Chapter 1

My brother Bruce was always a person who enjoyed anything that reeked of high speed. He had a souped-up bicycle, a racing car and was enthusiastically employed as a test pilot for the company that built the new jet personal commuter bullets that were faster than everything else. I am his sister Eileen and I was happy to see him quit that job after the accident that cost him one of his arms right up to the elbow.

We were probably closer than a sister and brother should be but I attribute that to the fact we were not blood related but only by the fact that my father married his mother after her first husband was shipped out to another galaxy by slavers who were randomly scooping up fresh meat for running of the machines of war.

It was fortunate for all of us to live in the protected "Purple Zone" and away from the crime and the stress of ordinary citizens doomed to struggle just to mind their own business. I was sixteen when Bruce and his gorgeous mom moved into our villa in the hillside neighborhood reserved for the moneyed elite. His mom Carmen was so sexy and beautiful that I feared my boring father would soon be watching her drive away with some burly musclebound hunk from the military services or the law enforcement ranks. In his own way, Bruce was like a male edition of his mom with his nicely toned body and handsome good looks. He was eighteen when he moved in with us and now two years later, we were close enough to take showers together and even do each other's sun screen when we laid out on the veranda to catch the rays of the twin suns around our planet.

He had already dipped his business in more joy-girls than I could keep track of and I was unfortunately still a virgin but with the mental attitude of a kinky girl wanting to experience everything a man had to offer. When he was exhausted from his love-making duties, I would massage his beautiful body perhaps a bit more frantically than a sister would appropriately do but he certainly didn't complain when I was more than generous in my stress-reducing strokes.

Bruce would repay me with his fingers under the surface of the water in the health spa and I would rest on his shoulder panting my approval of his efforts like some silly schoolgirl being trained to obedient service. Sometimes, I mustered up enough courage to plant a kiss on his long hard shaft just to show him I was constantly ready, willing and able to give him a "happy ending". I was frustrated because he was circumspect in his actions and we only scratched the surface of close contact like playful animals in a reserve for their species relaxation. I think his mom knew that instinctively and she never interfered with our play on the veranda or in the pool.

The accident that took his arm didn't really slow him down and he was just as obsessed with speed as ever. It was a cool autumn morning when we were first aware of the threat made by the Imperial Armada to destroy our Republic once and for all. At first, we treated it all like a big joke taking refuge in the thought that their forces were no more than "junior varsity" unable to confront our far superior forces in open battle. It was several months later that we were made aware of the fact that our military forces had suffered some serious setbacks and that we had decimated their power because we had curtailed the proper level of funding to maintain their power. Now, our only course of action was to transfer our people and our assets to another world far distance and away from the influence of the Imperial Armada to carry out their threat of genocide of our species.

My father purchased four tickets on the Wormhole Express which would whisk us away to a land far away and start all over. I had never been on a Wormhole Express before but was assured the trip had a 97.5 chance of survival. The odds sounded pretty good to me and we all hurried to board the capsule that would be soon spinning out of control down the Wormhole channel.

In order to keep the evacuation as unsuspected as possible, the leaders had organized the transfer at no less than ten locations and rounded up groups of two thousand to be placed in the pod beads strung out like a shining chain inside the loading shaft leading into the invisible wormhole. Once the first pod bead was chambered the other would all be sucked along behind delivering the entire load at the destination site. We had been given updates on the glorious benefits of the new world but I had my suspicions that words are merely words and there was nothing to insure the photos we looked at were actually real or just a figment of some producer's fertile mind.

In the past thirty days almost twenty million humans had been sent on their journey and the remaining masses hardly noticed their absence. They were much more concerned with the first salvos of the bombardment from the invaders who were pledged to extermination the human race once and for all. We had sent out best diplomats to discuss their desperate plans but the bottom line was always the same.

"Death to the Humans"

It would have been laughable if it wasn't so tragic that the delegation came back with the news that the enemy had agreed to allow us to live for as long as it took them to muster the firepower to eliminate us all. For some strange reason, the leader of the delegation seemed to considered that a victory of sorts and that his mission had been a great success.

My father was happy that we would all be leaving together and I was ecstatic that my step-brother Bruce would be in the pod directly behind me. They almost didn't take him because he was missing part of a limb but the prosthetic device was almost lifelike and he was skilled in its operation.

All I really remember of the wormhole was that the pod material was so rough on my skin. We all had to strip down to our undies because the pods needed to adhere to our skin to keep us from being bounced too harshly in the high velocity transfer. I had this sense that the living pod material was absorbing me into the pod like I was food or a sexual treat. It seemed like the journey was never-ending but eventually our chain was spit out of the channel at the destination hanging obscenely from the off-ramp above what appeared to be a large city built in the middle of a desert. We had been assured the air and the temperatures were similar to our native planet and all we had to do was to safely exit the living pods without damaging them too badly.