Angel Flores chose to leave Earth behind. She found herself in a prison in space. She gazed through the spaceship compartment’s viewport at the small, white-flecked blue planet far below. The Earth. One and a half million kilometers away: more than nine hundred thousand miles. Her thoughts ran over the events she had witnessed, the choices she had made, and all of the individual steps that had led her to this imprisonment. Born of Asian-Hispanic parents in a Rio favela, she had fought her way up and out to a better life. Life in the walled elite enclave of the Citadel in New Phoenix had been good, if limited. Angel had been comfortable at Janus Security Corporation. She had made Chief Executive Officer in her early thirties. Her next step up would have been to a senior …show more content…
Ironic. She chose to leave it all behind and gamble everything on a better life. Chose to manipulate her way aboard this great spaceship with a hundred of her best people. It was the right choice. At the time. And yet within a day of boarding the ship, the freedom she sought had turned into imprisonment. It was all wrong. The ship was supposed to travel for six months toward Jupiter then plunge into a wormhole, arriving within minutes at a paradise planet called New Eden in the Andromeda galaxy. That was the plan. It had taken over a year to maneuver her way aboard. People had died. Good people had been left behind. Damnit, I don’t even understand what a wormhole is! You go into one end and come out somewhere else in space millions of light years away, a galaxy away. Someone said it was like going down a rabbit-hole. Alice in Wonderland. Angel in Paradise. It had been a journey of discovery: her employer bankrupting his business empire to buy tickets on this ship; a secret mission to move a hundred thousand of the world’s richest and most powerful to humanity’s new home on New Eden; a contract assassin hired by her ex-employer to kill