SS Esperanto

The SS Esperanto was a Class-D seeding ship in service with the Earthen Space Corps, commissioned in the year 2646. Its mission was to colonise an oceanic world with an experimental form of life whose evolutionary processes had been artificially accelerated so that 5 million years worth of evolution could be compressed into a three year time frame. The SS Esperanto seeded the planet with micro-organisms in 2648, having spent a whole year terraforming the planet to be suitable for life. By 2650, they had completely transformed the planet from an aquatic wasteland to a world teeming with undersea life.

After docking at the bottom of one of the planet's undersea trenches to carry out research on the earliest stages of life the SS Esperanto began to log strange reports of what was happening outside the ship. The crew began to notice that the sea was becoming less and less densely populated, with the average numbers of fish dropping by the day. It emerged that the accelerated evolutionary process had created a monster - a squid that produced hallucinogenic ink causing despair in its victims, causing them to commit suicide. The crew were all subjected to this when the squid finally found them and the ship was lost.

Thousands of years later, the crew of the mining ship Red Dwarf found the wreck of the SS Esperanto, still operable to a point, and had a scuffle with the last despair squid, which they destroyed with limpet mines after experiencing a strange group hallucination. The SS Esperanto was destroyed in the attack on the squid.