Mankind has just uncovered the means for faster than light travel.

Darryl Tolman, an engineer working for Clegg Applied Sciences (CAS), invented a device capable of removing objects from normal space-time. The device is called the Tolman Engine; the process it creates is called the Tolman Shift. Darryl Tolman was remarkably self-centered...\

Up to this point, mankind has made the voyage to the stars by means of generation ships and stasis baths. The advent of FTL travel means that more worlds can be explored and colonized-- and it also means that a formal galactic government MUST be organized to govern the interactions between all the worlds. Enter the United Galaxies Compact-- whose slogan seems to be "We're benevolent! Join us or feel our scorn!" While no war has broken out, the UGC (known as the Ugly-C to colonists) has managed to persuade most of the colonies to accept a seat in parliament, and pay taxes to support the pan-galactic bureaucracy.

Essential to colonization and FTL are the Shipmates. These are former human beings who have had their nervous systems and brains bound to spaceships. They are essentially immortal beings-- nanotechnology has replaced most of their nervous system, and their brains are kept in stasis gel. They are ideal security operators and navigators; they are the eyes and ears and brain of the ship itself. It was discovered early on that Shipmates, like most other human beings, require contact with other people for their psychological well being. All Shipmates have a simulacrum, or Sim, a body which they can use as they would normally use their own body. While the Shipmate's brain resides in a stasis bath and their nervous system wraps around the ship, most Shipmates will tell you that *they* are inside their Sim. It is the Sim which speaks their thoughts, feels for them, eats and socializes, etc.

Shipmates are essential to the colonization effort because they can operate the ship under the enormous g-forces during acceleration when everyone else must be in crash couches and effectively immobilized. (Ships using the Tolman Engine cannot be used in close proximity to planets. The larger the object to be transported through the shift, the farther away from gravitational pull they must be) They are also intimately tied to onboard systems-- no one knows faster than a shipmate that something is wrong with a ship.

The Yancy Darrow is a surveying ship turned colonist transport. It isn't large, and the choice to turn it into a colonist transport was a poor one which quickly bankrupted the owner that made that decision. The current owner is Natalie Caldwell. She bought it and its obligation to transport a small number of ideological scientists to Medemea, a newly discovered world in the Han-Sho galaxy. After the scientists are delivered, she has plans to turn the Yancy Darrow back into a surveying ship, and capitalize on its inter-atmosphere capabilities to explore new worlds.