A secret shared only by a privileged few. Years from your present time, clues about the coming cataclysm will be discovered. It will be kept from the public. Only those in power will know, and they will create a secret coven—in essence, an Earth evacuation plan, concealed behind an aggressive program to colonize Mars. Humanity, at least a certain privileged segment of it, would go on. Thousands had already arrived on the Red Planet. Our twelve shuttles would be the last to join our fellow survivors.

As we began our perilous four-month journey and Earth disappeared from our viewports, we cried and prayed and cried some more. Our salvation was Mars Colony, but we would never arrive, for what lay ahead was an off-ramp—the entrance to a wormhole.

There was no way to avoid it, no way for our pilots to even see it. A sudden surge of the shuttle’s gravity-wave detectors and whoosh—we found ourselves hurtling through the conduit’s funnel of energy, time and space distorting as we plunged through our Galaxy’s version of a rabbit hole.

Imagine falling from a thirty thousand-foot precipice, knowing your life is about to be extinguished, your screams squelched by the length of the drop. In those final minutes everything becomes clear, and you realize how much time you wasted on petty nonsense.

As frightened as I was, I could not tear myself away from my viewport, my mind mesmerized. We passed through gray interstellar gas clouds whose cosmic glow brightened into visible light, drenching us in pastels of crimson and yellow and blue before yielding to a hydrogen field of fluorescent pink.

Voices cried out in the darkened cabin, some identifying the gas cloud as the Orion Nebula. If accurate, then we had traveled some fifteen hundred light-years from Earth in the blink of an eye.

And then the cabin pressure increased and the spacecraft shook violently, and I closed my eyes to die.

How much time passed, I cannot say, but when I awoke, I was still on board the Mars shuttle, only the stars had stopped moving. We were through the wormhole, all twelve of our ships—and somehow we had survived.

I say ‘we’ yet I still had no idea who I was or what I was doing on board the vessel, but the sheer delight at merely being alive … it was too overwhelming to question.

In the distance I could see a red supergiant—a star so large that had it been Earth’s sun its girth would have stretched across the solar system beyond the orbit of Mars. In close proximity to this monster was a planetary nebula, its fluorescent-style ring of gases appearing in shades of violets and blues.