There is the question of how many crew there are out there to be rescued. If it's about five or fewer, you can probably cram a few extra hybernaut capsules in somehow, save the crew and the (carefully sealed) data cores, scavenge anything useful/small and valuable, and leave the rest to rust.

This, incidentally, was one of the reasons I was suggesting time dilation - more as the idea that the drive was somehow consuming the internal timestream (or shifting it around in productive-for-travel ways) than as any direct result of relativity.

On the other hand, I'm also interested in Fnord's Idea. (Warp gates, perhaps?)

Incidentally, where does Gina fit on this thing?