strong, but we can't get a fix on your position."
"Uh, Bernard here, Houston, thanks for the concern," Bernard said, keying his headset on, "but we're on the ground. On Earth. I'm not sure where exactly, but judging by the sound of it, we seem to have materialized right on top of a building."
"What?" A pause. "Did the GBAR fail, AHAC?"
"Uh, negative, Houston, we disabled it because it appeared ineffective and we wanted to have sufficient energy to attempt another jump."
Cho managed to get out of the last of her straps, and crossed the curved "floor" to the chamber. After a bit of exchanging gestures, she got the idea and pulled the emergency release. Hermione tumbled out. Cho helped her up. Though Hermione wasn't one to gripe, she was quite certain at that moment, that she was never leaving Ron or her kids, and certainly not Earth, again.
"Another jump? Where were you?"
"Well, you should get everything in a few hours, but I'll tell you now, the navigation completely failed. Our first jump sent us more than a light year outside Sol system - well, part of us."
There was a silence. While Cho started removing Pierre's straps carefully, Hermione climbed out of the capsule into the suddenly dazzling light. Finally the CapCom spoke again.
"I can see this is going to be an interesting debriefing. Where are you now?"
"I told you, we don't know. We seem to have lost power after that impact."
"I know where we are," came Hermione's voice from outside, with a strange mix of anger, despair, and hilarity.
"What do you mean?"
"We landed," she explained, "on top of my house." Specifically, she added mentally, the bathroom with that damned cockroach. It hadn't even startled her that much, who knows why she couldn't shake the thought.
"We're in England," Bernard reported calmly.
20 August 2018
NASA's Chief of Staff hurried into the conference room. "We've issued a press release," she said. "No specifics, just that we've tried out a new form of propulsion, and it provided adequate thrust but was practically uncontrollable. There's a lot of speculation on the Web about us covering up controlled fusion and zero-point energy, but no one close to the truth."
"Good. That does seem to cover it," NASA's Administrator added. The hastily convened conference held him, NASA's Chief of Staff, their European counterparts, the crew aboard the AHAC-1, Ron and the Muggles' wives, and several magical officials from the USA, the UK, and France. "We've found no evidence in the sensor logs that the control systems had any effect at all, in fact."
"Ordinary Apparition can be controlled reasonably well," Hermione said. "But this...I've had fleeting thoughts of other destinations quite often when Apparating, and it has scarcely ever been a problem. But this...it picks upon anything, or nothing."
"Still," one of the ESA people said, "this is a tremendous accomplishment. We have achieved the dream of science fiction, centuries ahead of its time; the transits were far faster than light. At a light year each jump, if it can be controlled, we could get a more powerful spacecraft to Alpha Centauri in minutes."
"But without control, this is worthless."
"Can't you just keep jumping until you..." he made vague gestures ,"get somewhere?" one of the American wizards asked.
"I'm afraid space is very large and everything in it is comparatively miniscule," said the Chief of Staff. "We could do that for years and get nowhere except hard vacuum. And, this thing can't reliably return to Earth, and has to be manned to work."
"I'd say it's back to the drawing board for a while," the Administrator summed up. Everyone nodded. "We'll need to discuss continued funding, but that's a matter for our respective governments."
"In any case," Hermione put in, "you lot will need to find a new astronaut. It's not that I couldn't stand it, but I can't risk leaving my children without a mother. Not again."
"I understand."
With little else to be said for the time being, the meeting concluded.
Test Flight by William Brennan
Chapter Notes: It's almost a shame Neptune and Earth happen to be on the same side of Sol on the date I chose. I was going to have them bounce the signal off Cassini and the Indian Mars orbiter whose name I can't spell, but whatever.
I'm also sorry for the bad writing, but I tried to capture a middle-aged Hermione in these situations and just couldn't very well. In the end I had to cut a lot of things.