Lost Missions: Moraturi Series

When you're 2.5 million lightyears from help, you can't afford people who only have a 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. The saga begins...

What a 21st! Eva's big birthday 'present' was a tired old spaceship lost in space and time, a motley crew of amnesiac patients, 500 colonists in cryo, and a mission that would take a lifetime - assuming she could keep everyone alive till they made planetfall. SS Moraturi is a Lunar Earth Transfer Orbiter - a kind of spider robot designed to construct space stations and ships in and around the Earth-Moon Lagrange points 1 and 2. Now Moraturi is taking two cryoholds full of colonists to New Eden, an earth-like planet in the Paradisi system, 2.5 million light years from Earth in the Andromeda galaxy. Eva's problem is that the trip that was to take one year is now going to take decades - their emergency supplies were based on 200% of expected needs for just 16 crew members with the 500 passengers in cryo, and the cryotechnology can't keep them alive for even a decade at a stretch. And the success of the mission will be in the hands of a bunch of teenagers. Casindra Lost and Moraturi Lost take us on two different ships as they commence their mission, and each is the start of a separate arc, arcs that take several books to resolve.  Each volume is designed to be readable on its own, and provide all you need of the backstory without unnecessary spoilers. But the stories and arcs are not independent, and intertwine in a number of ways - still you can read either arc independently, starting either one and picking up the other later. Casindra Lost won the Gold Medal in Science Fiction in the 2021 Global Book Awards for Self-Publishing, while Moraturi Lost won Silver in Science Fiction/Adventure, and together with Moraturi Ring won Silver for Science Fiction Series in the 2021 Global Book Awards. (~300pp)