Birth of Eden/Twice Bitten, Once Dead/Elijah
an excerpt

The entire mission, if all went well, would actually end up being slightly under one year. That included the launch of the massive colony ship, the nilspace transition, the colonization of the terrestrial planet, and the setup and tuning of the Janusian Gate. All things considered, as Rosalia pointed out, not really any different from the time that they would normally have spent on a regular E & E mission.
Also, in a stroke of fortuitous circumstance, the “Cardiff bus run,” as the E & E core team had gotten into the bad habit of calling it, would nicely cover the amount of time they would otherwise have spent incarcerated due to the last little dust-up. Arco Prime’s Enforcer Unit had taken a dim view of the damage that the brawl had caused, and even though there were over twenty witnesses to swear that neither of the E & E personnel had started the rampage, there was no doubt that the highly-trained duo had accounted for a significant percentage of the damage. The courts had likewise taken a dim view of the results and had sentenced the pair to 306 days (each) in the local incarcerative facility, there to work at menial jobs until the cost of the damage was repaid. Commander LeStadt had made a deal with the Enforcers, however, and had managed to get the miscreants released on the promise that they would leave Terra as soon as was reasonably possible. The commander had conveyed as much to the E & E core team, and had suggested, though not in so many words, that they had the coice of either flying the Cardiff or heading back to Arco Enforcer HQ to be returned to the cells.
Both were on the orbital shuttle for Cardiff when it lifted off at 1550 hours.

The CSSCardiff was a Mark III colony ship, massive and ungainly, a whale among the silvery minnows of the normal long-range ships that LaGrange Station 3 serviced. Over a mile long, with the boxy shield generators giving the entire beast an ungainly appearance, the Cardiff would win no prizes for beauty. But what it did, it did well. No other ship could convey the amount of cargo and colonists that the massive Mark III’s could. Nor could it be any larger; the shield generators that permitted it to move at relatively high speed were at the limits of design. In fact, the entire ship had to come to a near halt in order to activate the Spectrum systems that would carry the ship and its occupants into the anomalous reaches of nilspace.
Much has been written about nilspace, and by far better pens than those at hand. Even the children among the Confederacy are made aware of that grey nothingness that pervades and subsumes the known Einsteinian space; a separate dimensional reality in which energy has form and mass, while matter does not, where supralight speed are a misnomer, because light is the slowest thing in the dimension, not the fastest. And every student of history is aware of the fortuitous accident of the freighter Liam O’Rourke, whose malfunctioning navigational shield was the first to convey the Terran space forces into the grayness of nilspace and return them essentially unharmed.
Suffice it therefore to say that Cardiff, in its massive self, represented the largest known object that could be drawn into a nilspace rift, since the rift could only exist as long as the shields pushed aside the dimensional barriers that sparate the known universe from the bleak landscapes of nilspace. And those shiled cannot maintain integrity forever; they are subsumed into the energy/matter environment of nilspace, and the rift which they had created closes behind them. That which remains between the worlds when the rift closes is sundered forever. Too many larger systems had been lost in that manner for Terran likes.