Lucien Mabus was born with a platinum spoon in his mouth. The only child of the defense contractor Peter Mabus and his late wife, Carolyn, Lucien was raised by private tutors and athletic trainers for much of his childhood while his father mounted a political campaign to challenge the incumbent President Ennis Chaney for the White House. Bitter over losing the 2016 election, Mabus sought other avenues to rid the country of its leader. He was eventually ‘sanctioned’ by the Gabriel twins’ bodyguards after hiring an assassin to kill Jacob and Immanuel.

In shock over his father’s murder, Lucien Mabus spent what remained of his teen years under the watchful eye of an uncle, who preferred to keep his defiant nephew confined to rehab centers rather than deal with the boy’s ongoing drug and alcohol addictions. Lucien celebrated his emancipation on his eighteenth birthday by leaving his halfway house and tossing his court-appointed guardian out of his father’s home. The family fortune now his, Lucien would pacify his angst with the self-abuse that comes from a lifestyle dependent on immediate gratification.

Six years, two bad marriages, and a four-month jail sentence later, Lucien found himself in the company of Lilith Aurelia. The mocha-skinned dominatrix became his obsession, her ruthless ambition sweeping him along like a raging river. Born into poverty, Lilith sought the kind of power enjoyed by society’s new elite—pathological globalists who were slowly and steadfastly manipulating the international powers into one world government.

To be a player in the New World Order required a niche, and Lilith would find it in Project H.O.P.E.

Humans for One Planet Earth was a space program conceived in 2016 by a group of former astronauts, design engineers and rocket scientists who had left NASA because of the agency’s ‘good ol’ boy’ policies. Unlike other private space companies who were in the business of launching satellites, H.O.P.E. wanted to pioneer the space tourism industry, their team having completed designs for a new passenger vehicle that could take off horizontally like a jet, rise to its maximum turbojet altitude, then use boosters to rocket the plane into space. Once in orbit, the paying public would enjoy twelve hours of zero-gravity and a lifetime of memories.

All H.O.P.E. needed was a major investor.

At the urging of his fiancée, Lucien Mabus struck a partnership with H.O.P.E.’s directors, taking over the company as majority shareholder. On December 15, 2029, the world’s first ‘space bus’ took off down its new fifteen-thousand-foot runway at the Kennedy Space Center. Onboard were 120 VIPs, including key stockholders, political dignitaries, members of the media, Lucien and Lilith, and a crew of twelve. Nothing real or imagined could have prepared these civilians for the magic of space. The flight was smooth, the accommodations first-class, the views both humbling and inspirational.