SPECIAL: If you beat this mission, you can unlock the Excelsior as a Super Ship choice for the "Free Start" and "Own Faction" options in Nexerelin!

Location: Deep in the ass-end of nowhere
Date: 204.12.22

Captain Lee was having a bad day. No crew, no beer, no credits–those had all been lost in the taking. He could only consider three things to still be in his possession: a lifetime of regrets, a million-credit bounty on his head, and a priceless bucket of bolts.

The job had seemed promising. A Tri-Tachyon black site, dedicated to cutting-edge research. Access codes to the base. An anonymous tip-off that may or may not have come from a human being. A huge reward for "liberating" a prototype testbed. Of course, as most of his jobs went, things went wrong. Captain Lee was used to that–skilled at rolling with the punches that fate saw fit to throw at him. But this time, Captain Lee's luck wasn't merely bad; his luck was out for vengeance.

When Captain Lee found the testbed, it turned out to be a ship no one had ever seen before. The Excelsior, they called it. It should have been easy enough to commandeer; scientists, for all their knowledge, are not hardened warriors. But these scientists were not ordinary academics. Lee lost good men in the ensuing battle. Too many men. But, at the end, he found himself at the helm of their fancy prototype toy. Half-finished, exposed hull and electronics bare to the vacuum of space, the thing practically shook itself apart just on its way out of the hangar.

Whatever the Tachyon eggheads had been researching, it chose to go bad right then and there. Or perhaps one of their guns hit something that shouldn't have been shot. Who knows. Either way, the entire research base chose that moment to go crazy. Portals opening randomly, some intersecting and carving through sections of the station. Explosions of light and darkness. Entire sections just vanishing into a blackness darker than the void between galaxies. His boys were back there, in that expanding deathtrap of chaos. All gone, every last one of 'em.

It turned out that the Excelsior lacked the capacity for long-distance interstellar travel: bad news now that the rest of his fleet had been blasted to atoms, or worse. With a few weeks' supply of rations left after running out of fuel, all he could do was ping a distress call to anyone still listening, hide within the cover of the local star's magnetic envelope, and wait.

Indeed, listeners soon arrived. To be exact: heavily-armed, professional-killer "listeners", better known by their name "The Silent Hand", had used Captain Lee's distress signal as a beacon to pinpoint his location. Evidently, CEO Sun wanted her toy back.

Captain Mann Lee, now with nothing left to lose, told them they could keep the wreckage.