And back in Haven:

"No. You are absolutely not sending him to Sunhame anytime within the next month." 

"Melody, can't we–"

"I said no." 

The the next morning, King Randale sends a message to the Andalites, asking if they would still be available to drop off some Heralds in Sunhame three days from now. They'll be doing it without Vanyel, so they want all other hands on deck, including Sandra. 

Ughhhhhhh Sandra is so upset about this. 

It seems very terrible that Valdemar is so desperate as to send their women to war but the Andalites will drop them off for it. 

Leareth hears about this when Sandra swings by to apologize for leaving and check if she should hand anything over to his mages. 

Does Valdemar want him to send some of his mages to help? - Also, (to the Andalite doctor) can he please leave the room today at some point, what does he have to do to be able to leave. 

(Sandra agrees to pass a message back to Haven and ask if Randi wants some of Leareth's mages.) 

Well, the Andalite doctor is used to patients who morph off their injuries as soon as they can sustain the required two minutes of lucidity and he doesn't want Leareth to have permanent damage to his body of some kind, but he's not going to stop him from marching off, it's not going to kill him or make him worse.

Leareth feels completely fine now, so he thanks the Andalite and then tries leaving the room and just standing outside it for a minute, with the Healer who can keep an eye on him. 

- he still feels mostly fine but kind of tired, and with a stronger preference than usual to be sitting down, which is honestly a more reasonable way to feel given the entirety of yesterday. It doesn't feel bad to push through it for a while, though, and he's still clearheaded, so he heads off to find Cayaldwin and ask whether he was able to make any sense of his terrible note and corroborate Leareth's theory on the mistake. 

Cayaldwin is happy to talk with him about that! He couldn't reconstruct exactly what happened but here's what he's got.

It's pretty helpful. Leareth still thinks that the actually-hard part here was hitting the right planet at all, and landing on exactly the right spot of ground from there is only a normal amount of difficult, but if he's going to be Gating from planets to space-between-planets then he does need to be able to take the planar-distance aspect better into account.

Sandra said there's a way to do further tests safely by sending robots through instead of people? 

Yes! They should send robots, and then the robots can come back with pictures and temperature and atmosphere and radioactivity readings. Robots rather than people do all exploration of new planets for this reason and their parts printer has been occupied but it is no longer occupied and they are, as they speak, printing some robot parts.

That's so convenient! And, er, Leareth is sorry for scaring everyone by doing a test incautiously. It's been a really long time since he screwed up that kind of thing, but also accidentally Gating to space was never a risk before. 

Cayaldwin is politely confused, and gestures with his tail in vague acknowledgement. 

One of the other engineers is helpfully thinking that Leareth is - suggesting that they would've been having inconvenient emotions or reactions about Leareth's injury? Which is a odd thing to suggest, possibly someone did feel that way but they didn't mention it, and if they had it would've been rude of them, to have caused Leareth's injury to have implications beyond the tactical ones. He was injured and now he is fixed. 

Honestly that’s so refreshingly straightforward of them! Leareth nods and dismisses the matter and moves on with the research.

King Randale replies midway through that afternoon. They will accept help from a handful of Leareth’s mages, if he’s offering. In particular they hear he has people who are very good at Gates?

No one is as good at Gates as Leareth himself, and he has no intention of going to Sunhame. He’ll send them four of his Adepts who are experienced with Gates, though.

Vanyel has pulled himself together enough to start arguing with Melody that he’s needed in Sunhame.

What? No. No no no. Refused. 

By that afternoon, Leareth is ready to try a teensy Gate to the spot the ship jumped to before; if he can retrace his steps and account for the gravity well in reverse, that’ll be significant progress toward making Gates safer. And he’ll be able to hold a small one longer, plus get a sensor read on how much less conspicuous it is. 

Can Cayaldwin be on standby to send a robot through and check where the other end is?

He can do that! The robot has been assembled. It's small and vaguely round and it flies.

Tiny robot! There is agreement among Leareth's staff, particularly the female ones, that it's adorable. 

Leareth uses a small stone frame for the departure threshold, to make it easier to hold the Gate. It still takes a long time to find the other end but he manages the search a little more efficiently this time, giving the spell a clearer 'direction'. 

Little Gate that theoretically goes to vacuum! You can't tell from looking at it, it's still opaque; Leareth thinks he can tell because it's tiring to hold in an unusual way, he suspects because the other terminus is losing energy faster than Gates not in vacuum and he's needing to replenish it. 

He can hold it a couple of minutes, though, to get robot sensor readings. 

The robot can fly through (on a string, though it has its own propulsion and should in principle be able to come back even if it's in space) and then fly back with some readings!!