After a near hit with an unseen meteor, Earth fast-tracks the exploration and colonization of its moon, Luna, and its closest sister Mars. The fear of extinction drives humanity's ambitions. But after two and a half centuries of colonization, humanity was struggling. Mars and Luna had citizens that had deformed bodies due to the differences in gravity and radiation levels. Their life expectancy is no more than fifty years old. The leaders of Earth, the most powerful of the three planetary bodies looked at their own people. Growing in numbers with an ever-changing climate the future looked bleak. Longer than Mars or Luna but doomed non the less.
So the leaders of Earth did what they always did, they looked for ever more elaborate and fantastical ways to run away from their problems and inflict them on another land. This time the land was Proxima Centauri B. An Earth-like planet they could truly thrive on. So they dedicated every resource they could squeeze out of their planet and the two colonies. After ten years they had gouged Earth for minerals, poisoned Martian colonies with experimental tech, and worked the people of Luna to death in many cases. They had finally built humanity's hope for survival. The Quicker Than Light. Built on the theories laid out in the Alcubierre metric, the ship harnessed power equal to the sun in order to run its distortion drive.
After Captain Wayne Hadfield, mission specialist Rakesh Dhumal, Lt. Avani-Marie Leavitt, Jr. Lt. Len Russell, Navigator Zahn Shen, and civilian engineers Valentina Sarova and Gabriel Douglas take the craft out on its first flight they run into trouble quickly. After suffering a powerful surge in their systems they are thrown into normal space, traveling at 95 percent the speed of light.
It took three days to repair the Quicker Than Light and get back into a distorted space and home where they could be safe. However, outside the protection of distorted space, the ship experiences time dilation like they had never expected. When they finally get home, the crew finds that three hundred years have passed in what is now simply called The Sol Trinity system.
Humanity survived and thrived without them or FTL ships. They solved their problems in reluctant partnerships. But now that the failed experiment that brought humanity together turns out to only have been a delayed experiment and not a failed one, a new sort of problem is brought about. And the now ancient crew struggles to come to terms with the new world they have come to live in, and the one they can never go back to.
