A navy ship and some scientists, studying the wormhole’s last known location, topple in when it unexpectedly opens and arrive at Erehwon before Caleb and Cuiva do. But even at top speed they’re four years’ travel away. Meanwhile, back at Vega, Caleb protects Nimisha’s daughter and heir, Cuiva, from the feeble threat posed by Vestrin and organizes a rescue mission. With plentiful supplies from a wrecked freighter, they all begin to build a civilization. Exploring further, the group also finds descendants of survivors-the small, furry Sh’im-from an alien vessel.

Nimisha finds survivors: Jon, Casper, Syrona, and young Tim. Erehwon, then, is littered with wrecks from the wormhole’s previous victims. As the wormhole opens and closes unpredictably, there’s no immediate hope of rescue, so Nimisha explores a nearby habitable planet. She takes the ship for a shakedown cruise only to be trapped by an uncharted wormhole and deposited, more or less intact, many light-years from known space. Assisted by naval attachÇ Caleb Rustin, Nimisha designs the revolutionary, ultrafast Mark 5. And when Tionel dies in a tragic accident, Nimisha takes over-despite the objections of Tionel’s ne’er-do-well son, Vestrin. Impressed, her father, Lord Tionel, takes her into the family business, the vast Rondymense Ship Yards, and teaches her to design spaceships for the navy. Not knowing if she would ever return to the world she knew, Nimisha chose to land on 'Erewhon' - fascinating, terrifying, beautiful and frightening - and inhabited not only by three survivors of a previous Vegan ship but by something else.New, independent sf from McCaffrey (Freedom’s Challenge, 1998, etc.) Here, Lady Nimisha, unlike most of Acclarke City, Vega III’s decadent aristocrats, enjoys tinkering with machines and improving their design. As she explored this new, unfamiliar section of the universe she found traces of ships that had been marooned over many centuries. In an empty space field, suitable for test runs, she was suddenly confronted with the boiling white pout of a wormhole, was sucked in, only to be thrown out into an unknown dimension of space. It was on a test of her Mark 5 prototype that things went wrong. By the time she was in her twenties she was the designer of the most advanced space yacht in the galaxy, and was owner of the Rondymense shipyards.

But even as a child she eschewed the formalities of her aristocratic background and was happiest in her father's shipyard. Nimisha Boynton-Rondymense was the body-heir of Lady Rezalla and, as such, was the heiress of one of the First Families on Vega III.

Nimisha's Ship by Anne McCaffrey