Casindra Lost by Marti Ward

A 3.5 year mission from which they’ll never return, a 2.5 million lightyear journey to another galaxy, a 1.5 member crew comprising a solitary captain and a half-baked AI…

Captain Sideris is a loner and knows LETO ships like nobody else, having risen to command the Lunar-Earth construction fleet, as they build ships to mine asteroids and colonize Mars. Suddenly he finds the colonization effort is for another planet, in another galaxy, and he’s the sole human guinea pig being gated through a wormhole with an AI playing Noah to LETO SS Casindra’s ark.

Everything goes well as he starts to survey four planets they plan to exploit, as he gets to know emergent AI ‘Al’, as he discovers he’s building a special relationship with empathic cat ‘Simba’. Problem is message drones gated home are not being returned per protocol, with little explanation, no supplies, and disturbing messages.

Category: Science Fiction – Colonization

When you’re 2.5 million lightyears from any other help, you can’t afford people who only have single skill…

20-year-old Veterinary Nurse/Trainee Medical Officer Eva Hughes is junior officer on SS Moraturi, transporting 500 colonists to New Eden. Eva’s responsibility is the domestic and farm animals they are bringing, but she is working towards qualifying as both a veterinary and a medical doctor.

After a gamma burst in the wormhole, Eva finds herself looking after colonists whose cryobeds failed, and who now show memory loss for specific things. When another wave of radiation hits, the ship slips out of the wormhole, somewhere, sometime… and Eva finds herself in charge of an impossible mission.

The quick trip through the wormhole has turned into an epic journey of biblical proportions… and Eva realizes that their survival will be in the hands of three teenagers.