https://soundcloud.com/saike/missing-in-action
This tune is meant for a mission where you go look for the person who used to be your co-pilot. In the game you can select the order in which do your missions. Depending on how early you do this mission in the game she's either going to be dead or alive.
In the last bit where the tune starts modulating up, your ship reports detecting her ship and you start speeding up to get their faster. You can guess which ending the mission got on this version
Credit where credit is due, the vocals near the end are placeholders by 11linda, montblanccandies(female) and jorickhoofd (male) taken from freesound, since I haven't decided on voice actors yet.
What I'm happy with are the modulations near the end to heighten the drama. They're cheesy, but so is the style of the game and story. What I'm not so happy with is the opening, because it harks a bit too much of cheese-trance. I think for me what was tricky in this one is how brittle the lead is. Although it doesn't sound like the lead would be a difficult one to have cut through the mix, it was difficult for me to not lose definition of the main lead.
I still feel like the lead doesn't sit in the mix *that* well, but I'm not sure what to do about it. I've tried a touch of verb, toning it down (but then it started sounding washed out), EQ'ing things around it and toning it down, but all of those only made a very marginal difference. Suggestions would be welcome