Casindra Lost: Paradisi Chronicles (Lost Missions Series Book 1)

Casindra Lost is a limited deluxe, hardcover colour edition of the paperback first published in 2019.

"there’s a difference between being a loner and being alone"

A 3.5 year mission from which they'll never return, a 2.5 million lightyear journey to another galaxy, a 1.5 member crew comprising a solitary captain and a half-baked AI...

Captain Sideris is a loner and knows LETO ships like nobody else, having risen to command the Lunar-Earth construction fleet, as they build ships to mine asteroids and colonize Mars. Suddenly he finds the colonization effort is for another planet, in another galaxy, and he's the sole human guinea pig being gated through a wormhole with an AI playing Noah to LETO SS Casindra's ark.

Everything goes well as he starts to survey four planets they plan to exploit, as he gets to know emergent AI 'Al', as he discovers he's building a special relationship with empathic cat 'Simba'. Problem is message drones gated home are not being returned per protocol, with little explanation, no supplies, and some cryptic and disturbing messages.

Part survival story, part mystery, Casindra Lost is a gripping sci-fi tale in the tradition of Clarke and Asimov, set within the multi-author Paradisi Chronicles universe. The first book in the Lost Mission Series, it answers the questions behind the lost missions that set the stage for Paradisi’s epic colonization stories while somehow disappearing from history.

It's not the old man and the sea, but the old man and the galaxy.
It's not Alice down the rabbithole, but Sideris down the wormhole.