Premise

Many gave even odds that humans would go extinct sometime around the end of the 21st century. Catastrophically collapsing the biosphere through over-exploitation seemed likely to do us in as a species. Instead, we squeaked through. Continual innovation outraced disastrous policy, greed, and countless crimes of failed leadership. Now, a couple of centuries past the precipice that almost snuffed us out, we can revel in what we accomplished, here on the cusp of the 24th century.
Supermassive O’Neill space stations host millions of residents each. Luna One is a sprawling dominion of domed Moon bases, regolith-covered corridors, and sublunar cavities. Cloud cities float across the surface of the planet Venus.Hollowed-out asteroids of the belt contain independent trading concerns, though the least successful are always under threat of being snapped up by the Big Five or elements of the Diaspora.
Beyond that are the stars themselves, now within our reach. We stand the edge of a brand-new golden age of interstellar expansion thanks to radical propulsion developments in the last decade. Xiao-Keller (XK) and Astra Industries—two conglomerates of the Big Five—produced a top-secret propulsion system allowing humans to travel through space at faster-than-light speed!
Within a restricted research facility deep inside the Carpathian Mountains, Dr. Povilas Kukta leads Project Pythagoras. Within, some of the brightest minds of the United Nations are working to increase the reliably of the FTL enabling Dark-drive. Before the UN Navy can be retrofitted with these drives, production facilities controlled by the Planetary Government need to be able to produce them. 
You are all part of the test crew for the SS Damascus, an experimental dragonfly class spacecraft carrying a top of the line FTL drive. On 24th August 2398, the SS Damascus was supposed to commence its first test flight. The plan was to reach the Outer Kuiper Belt in 4 hours, take the engine offline, restart it successfully and then come back to Earth Space Dock then investigate the drive readings.
Everything was going according to plan on the day of the launch. All systems green. Pilot enables its focus device, crew enters the travel stasis pods, FTL drive spools up and in blink of an eye the ship is no more. While in the stasis chamber, you hear claws scratching the inside of the ship, disembodied body parts seem to be flying in all directions. Suddenly a splatter of biologic mass gets smeared all over the stasis pod. You can't move. Behind the steel panels, clicking noises keep gnawing at your mind. The walls of your stasis pod begin to shift, bending at sharp angles attempting to crush your frail body, swallowing it withing the hull. You feel your skull throbbing under more and more pressure and just when it's about to pop...you wake up from this nightmare.
You look around and see your stasis chambers bent and dented. Glowing sparks from the exposed power cords fly throughout the room. Emergency lighting flickers on and off at random intervals. Smells of burning plastic fill your nostrils. Near the entrance, Ryon Song-Hun, the 26 year old sensors expert with the dry jokes lies legless just outside his completely shattered stasis chamber.