Merchant Marine Co.

Please remain calm, you are about to be borded by the Merchant Marine Company. We will be conducting a search of all cargo and personal effects, and in accordance with sector law, we shall then escort your ship out of this sector. This is not an optional action.

 

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The Merchant Marine Company, while sounding like an Old World organization meant for the betterment of sailors' lives, is in fact one of many military arms of several megacorps.
  After all, why provide enough guards and escorts for your intrasolar merchant fleets when you can simply pay someone else for the responsibility? 
  The company was founded in 3392 by a small but tight-knit group of solar captains, who each had lost most everything they had, bar their ships and their now seasoned crews, to the pirate infestations throughout the system. They couldn't afford to try and carry cargo anymore, and so they decided to volunteer themselves for guard duty. They had experience fending off pirate raids, at least, and had the firepower. For a cut of the profit, they could increase the survivability of any shipment or convoy. 
  Of course, that search for profit is what drives most companies to their collapse or their ascention into something else altogether. 
  Nowadays, the Company has more in common with its conceptual enemy of piracy than its founding principles. Big surprise there. It helps reduce overhead by promising protection at a premium price, achieved by not tying their hirers up in agreements to support the deaths of the company's fighters monetarily, but instead giving the Merchant Marine carte blanche to "reappropriate" any cargo they seize from defeated raiders, and sell themselves.
  Their men are largely paid in spoils, to supplement their small salaries, which they are responsible for transporting and selling. I'm told that Merchant Marine ships are jealous, paranoid affairs especially after they have been on deployment for awhile. Bounties are often a good source of income, though the company itself takes most of them. After all, the person who completed the bounty used company equipment to do so.