The war changed most everything. I won't bore you with the politics. Leave it to say that humanity, through its omnipresent greed, or plain ol' stupidity, bungled its way into a conflict with a species that was its clear military and strategic better.

Then humankind just as miraculously bumbled its way into a Peace Accord, an agreement that was far more generous than humans could have expected. Our side had to abandon some colonies, to avoid certain stretches of space, and to restrict ourselves to precise travel corridors in others. After 10 years of bloody interstellar struggle, it wasn't a bad outcome.

Except for the people of Dos Sylva.

That world was our big concession, the sticking point that nearly lost us the peace. Dos Sylva was no obscure colony. It was one of the Central Worlds, a planet of 600 million inhabitants that had been settled by humans for nearly 500 years. Its one shortcoming? The planet was an outlier, a world that was situated on the far end of human space, several months travel from its nearest neighbor, even by the fastest star-liner.

And that's where I come into the story.

After mustering out of the army, I rolled my back-pay into a down payment on a surplus naval vessel that I christened the Moriah. She wasn't much, just a small multi-purpose job that could be refitted to do most anything, including light cargo, and I ran a solo business hauling freight around the Central Worlds, including Dos Sylva. It wasn't much of a living, but the work paid the bills, and I was able to see something of the galaxy.

I'm ashamed to say that the Dos Sylva run was the most lucrative, especially as time passed. No one wants to profit from the misfortune of others, but the timeline set by the Accords called for the total removal of all humans from the planet by the end of seven years.

The first reaction of the Sylvans was denial. Many just pretended the future wouldn't come. Their people had lived on that rock for half a millennium, and the soil was as sacred to them as any patch of dirt ever inhabited by a human.

But, slowly, people came to their senses and began to move to other worlds. At least, they did at first. After a vicious spat of political violence, a rejectionist party came into power, declared martial law, banned all off-world migration, and threw the country into full war footing. They planned on fighting it out, and, I suppose, putting up such a good show that the rest of the Central Worlds would be forced to back their play.

I was on Dos Sylva for the last time—or what I thought was the last time—a few weeks before the seventh anniversary of the Accord. So I was there when the news came. The entire planetary defense force had mustered more than 700 ships, including a few score capital ships and nearly 600 thousand sailors and marines. All had sallied forth to meet the invaders near a small star cluster called the Lions. I suppose they hoped to ... well, who knows what they intended. What chance did a single fleet have against an adversary who had beleaguered the combined might of the Central Worlds for a decade?

Optimism is like a narcotic. The battle at the Lions lasted scarcely six hours, and nothing of the Dos Sylvan fleet remained.

I'm not ashamed to say that I was happy to get off the planet. Things already had taken an ugly turn on Dos Sylva, but after the news of the battle, virtually everything came apart. Nearly 200 million people remained on the planet with the deadline for departure mere weeks away. Most were doing whatever they could to get off world, jumping onto any piece of junk with a faster-than-light drive. A small faction was doing its damnedest to intimidate the rest from fleeing, insisting that they could mount an insurgency against the invaders. The fools.

I got off that rock as fast as I was able.

Fool I was, I was back 11 days later. Five days out, I picked up a distress beacon and later scooped aboard a dozen survivors of an ancient freighter that virtually had disintegrated after a minor malfunction.

What could I do but take them back to Dos Sylva? My ship, sturdy little spud though she was, simply didn't have the atmosphere to carry so many to any other destination. Even one extra body would have been too many.

My, how those ingrates were angry. I had to shoot one and kept the others locked in ship's storage until I got them back.

Bloody ingrates.

So, after landing, I shooed them off at gunpoint and took a quick look around before dashing to refuel and recharge atmosphere. It was clear from that glance that I was on my own. Port police were not to be seen, and the only thing keeping people from rioting and storming the last ships still loading were armed members of ships' crews. The Central Worlds were doing their level best to evacuate as many as possible, but many millions would be left behind. And the sound of air raid sirens in the distance told me that this was the end. Those who remained would not be fighting any insurgency. The aliens intended to sterilize the entire planet, to make it uninhabitable for future human generations.

The berth I'd selected was on a secluded section of dock, but pistol in hand, I needed to warn off several groups of would-be refugees. All were panicked, but most were ticketed passengers on other ships who had taken a wrong turn. The rest were desperate, and one offered me more money for Moriah than I could have made in ten thousand lifetimes. I stopped trying to explain that she was a single passenger vessel. People clamoring for life, hoping to save their families, will do most anything, and I didn't want to have to shoot anyone else.

I've never been overly burdened with a conscience, but I never felt smaller than I did in the two hours it took to prep my ship. I didn't think it could get worse until I heard the crack of a dozen sonic booms overhead. Weapons of some type were piercing the atmosphere, and the crowd in the distance gave off a simultaneous groan of fear and agony.

That was when I saw her, standing just outside the airlock. A single female. She looked familiar, and I was fairly positive that she was with the last group of ticketed passengers that had gone past.

"You have to go," I told her. I didn't have time for this shit. "You need to get to your ship."

"They'll kill me," was her only reply.

"Pal, you'll die if you stay here, and this ship doesn't have the atmosphere for two people."

She hesitated but a moment. "They'll ...."

A massive explosion in the distance wrenched the air and nearly left me deaf. If the aliens started using nukes, there would be no getting away. My conscience made the decision for me. The ship was ready, so I grabbed my new passenger and shoved her inside.

___

The following days weren't joyous. The only thing that had saved our lives was the fact Moriah was fast and had military-grade energy shielding. The aliens had opted to interpret the terms of the Accord down to the letter and to the second. They fired on any human ships still in the system.

We shook off our pursuers after the first day and headed to where I'd dropped my cargo trailers two weeks earlier. I wasn't certain whether to recover the freight. It was worth a blinking fortune, and there was no guarantee my insurance would cover the loss. But on a more practical side, cargo would slow us down, and for some weeks yet we would be inside the new alien interdict zone, which would mean more evasion and hiding, all the while sucking up oxygen.

To that end, there were a few backup O2 pods on the cargo trailer. It wasn't much, but it might make the difference between life or death for my passenger and me.

Yet I couldn't be angry with myself for having taken on the young woman, even if it might spell my doom. Perhaps saving that one soul, in some tiny way, tempered the guilt I was feeling.

And she wasn't unpleasant. There was some sobbing, but who could blame her? It wasn't my planet, and more than once I nearly was overcome by the tragedy of it. Even more, she tried her best to help with the ship. I spent most of my time trying to figure out how to coax more speed from the engines or to reduce our oxygen usage.

Even under the best scenario, we were in a great deal of trouble.

Moriah was 30 minutes from the coordinates where I'd left the trailer when my passenger peeked into the tiny chartroom.

"We're getting a distress signal."

One thing I had hoped would not happen. I sat for a moment thinking.

"You and I might make it out of this alive," I said, looking her in the eye. "Just might."

"Alive for what?" she asked. "So we can tell our grandchildren how brave we were when it counted?"

Well, I didn't think her words were fair. It wasn't about courage. It was about survival. But I let her program the autopilot to take us to the source of the signal, an escape pod not far from where I'd rescued the last group of unfortunates.

After we brought our three new passengers aboard, fed them, and watered them, we talked. I had only a shadowy notion of a plan, but there was no hiding from what we needed to do, any more than we could hide from the aliens who hunted us.

"Once we've salvaged what O2 there is from your escape pod and picked up the spare cannisters from my trailer," I said, "we should have enough breathables for three weeks, three and a half if we're lucky.

"That's not enough to get us to Port Vestry," said one, a tall woman who appeared to be a ship's officer.

"No," I agreed, "but it's enough to get us to Auras III."

"Where?"

"If we go about 30 degrees starboard off our current heading, we should reach it in ... well, about three weeks."

"Thirty degrees," the woman said. "The desert?"

"Yes," I said. The Rub' al-Khali, they called it, three full sectors so choked with interstellar dust that it clogged and fouled the best FTL drive. The fastest ship could travel at just a crawl there.

"You've got to be out of your mind," the officer said.

"About a century back, a group of religious revivalists terraformed a chain of worlds in that area. I've never been to any, but I think I can find Auras III. Then, hopefully we can skip from one to the next until we're close to Port Vestry."

"So, they're inhabited?" asked a young man.

"Abandoned. Even with terraforming, there wasn't enough water. I don't remember the full story."

"How come you didn't mention this before?" asked my original passenger.

"Because it will take us years to get across that dustbowl," said the officer, "even if we can find this Auras place."

I shrugged. "Not years, but many months, 18 or 20. Look. No one is coming for us. We were the last ship off Dos Sylva, and we won't catch up to any other refugee ships. We're on our own, and Auras III is the closest oxygen."

"What will we eat?" asked the man.

"I have field rations on the trailer that should last us a few months, and then we'll have to scavenge."

I gave them some time to speak.

Nothing.

"I'll get us underway," I said.