THE STORY - VOLUME 1: "BRENT - Pirates!"

Sometime in the not so very distant future, in a time where there are, say, maybe 50 000 people living on the Moon, and mining on Near Earth Asteroids has begun, four Scotsmen and an Irishwoman decide to steal a spacecraft, gather a crew and become history's first Space Pirates. Glasgow isn't what it used to be and better organized and more ruthless criminal organisations are squeezing the Scots out of the local cocaine and designer drug market. It's either start shooting first or get out.

So they get out, and in a most spectacular fashion, one might say. You see, the big powers, China, India, Europe, Russia and the others, have not managed to get the Near Earth Treaty anywhere near a final draft, so Near Earth Space is not militarized and hardly policed. The floating space hotels, the farmaceutical plants and the metal cargo containers are being protected by private security companies. They prove to be no match for the hundred or so Space Pirates and unemployed astronauts and technicians that now have taken control over the NE drug market and also supply Luna City and the hotels and casinos that hang outside the satellite belt, with prostitutes, banned pets and illegal Mixed Martial Arts tournaments.

Their ship was originally designed for exploration and test mining and is actually like a floating space hotel itself. It is a comfortable place to live, as the new generation of rotating space crafts have normal gravity. It's cozy, it's home.

But when Chapter 1 of Volume 1 opens, the Space Pirates are at the height of their fame and glory. Like an MC crew of our days, they more or less rule the NE Space, at least noone manages to catch them, as our merry pirates empty the wine cellar of the Hotel Hilton NE Excelsior or snatch a MCC with asteroid diamonds or gold on its automated way from NE asteroids to the refineries on Luna.

These are the events that lead up to Chapter 1, where we meet a Norwegian entomologist called Brent, who is squatting in catatonic solitude in an abandoned factory area in Samara in Russia, where the Russian mob is producing heroin and designer drugs, his life in ruins after his pregnant wife Mariah dies in a meaningless traffic accident.

Somebody comes to pay him a visit, and thus Brent's epic adventure begins.