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there was, she would have travelled into space with Saviour, and not had to enter some stupid lottery or be tied to an alien male whom she did not know, and might not even like.
    Yet he couldn’t be that bad; he had shown her the moon.
    “Now we must head through the beacons,” Malik said. “They are expecting us at the space station. From there we will travel to Karal.”
    “Is this the last time I will see Earth?” she asked, looking back at the planet far below them. It still looked beautiful, blue, although the pollution muted the colour. It had been her home for so many years, and now, despite wanting to go out and see the universe, she also didn’t want to say goodbye to the planet where her dad had held her in his arms and watched the stars with her.
    “Yes. There are no plans for the females who breed our children to come back.”
    “The females who breed our children. You make it sound so romantic,” she said.
    “You won the lottery, Chrissi. No one promised you romance,” he said bluntly.
    “I know, but a girl can dream,” she said. “Is that the entrance to the wormhole?”
    “Yes. Are you ready for a new adventure, Chrissi?” he said as he pushed the throttle forward and the ship raced towards the hole in space that had opened up in front of them.
    “I think I am,” she said, and then let out a scream of pure delight as the wormhole swallowed them and they hurtled along a tunnel filled with colours, vast seas of stars, that went on and on forever. They slowed several times, and she worried they were stuck in this no man’s land of space, and then they would be off again, the space ship spinning wildly, before turning upside down, only to right itself as they exited the wormhole, back in normal space.
    Well, the space might be normal, but it was not the space she was used to. None of the planets she had longed to see close up, such as Jupiter and Saturn were visible; instead, there was a large planet, with a violet haze around it, below them, and in the distance she could see the two suns orbiting each other and she knew this was Malik’s planet, this was Karal.
    “It’s beautiful,” she said.
    “I know. I never tire of coming home.”
    He steered the space ship away from the wormhole, heading towards a small lump of what looked like silver, shining in the light of the two suns. As they flew closer, she could see it was a space station, and that was where they were going to dock.
    “Why don’t we go straight to Karal?” she asked.
    “We have to go through decon’ first. So that you are clean.”
    She looked down at herself, and said. “You mean it’s a decontamination?”
    “Yes,” he said, looking surprised.
    “Makes sense,” she said. “No space nasties finding their way to Karal.”
    “No space nasties,” he repeated. “It won’t take long. We have to hurry, there is so much else I have to do before we leave tomorrow. Someone else should have come and picked you up from Earth, really, while I concentrated on the mission,” he said, not thinking of the way that might sound to her.
    “Then why did you come, if you had something better you would rather be doing?” she asked.
    “Because Okil insisted. He said it would be better for you if I came. Since you are to be the mother of my child.” He left the full meaning of his words hanging in the air, and Chrissi had to gulp down her panic. Suddenly the excitement of the moment was lost, overtaken by the thought of having to have sex with a man, no, an alien, she didn’t know.
    To Chrissi, love and marriage went hand in hand with sex. That was how it had worked for her parents. Now, maybe even today, she was going to have to go to bed with Malik, and he would have sex with her. It was what was expected, what she had agreed to when she entered the lottery.
    “Do you feel unwell?” he asked. “Please do not tell me you feel travel-sick.”
    “No, of course not. It’s all a bit sudden, that’s all. Yesterday I hadn’t