"Name?" The question sounded as bored as its owner looked.

"Jake Lee."

"Evacuation pass?"

Jake handed over the innocuous document to the official.

"This is for eleven people. You know that's is against the rules. One pass per person."

Jake groaned. He'd hoped that that little detail would be missed by the ECPA - Evacuation Control Policing Authorities. "Give me a break here. The office where you get the things from was only half a kilometre from a hive. You expect me to print out eleven individual passes that near a bunch of bugs?"

"That would be another regulation broken. Each evacuee must print off their own pass, not obtain one from someone else."

"Please," Jake begged. "It's all legal. I even managed to get an official 'Ok' from ECPA headquarters, there at the bottom of the pass."

"For crying out loud... fine. Get through, take the rest of your menagerie with you. You'll be lucky to find a ship that'll take you, though. No military vessel will accept that thing, and there are one or two civilian ships at most. Now move. You're holding up the queue."

Jake breathed a sign of relief, and beckoned to the other ten evacuees waiting anxiously on the other side of the lengthy spaceport corridor.

"All fine?" asked Hukken. No one knew his first name.

"Yeah. There was a sticky patch when he made a thing about the pass being for multiple people, but he's let us through."

A murmur of relief spread through the group. No-one wanted to stay on a bug-infested world. Not even Earth.

"Look, I'm not taking less than thirty thousand each. People are paying fortunes for places aboard a civilian ship - the military aren't letting anyone on their ships." The captain of the Ariadne looked at the motley group sadly. "I'm sorry, but times are gonna be hard without Earth acting as a central hub. Those military assholes aren't gonna let anyone anywhere near Earth after this catastrophe. Losing this place is bad enough - what happens if the bugs get to Centauri 7 or something? Avoiding Earth will pile up shipping prices, insurance..."

"Surely you can charge more on those trips?" asked Jake desperately. Getting past the ECPA had been the first hurdle. Getting around the problem of limited funds was turning out to be more difficult.

The other shook his head sadly. "Doesn't work like that. I need cash up front before all that starts." He hesitated. "I probably shouldn't tell you this. But there's a colony ship in Bay 39 waiting to go. They'll take all the people they can get - you'll probably be able to get aboard that cheaply."

"Colony ship?"

"Yeah. Mission was organised, funded and so on before the bugs got loose. Some far-off pen-pusher thought they ought to go ahead with the thing. Lunacy, in my opinion. The risk of infecting a new world..." With a nod, the captain walked over to his crew to help with loading the cargo.

"So what now? Bay 39?" asked Rachel, Jake's wife.

"I guess."

The colony ship was, for some unfathomable reason, named the Charon. It did not seem to be a good omen, travelling aboard a ship named after the boatman of the underworld.

Jake looked around at motley group of survivors, all that was left of a small town several miles away from New York. The last city on the planet to be reasonably free of Alien infection.

There was Hukken. A strange, private man who had only come to that town a month ago.

The Karlap family; Mara, and her two children Tom (six) and Kathy (thirteen). Tom Karlap senior had last been seen being dragged into a hive.

Thirty-year-old Warren Golzan, last survivor of a large family that had all died in an Alien attack. He still had nightmares about it.

Ex-Private First Class Holly Chance, who had lost her entire company during an ill-fated attack on a large hive. Rumour had it that she hadn't even fired a shot. No-one was quite sure if she had deserted, or simply been abandoned by the military in the aftermath of the incident.

His own family. Rachel, himself, and their son Rex (ten).

And the Gearing twins, Artemis and Anigel. They had escaped the fate of their parents and siblings by crawling through a hive in the middle of a heavy storm.

Jake sighed. His was the most complete family there. Everyone had suffered loss to the bugs. Even he had lost his youngest son, ripped apart right in front of him by an enraged Alien.

He sighed again. The past was gone. The entire planet was gone. Taken by the bugs. The... what did Holly call them? Xenomorphs?

He strolled into the docking bay, and was intercepted instantly by a man wearing a very smart uniform and an air of command.

"Captain Caraeus Hector, atyerservice. I take it you're here to enlist aboard the Charon?"

Jake hesitated, caught off guard by the other's bluster. "Yes... Captain. I'm afraid that we don't have much money to pay for passage."

Hector waved the comment aside. "No charge. We need all the people we can get, a lot of the old crew have died since the Aliens started spreading. If you don't mind a bit of hard work, you're all welcome. Of course, you'll probably need to pool your funds with the rest of us, to try and get the colony on FLK-797 off the ground."

Jake looked around the group. He saw fear, anxiety, anticipation... and hope. He turned back to Hector, and nodded. "We're in. When do we leave?"

"You're just in time, as it happens. We're taking off in an hour - you fill up the crew complement nicely. Just need to load up the last few crates... Apparently there was a mix-up somewhere which delayed the last few... If you'll excuse me..."