The black, a vast expanse of lost emotions and of dangers, space was the frontier. Planets shifted, lives ended but Earth was no more. Long gone, lost to the pollution of a race, the human race. Now humanity was amongst the stars, a new solar system to inhabit and a new dictatorship. The alliance, it had been decades since war tore through humanities home, the unifaction war. Culminating in the battle of Serenity valley, the defeat of the independents and Alliance domination.
Captain Bane stood at the helm of a firefly class space vessel, the Hammer of Dawn. The class of vessel was so named because of the radiation waves from it's engines meant the tail of the ship glowed a vivid orange in the silence and blackness of space. A small vessel with no armaments, mostly used by smugglers and criminals, of which Bane was neither. Bane was an honest trader, an oddity in itself in the day and age before him.
Sebastian Bane was a tough man with very little self interest, he just protected his crew and got the job done. Obviously doing honest work meant scant pay and very few decent jobs worth taking but they took everything honest that came their way. They had done everything from move medicine shipments to the outer rim to tracking reaver activity for the alliance when they just couldn't get their ships in to verify reports. Bane had never questioned any of the work, until 4 months ago.
4 months ago a wave had come through, an open wave. Mal Reynolds had sent it, Bane and Reynolds had been at odds before but what Bane saw on that screen was something else entirely.
An alliance scientist admitting to creating a sub-human race, Reavers. Those who happily killed their own kind, humans and reavers alike and wore their skin, raped them and tortured them. For fun.
That very wave had changed Bane's mind, now he was still doing honest work but as the human race began to turn on the dictators in disguise he was hard pressed not to join the uprising against the Alliance, the brown coats were surfacing once more. Bane had fought for the alliance during the unifaction war, a 4 star general who had designed a new cruiser, the 'Hellion' the largest and meanest cruiser in the Alliance fleet, the only thing that kept the brown coats contained. He knew how to bring it down.
Slowly Bane climbed out of his bunk, a rough spun affair with little comfort and he stepped to the steel, rusty ladder and began to climb, punching the base of the trap door which swung up to reveal a mess of wires and girders, the same mess that traversed the entire ship and kept them alive. He stepped out of the trap door and tapped a few buttons on the tablet above, the door swinging down and locking after him as he moved towards the bridge, a small chamber with two control panels. Each was an array of instruments, numbers and buttons, not Bane's speciality. The man who sat behind the right hand control panel was grubby, unkempt and he sported a ginger beard. This was his pilot, Blake Storm. The man was a whiz with the controls when in space but his landings were somewhat rough, Bane's ship tended to end up missing parts.