Reaching down you take a small sip of the whiskey he poured for you hoping it’s his good stock, it bites but the burn is soft and warming as it goes down. He rests his arms on the bar and looks back over his shoulder as he tells you the ship has a name but it is the numbers that have always mattered, not just the painted ones either but the number of hearts that beat within her. The haul plate has been up on his wall some 40 plus years now since the day he bought the pile of scrap metal that was left of the ship. It was a small crew of people who never wanted to be hero's that made history with that old ship.
The story starts with the man they got the ship from. That was a pirate captain and part time smuggler with big damn dreams named Jaccob. The story goes he had a wife and two beautiful daughters but not much is known about them now, at the start of the first war with the core worlds he left them or lost them, that’s probably what made him start to want the freedom of the black. In the first war he was an intelligent type, planed some of the battles the Federation won, and most of the ones they lost he was the officer that held back the angles when they where begged for at Serenity valley then ordered the men of the federation to stand down when he knew there was no hope.
They say the heist that got him killed was a set up by some of his newer crew just to get the boat from him, don’t you believe that pact of lies, they was all loyal to him even if he never told them what he was doing most of the time. He died cause of bad luck and bad intel. You see the Alliance knew that after that there thing with the Reaver fleet and Mr. Universe telling their secret to the verse that they had leaks, so they started lying even to themselves about all kinds of things hoping it would stop the other factions who were raising up against the core words. Remember now the core worlds needed the outer worlds as a place to put the one thing they had too many of, too many damn people.
So it was that Jaccob got wind of something big, something that could help those fighting against the purple bellies. It was something too good to pass up it was supposed to be the newest routes and depot locations for the Alliance fleet so the purple captains could keep their ships in the fight and moving about fast. While the intel said it was easy to take, the job cost the lives of a lot of good men. Five died trying to get it out of the depot. Zen the first mate and only other man on the ship who knew the entire plan took a few slugs in the back while leaving. It was when he fell over half dead into the arms of the gunslinger from Greenleaf that the locals swear her eyes turned red and she rose up like a screaming banshee and laid to rest some 18 men who tried to stop her. In her rage with a single hand she picked up Zen and tossed him some ten feet into the waiting coach and yelled at some poor towns girl to drive or die. Maybe she was his lover or maybe she just wanted to do the job herself, whatever it was she left so few of the guards alive that they had no will to give chase. Now it’s a funny thing you see when they took that coach, they turned from being simple spies and thieves into becoming low down horse thieves as they stole the only coach in town. A coach and a team of six strong horses on Silverhold is worth more than a farmer would see in three good growing seasons. That’s why they are still wanted on Silverhold for horse robbery and destruction of private property. They done turned that coach into a pile of broken fire wood bits but no one ever found those horses, if they ever got back to Silverhold the law says they are to be branded and worked for 6 days to build a new coach for the town then to do 10 years hard time per horse in a prison camp.
The story goes they got off the planet with the help of over a thousand ships but something went wrong once they had made it out of the atmo. For some reason they where caught cold and even held at gun point. However something happened, something that no living man has ever told another, they went and sold Zen the rightful first officer and new captain of that ship to the Alliance in exchange for their safe passage away from the planet. Sometime between when Jaccob died on the ground and that ship leaving the planet this Jonathon guy had mutinied and named himself captain and was using the gunslinger and a big girl named Rose-Blossom to keep him in charge. He must have been one smooth talker to turn a dead man’s crew against the first officer so fast and then convince an Alliance officer to take Zen as a bribe. Some people are just smooth talkers with silver tongues.
Things being what they are,they got away and ran into the black, They ran, they ran deep into the black to of all the places they could go too they went to Alpha Base. Yeah for some reason they knew where the secret base of the Federation was and they done never told anyone. Till this day no one else has been able to find it and let me assure you many have tried.
