Chapter 2

The three redheads and I cuddled in my large bed with our clothes on. We laid in a pile of sad and worried bodies, holding each other in a search for tranquility. There was no sex or even any thoughts about it. As I finally reached moderate comfort, I slept and dreamed back to my final months of college and my powerful crush on Rettenna.

Most people had just called her by her nickname, “Red”. Her luxuriant scarlet curls flowed downward, past her amazing head-sized bosoms, and nearly touched her slender waist. Every time she strode up or down a staircase, her splendidly curvy butt bounced enticingly, just like her gigantic jugs. I was sure she was the most attractive girl in a university of three thousand students.

She sat in front of me in Literature class, which is the main reason I never managed more than a ‘C minus’ in the subject. Having a nearly constant hard-on as I stared at Rettenna made it terribly hard to focus on Cervantes, John Milton, or Voltaire. At the end of the class period, I held my tablet over my swollen and aching crotch as I went across the hall to Ancient History. Being near Red was the highlight of my day.

I saw what I had long been dreading on the large display at the front of the History classroom, “The Horror Age”. It was restricted to students at least age 21. Even as adults, most of us could barely handle it. At the end of the first class everyone left with tears in their eyes, even the professor. The Horror Age started with the Unification War of 2106. The entire war only lasted three hours and Humanity nearly died out. In less than the time between breakfast and lunch, most of Earth’s great nations had attacked each other with swarms of armed drones, stealth assassin robots, chemical weapons, atomic bombs, and beam weapons.

The most advanced faction, the Malay-Thais, even used a satellite weapon that dropped huge numbers of metal spikes from space. They were heated to incandescence on reentry, penetrated dozens of meters into the ground, then exploded like meteorites. The spike clusters or ‘rods from God’ destroyed San Francisco, Moscow, Tokyo, Hanoi, and Beijing in only moments. Chemical weapons killed most of the unfortunate residents of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Syria, Palestine, Israel, and Lebanon. Unlike hundreds of other cities which were only nuked once or twice, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Paris, Perth, Seattle, Manila, Mexico City, Sydney, and London were irradiated and utterly leveled by several atom bombs each.

Mecca, Jerusalem, Medina, and Rome became uninhabitable due to intense radioisotope contamination. There were rumors a radical atheist group had detonated dirty bombs in all of them for religious reasons, but rational people understand the phrase “Radical Atheist” is an oxymoron. A “Radical Atheist” would nonsensically have an intense belief in not believing in anything.

Nowhere on Earth was safe, and only a million or so people survived out of blind luck. Three hours of war and the fallout and chemical contamination it caused had nearly exterminated our whole species. Over eleven billion perished because of religious differences and a trade agreement gone wrong. It was called the Unification War because it unified everyone who lived through it.

The Horror Age encompassed the irrational and idiotic causes, the war itself, and the hundred and thirty years that followed. It was suddenly obvious that survival was far more important than any religion, petty political grievances, or greed for resources. People struggled to stay alive in the wreckage. They had to re-learn lost and ancient skills to survive like primitive hunter-gatherers. Eventually they rebuilt and repopulated, and formed a new species-wide government. As one of the first new laws, like nationalism, sexism and racism; religion was firmly banned. Humanity finally reached out into space again in 2240. We hadn’t gone out like the dinosaurs, but had been perilously close.

Remembering the lessons about mass death, shredded cities on fire, and lifelong hardships put me in the wrong mood for how I awoke. Trisinna was smiling at me from only centimeters away, but I felt like crying. The melancholy expression on my face must have upset her, because she rolled off the bed and backed away from me.

Her speech had an odd pattern to it and some of her words cut off suddenly, but it was an improvement over the day before. “Jonas, I’m so sorry we’re not what you expected. I hope you can find it in your heart to love us. Or at least accept us.” She looked like she wanted to cry too.

I replied, “It’s not you! I had a terrible dream. It’s okay.” I got up and gave her a calming hug. “Let’s get some breakfast, then I have a lot of work to do.”

I put my hearing protection on and went back to the mass driver. The bots were loading projectiles at a pace of one every four minutes, which would be just fast enough to load the ship in time without overheating the gun or accumulator bank. Each shot required more electricity than a month of normal mining operations. Since ships took 30 hours to reach orbit from the wormhole, and vice-versa, they only had five days in orbit before they needed to leave.

In the shack I saw the driver coil temperature was past the red line and wondered what was wrong. I looked at the cooling water stats and saw there was only ten percent of the flow required for normal operation. I quickly shut it off, then hurriedly removed the water hose and saw it was plugged with small pebbles. I ran to the river and discovered the cause. The rain during the night had filled the river and increased its flow enough to pull the wire mesh filter partly off. As I cleared the hose and put the screens back, I thought about the awful situation my girls were in.