There are four monitoring stations in current operation around the region of space occupied by the ringed planet. One orbits a fixed rotation above the north hexagon. Another hovers the empty space between two moons, Titan and Rhea. Yet another lies opposite its sibling, an array of sensors and antennae attuned to the furthest reaches of the solar system. The last floats beneath the southern pole, isolated beneath the vast Cronian planet.

The stations’ secondary mission is to chart chemical and geographic changes on Saturn’s surface, moons and rings, while monitoring the surrounding region for rogue meteors, or, perhaps even more dangerous, a hostile alien species. The first and most important mission is to monitor the performance of the WiSP. Put basically, the drive is designed to construct an inner wormhole. Radiating outwards, it breaks Mimas 4 and then itself down into subatomic particles, which are fired to a pre-programmed location where it reassembles both, hopefully without harm. The probes are designed to serve as navigational beacons, tracking every micro-instant of the craft’s arrival just beyond Mimas, one of Saturn’s sixty-two moons, from a jump point 0.3 AUs4 from Earth’s lone satellite. Four unmanned tests took place, which means there were three previous incarnations of Mimas before the final manned flight. Of the first two, the drive and its computers burned out hours before each jump. The third sent the craft shy of the asteroid belt, while the last was right on target. Eager to dispel even the slightest chance of failure, EASN prepared their most successful starcraft for the first manned test flight to Saturn.

The craft’s design is exceptional in its beauty. Ninety metres from tip to exhaust, twenty-one metres high, with a wingspan of seventy-five metres. Varied TPS5 materials cover the entire craft, one of few sustainable relics from NASA’s twentieth-century shuttle programme, a source of protection from the heat of re-entry and the cold of space. The bow contains a small flight deck and observational area. The amidships house the airlock, research hot desks and the living quarters of two small cabins, a kitchenette, twin WCs and shower facilities. The lifeboat bay, comprising four boats, is in the aft. Behind those is the WiSP, followed by the main rocket engines. TPS materials colour the craft honey-brown. From the exterior it looks like a poised bird of prey. Mimas is by far the royalty of EASN’s starcraft line, treated as such by the governing body and general public alike. No other craft has received as much attention. No space programme is funded as richly.

The very real dangers of that maiden flight were rarely addressed, in public at least. Everyone was aware of the risks, the Mimas 4 crew members most of all. Each journey since the dawn of space exploration has come with its own dangers, and yet none were so formidable as this. The possibilities of certain death far outweighed the probability of the craft returning intact and the crew alive. Everyone on Earth expected, although no one said as much, that the men and women we looked up to wouldn’t survive. No one was prepared for what actually happened, however: that they would disappear from our known multiverse.