The small ship drifted in space, tumbling end over end in a lazy, eternal nod to momentum’s laws. As ships go this one was old. A Beretta Rim-Runner, a ship used by small time mercantile operators, prospectors and those operating not precisely above the law - or all three - or other uses. She was a general purpose small, sturdy ship. Not so fast without being enhanced, and not so large to carry cargos of significance, this was a specialized ship class that had seen most action of its class a century and a half ago. It’s decline came in with upgraded, well, everything that made the Rim-Runner’s obsolete and used only by those tenaciously hanging on to the past, those unable to afford the upgrade, or small corporations that needed a sturdy small ship to run goods between worlds or flit about taking samples in an asteroid belt.

This tumbling Rim-Runner sported no power emissions. A blackened area of her aft hull near to her port storage bay was open to space, an ugly scar along her rust colored hull that didn’t entirely cover up the name emblazoned on the side - identified by optical scans - as the Red Dwarf. Some 44 meters long and half that in diameter, sporting many rounded ‘bulbs’ a meter or so wide about it’s upper hull. The underside, flatter than the top held landing gear and, curiously, the rack that denoted an external torpedo launcher. It was empty. The ship boasted no portholes apart from a single thin strip on either side of a raised half deck that spanned 10 meters wide and a half meter high. The only other external ports were at the pilot’s forward area at the fore end of this raised half deck. One of said two forward ports was cracked.

This curious vessel was detected by accident by stellar cartography which had been mapping a region of space and had initially flagged the Red Dwarf as a rogue asteroid, at least until a secondary analysis noted it as having refined metals in its makeup. This find was routed to the science station of the bridge of the Manhattan …
- Wookiee