The R.S. Honshu was of the old Interplanetary Corporation’s Type-7 design, about as robust as they came but nearing a century old. Captain Tarsik had saved her from the scrapyard for the low low price of two thousand credits that he’d won playing cards in a seedy bar on Arcturus IV.

He’d spent the next four years working his fingers to the bone to raise the nearly ten thousand credits it took to get her spaceworthy again. That wasn’t the legend that he told most of his crew about how he and the Honshu came together but close confidants like Ansul knew the truth. To everyone else she was a former pirate ship, one that Tarsik had been kidnapped and forced to serve on before turning the tables on his captors and seizing the ship for himself. It made for great narrative in the mess hall on drunken evenings, especially when someone new joined the crew. The Honshu carried a crew of 37 souls, most of which rotated out on a regular basis but about a half dozen stayed on as regular crew. They, of course, benefited from a larger share of the ship’s take whenever it came time for the captain to divvy up the credits.

No one knew what kind of fortune the ship’s commander had managed to accumulate over the course of his career, as he was very secretive about his finances, but he certainly did put a lot of it into the ship itself. Despite being nearly a century old the Honshu was outfitted with pretty much all of the latest technology. In fact it’s loadout was often much better than other ships in the Service, as the vast majority of them were at least a decade or so old but the old Type-7 kept getting upgrade after upgrade to keep her in tip-top shape. Captain Tarsik liked to brag at length to other captains that his old girl was as sturdy as “they used to make them” but as advanced as they “make ‘em now”. Her titanium space frame was much more solidly built than newer ships because the old neutron rockets would shake a ship apart if she wasn’t heavy enough. With new engines and tons of upgrades which had made her lighter than stock she truly was a unique vessel.

Not being one to take chances and always one to see the opportunity afforded by every situation the captain had years back salvaged a Mark IX proton cannon off of a derelict colonial warship. The piece of technology had laid in deep space undisturbed for close to two centuries, since the colonial wars that had ended Earth’s dominance over human worlds.

Nothing with that kind of firepower had been manufactured since and it was an incredible find. Still, Ansul and most of the crew had called him mad when he’d suggested fitting it to the Honshu. Their fears were justified. On every occasion that it had been fired it had caused massive damage to the ship’s own power systems. During one daring pirate raid, however, it had been the only thing that had prevented their capture and likely servitude or ransom. Their little Mark II cannons had overheated and a torpedo had malfunctioned in the tube. With surrender not being an option Captain Tarsik had opted to go for broke and use the big ole’ Mark IX. It had blasted the pirate rocket into two halves and left her drifting in space. Ansul had wanted to take prisoners and collect bounties but the captain decided against it, they were running a skeleton crew and he didn’t want to be dealing with prisoners who could overwhelm them and take the ship. No, instead he opted to leave them floating there. It was near a very well-traveled trade lane so he knew the survivors would be found before long. Secretly he’d hoped they’d be found by another pirate ship, one that would press their crew into service aboard their ship. Give them a taste of their own medicine.

The captain and his men had been born into a universe that was ruled, loosely, by a political organization known as the Federated Worlds. Each member world, human and alien alike, was considered a sovereign entity but they operated under the banner of the FW in order to benefit from the trade agreements as well as the peace and stability afforded by such an organization. Every world in known space flew the FW flag, there was just so much to be gained by being a part of the alliance and nothing to be had by shunning it. Easily enough to believe, if one knows humans, only mankind had ever brought wide-scale warfare to the stars. Aliens had fought for millennia before mankind joined them out in the deep but only mankind brought the gift of true militarization. Earth’s influence exploded in early years only to be resented later on by the colonies who began to declare their independence in rapid fire succession. Earth’s establishment, not being one to give up easily on old ways, declared war on the colonies and built massive fleets to re-establish control. The colonies, of course, built their own fleets and thus began the Colonial Wars. They lasted for over two decades and culminated in the invasion of the Solar System by colonial forces and an orbital bombardment that ended in Earth’s surrender. In those final days, once the tide had clearly turned, even the colonies closer to home like Mars and Europa sided with the colonials. When the fighting stopped and the ashes had settled Earth was not enslaved, but rather left to her own devices with the caveat that she should never attempt to control the other worlds again. The Federated Worlds was born and the large fleets were slowly dismantled as they became too expensive to maintain and served no purpose.

Enter the time of the Service; someone had to maintain order so it fell to privateers. Ships of the Service acted as mercenaries to fight small scale engagements over disputes, traders to ferry expensive goods that required protection, as escort to large shipping convoys and of course as bounty hunters to track down infamous pirates. Sure, local police ships kept order maintained pretty well in-system but once you were into deep space there was very little standing between your cargo and a pirate’s proton cannon. Despite Captain Tarsik’s bravado he seldom took bounty hunting assignments or even combat operations, he preferred a mental challenge and that usually meant the Honshu was off to some remote world to trade for precious goods with some backwoods locals who were potentially dangerous, as had ended up being the case on Kessela. Those were often the most lucrative of deals but it took a special type of captain to negotiate them and most Servicemen were not up to the task. While quite physically imposing Captain Tarsik’s most impressive features were his mental faculties. He was very decisive and had an almost unnatural talent for reading someone else. This made him especially suited to dealing with natives that most would have no hope of ever forming any kind of bond with. Uni-trans could only go so far, it could make spoken words understandable, but on most occasions there was much more to it than just the language. One had to watch for every little clue about a culture, sometimes the slightest slip-up in body movement or facial expression could lead to disaster. With his incredibly stoic exterior the captain was great at observing and not reacting, at least when he wanted to. This was a gift that had brought the men of the Honshu much wealth and quite a reputation among the Service.