Chapter 1: Preparing for Glory

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. The trip had begun with the usual routine inspections. The team cleared medical days ahead of schedule, with the exception of Reynolds, but she found a way around that too. The fact that she was getting special treatment from the admirals, even after her mistakes on the last mission, only made morale among the crew that much worse. Not even three launches had passed since all 5 passengers, with the exception of Reynolds had perished from a gross miscalculation of the capsule pressure levels on that fateful voyage.

What should have been a routine test flight to Alpha 12, the largest and most luxurious space station in the galaxy, turned into a nightmare for the teenagers returning home after a long hot summer camp excursion on earth. But the tribunal had been largely labeled a sham after Grant Reynolds, the billionaire who bought his way to the top of the program, basically funded his own daughter’s acquittal. Should she have been in charge of the hatches that day? Should she have been finishing her last year in the mandatory 180-week training program? We’ll never know for sure, but what the rest of the team didn’t know was that Cody Eggers, the captain of this upcoming mission, was the high school sweetheart of Azul Sayaman, the 16-year-old who last let go of the burning capsule before being sucked into the vastness of space with the rest of the kids, while private Reynolds sought shelter in the escape hatch, which may or may not have been locked from the inside.

Eggers had been extra cautious with the preparations for this mission. This would be the first mission he would Captain, and ultimately his last, but who could have known that so early on? Those details were only known to a select few, and nobody could have ever predicted the worst would be realized that soon in his career, and in that way. Eggers mostly kept to himself over the course of his 5 years with the project. At 20 years old, he was the youngest of all engineers, and the first 15-year-old ever to be selected by any space program. Because of this, he carried an exceptionally heavy responsibility. The fact that his first love, the same girl he had decided to give his late mother’s engagement ring to, had perished at the hands of one of this mission’s astronauts was only further stoking his stealthily repressed fires of vengeance building up inside. But this newly honored Captain, and little brother to the program’s only 5-star general, knew how to keep his cool and repress his emotions, especially for the sake of the mission. He certainly hadn’t been given the honor of Captain without intense dedication and merit. If there were any mission, especially one of this caliber, he was the easiest choice the general had possibly ever made.

This crew was nicknamed the lab rat crew by many of the project’s engineers. There would be no lifeline, no monitoring, and no contact with the crew for 18 months once launched, even though it would feel like only a matter of hours to them. The possibility of complete disaster was never more imminent than on this trip. There had been several well-planned, well-tested, and well-executed routes that other missions and other programs had used prior to this one without incident, save for the mission that disintegrated on take-off, but that was before approximately 100 additional sensors had been installed on the space crafts of this kind. This was the Saturn Express, a lifelong dream of the aforementioned billionaire Grant Reynolds and heir to the Space Fuel dynasty of Astroleum inc. This route would set him apart from all the billionaires that had come before him and attempted feats only half as dangerous and deadly as this one. But even with the inherent danger, the opportunity for this crew to be considered the modern-day pioneers of inter-planetary high-speed travel was unprecedented and invaluable.

As T-minus zero hour approached with the next appearance of the sun in sector 7, the astronauts grew more excited but equally more terrified. The coolest of them though, was Eggers who would routinely disappear for hours on end into sector 5, the area few had ever dared to journey to. He was up to something more than just psyching himself up for the trip, he was back there too long, many times over an hour too long, and at greater risk of toxic exposure. What was he planning? What was he preparing himself for, and why was Reynolds so unbothered by his disappearances?