A history lesson.

First Tm'skor was having a bad day. This had started as a very routine day on another routine freight run on just one more routine Fwirthian freight ship. He was looking forward to a peaceful retirement after 84 cycles of dutiful, if boring, service on the Fwirthian merchant fleet, including the past 12 cycles as First, commander of a vessel. Of course, as a member of the merchant caste of Fwirthi, he lacked the imagination to see how dull and boring his job really was.

Dull, that was, until this morning, when his ship was suddenly surrounded by warp holes, each one spitting forth a M'Platwiri attack cruiser. Even as the bells rang the alarm of the pirate attack, bolts of energy splashed against his hull plates. The ship groaned in protest as his pitiful crew, soft and helpless, shrieked their terror, dashing about in confusion and abandoning their duty stations. Even Tm'skor was frightened and confused. Fwirthian merchant ships were not crewed by the military caste; as such, they were easy prey for the M'Platwiri pirates.

Rather, they should have been. The fates stepped in, and spared Tm'skor the fate of being captured by the pirates. As he stumbled about his bridge, confused and frightened like the other Fwirthian crewmembers, he collided with his navigator, and the pair smashed into the navigation controls. Of the buttons depressed randomly by the flailing captain, one commanded the engines to engage and the warp generator to activate. The ship, still drawing fire, vanished into a warp hole.

Wounded, spewing freight containers from the ugly gashes in the hull, the ship popped out of its warp hole in a backwater of the galaxy, an uninteresting, backward system with one nondescript yellow star and only one reasonably habitable planet. First Tm'skor and his crew ignored the system. It wasn't on their route, and as such it held no interest to their unimaginative minds. And because their orders said nothing about recovering cargo lost from battle damage (such conditions couldn't have been imagined by the traders commissioning the cargo!), they ignored the countless canisters trailing their ship like a ribbon of confetti, each carrying nearly three thousand cubic meters of cargo . As soon as the essential systems had been repaired, they swung around the sun, set a new course, and dropped into another artificial warp hole. Behind the ship, a trail of cargo canisters, not having a warp hole as a destination, felt the tug and pull of the tiny sun and its tiny planets. Many fell almost immediately into the sun. Others were smashed against moons or planets.

For centuries to come, though, most of the cargo canisters would drift through the system, lost forever to the shipping company and its customers. Occasionally, one would end up falling into the sun. Other times, a rare collision with other astral debris would rip open a cargo canister, freeing more cargo items to join the lengthening trail of flotsam and jetsam in a cometary orbit around the small star.

Eventually, bits and pieces of the cargo and canisters, some still bearing the legend of the Gamalfi Company, skimmed the atmosphere of the third planet. Most of the debris broke up quickly, disintegrating in the awful heat, but some of the smaller pieces of cargo was made of sterner stuff.