Future writings should not involve something I felt Hogan had intentionally left out of his stories, little sparks for the readers' imagination. With "Alone," a followup to "Footprints," he sorta pulled me back in:

(To the memory of author James P. Hogan (1941 - 2010), and his Gentle Giants, I give you “A Homecoming”)
Alone
832 words | By D. R. Spires

Out on survey to a local star group in Vector 5, the starship's communications officer received a blurb memo requiring the research vessel's immediate return home. Buried in the mysterious message were fractured reports of civic unrest on the homeworld. The captain of the vast ship had been following the news reports of a revolutionary faction, a curious race of beings brought from the nearby third planet of their star for study purposes. Salvaged a few thousand years before from that uncommonly violent world, these beings had proved themselves to be of an uncommonly vicious temperament, but were also discovered to be sentient in nature, capable of reasoning away from their inborn hostilities to become responsible citizens and so were provided an equal civil status to that of their peaceful captors. Finding a need in the limitless universe for a military force as a survival necessity, these beings proved themselves quite adept in the arts of war and defense. A few hundred descendants from this alien race, male and female, were even crewed aboard the starship as a strong security contingent against unknowable interstellar threats.

The following day had been one of frantic preparation as the crew readied their massive craft for departure and the long voyage home, an estimated three-month journey. Breaking from orbit at 125,000 mph had been a smooth, sure procedure, with engines engaging, building the overall thrust to well beyond the speed of light. Reaching cruise at c3-velocity, the vessel gave a mighty shudder. Engineering was quick to inform command of the unexpected power surge that fused the jet-links in the dark energy power supply to run fully open, with the engines now all locked and firing. The relays had been charred, sending the craft and crew on a collision course with their own distant sun. Working through what should have been a cryogenics sleep period for the crew, valves were shunted by hand and the thousands of individual power supplies were removed one-by-one. After three months, this calculated labor enabled a slowing of the ship, but only to the speed of light. At this velocity, the trajectory could be somewhat controlled, allowing the helmsman to swerve the craft into a 94,197 astronomical unit-wide orbit, or a circle approximating one and a half lightyears in diameter around the sun.

It was estimated it might take nearly two full years of steady work to rebuild the dark energy chamber and correct the system malfunction, a plight which really could not be helped. The real issue now was the time dilation involved with such a calamity. In that two-year ship's-time-period at light velocity, nearly one hundred thousand years will have elapsed in real-time. Within that interval, everyone the crew had known and loved on the homeworld will have been dead, buried and gone to dust, forgotten to all except those aboard.

Redoubling efforts proved equally frustrating, for so much that was needed to happen were bound by rigid, utterly unbreakable universal constants. In the matter-antimatter conversion chamber some of those constants needed to be ever-so-slightly bent, with electron and proton rest mass forced to increase while at the same time decreasing the positron and antiproton rest mass, upsetting the balance to enable the starship to hold to its frantic orbit and not careen back out into interstellar space. Then came tweaking the magnetic flux density for the magnetic field strength of each passing sun-planet alignment the craft experienced. His valiant crew would have to remain alert for the next 20 months at least, possibly longer.

After 1.8 years in that wide orbit, a faint ripple in the flow of the electromagnetic interaction between charged particles in the ship’s matter-antimatter conversion chamber was measured and victory was achieved. Amid cheers of exhalation, the dark energy power supply was brought back online and the helmsman maneuvered a grandly arcing sweep, finally bringing the starship home, but only to find their homeworld no longer existed. In its stead was found a wide, thin asteroid belt, the bulk of their world even gone from this slight debris. The fifth planet from the sun had been cataclysmically destroyed and there was now only one place in all the universe the captain knew could sustain life for him and his crew. The hot, violent third planet. He leaned on his console, thinking of the peoples living there of whom he had some meager knowledge, wondering what they would be like now, having evolved to that fierce environment over the past hundred centuries.

The command conference, consisting of science, engineering, medical, communications and even the alien security force team leads lasted a full day, but the outcome was as had been predicted. The course was set for a passive orbit to the hostile third planet, where free and open communication was quickly established, and where yet another change was discovered. The third planet now had a somewhat large moon, the same satellite that had once orbited the homeworld.
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