SPOILER WARNING: This post discusses backstory lore from Freelancer's campaign, including the fate of the Hispania and the Outcast origin. If you haven't finished the campaign and want to discover this yourself, come back later.
Every house in Sirius has a founding story. The Mayflower, the Bretonia, the Kusari, the Rheinland — four sleeper ships that completed the 800-year journey from Earth and landed their passengers in a new sector to build new civilizations. Four survival stories that became four cultures.
The fifth ship is the Hispania.
The Hispania never arrived. According to the game's lore — delivered in fragments through bartender dialogue and mission briefings, never in one clean exposition — the Hispania encountered disaster during the journey. Its survivors made it to the Sirius sector eventually, but damaged, adrift, and arriving long after the other four houses had already established themselves. They found the Omicron systems: remote, uninhabited, far from the trade lanes and house politics that had developed without them.
On Malta, in the Omicron systems, they found Cardamine. A plant native to the planet, producing a compound that is simultaneously a narcotic and, with long-term exposure, a physiological dependency. The Hispania survivors were exposed. Over generations, the addiction became biological — Outcasts don't just crave Cardamine, they require it. Leaving Outcast space for extended periods has physical consequences.
The Outcast criminal empire is built on this. They control Cardamine production and distribution across the sector. It's one of the highest-value contraband goods in the game. And the people selling it are the same people who cannot live without it. Their criminal power is inseparable from their own suffering.
This is the kind of faction design that rewards thinking about. The Outcasts aren't villains in the straightforward sense. They are the survivors of a civilization that failed, making do with the hand the universe dealt them. The criminal empire is a consequence of the Hispania's fate, not a choice made in a vacuum.
The game never quite lets you forget this if you pay attention. The bartender in the right Outcast station will tell you things. The faction dialogue has a specific quality — not cheerful pirate banter, but something with more weight under it.
They are the house that didn't make it. They built something anyway.