The Stiles family had a long and distinguished career in piracy.

It had been the family business, off and on, for nearly five decades, in between rounds of low-key smuggling (when real piracy was impractical) and one extended, purely unintentional grounding of their ship that had resulted in an unlikely farming enterprise. If they got really desperate, the Stiles sibs would even stoop to honest commercial hauling – but the margins were low, and piracy was in their nature.

Their reputation was certainly helped by their boat, the Daydream. An old medium transport built to flit among the many moons of the Delta system over a century ago, the only reason the old Dragonfly caravel was still flying was still flying was because of the extensive modifications a series of brilliant mechanics had made on her. Tinker Stiles was the latest in a long line of them, but none had matched their ingenious grand-uncle Nikos, who had altered the solar mast and bank of panels in such a way as to render the ship virtually invisible to radar when deployed just so. And that’s just how the Daydream’s sails were deployed, as the ship snuck stealthily up on the Alliance gunboat.

Only she wasn’t precisely the Daydream, at the moment. She was armed, and as such had become the ship’s alter ego. Daydream was now enhanced with an entire bank of weaponry deployed across a steel superstructure (complete with additional gunnery capsule, an auxiliary reactor, and a large, less-than-tasteful lurid mural of a stylized Jolly Roger). The addition made the caravel look a little more top-heavy and a hell of a lot more deadly. So deadly, and so different from its civilian configuration, that the Stiles Siblings had adopted the nomme d’guerre of Nightmare for their ship.

Viktor and Tinker had been some of the most successful privateers under the Black Star during the war. Not only was their ship ideally suited for the task of lightening the load of fat Alliance transports, the family’s natural talent for the pirate’s art was profound.