Prologue: Departure and ArrivalUnity Crew Log – 24th January 2101
My name is Dimitri Glazunov.
My father was killed while serving among UN peacekeeping forces in the Twelve Minute War.
My mother was shot in the brutal crackdown on the rebellion. She was protesting against government corruption, which had led to the Russian economic crisis of 2058.
I was an engineer, working on the
Unity starship project.
The UNS
Unity was our last hope to escape from a dying world. Funded by the UN and built by many companies, it was to transport eighty thousand of humanity’s best and brightest to set up a colony on another world. It was powered by three massive Orion-class nuclear pulse engines, which would propel the ship across the void.
Its destination was the planet Chiron, in the star system of Alpha Centauri. The unmanned probes sent decades before had discovered a fertile world, ripe for human habitation.
I was one of the last to come aboard. My shuttle to the
Unity took off just before the terrorist attack that destroyed the Kennedy Space Center.
The voyage took forty years, with us frozen in cryogenic sleep.
Disaster struck the ship just before we reached Chiron. A micrometeorite impact disabled the fusion reactors, severely damaged a cryobay, and weakened the superstructure. Zakharov awakened us to fix the damage.
We were unable to. The damage was too great, and we simply did not have the time to mount a full scale repair. Another few days, and the
Unity would have overshot Chiron, going beyond into the interstellar abyss. We managed to settle into a comet-like orbit, but we did not have the supplies necessary to power the ship until the next closest approach to Chiron. We would have to land now, or die in space.
I watched the drama unfold in the last days of our doomed ship. How the body of Captain Garland was discovered, long dead decades ago when an assassin cut the power to his cryopod. How the stowaway Morgan was revealed, as he gathered his supporters around him. How Santiago rebelled against Yang, taking part of the ship’s security force with her. How Lal tried to get the crew in a semblance of order, and failed miserably. And how the seven de-facto leaders agreed to take one colony pod and supplies each, and escape from the dying ship.
I was the unlucky one tasked to stay behind and release the colony pods. Without Garland’s authorization code, we would have to detonate the explosive bolts manually, freeing the pods from the ship.
I watched as the pods entered the atmosphere, as their thrusters fired ineffectively, trying to guide each pod into a safe landing. Each pod carried ten thousand people, seeking their destiny under alien skies.
But now I am alone. It will be seventy years before the Unity makes its next approach, and I will be long dead. I leave this log so that some record of humanity will remain, even if the future of mankind ends here.
-Recovered by University of Planet automated probe. Filed to Datalink Archives, subsection “Unity Project” 
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