The story of the Captab begins on their home planet of Soni V (the Captab have their own name for it but it is rendered in their usual coloured language and has no real translation). Soni V is a relatively small oceanic planet with a few scattered continents, a watery rock in space prone to great storms. But the water is magnificently clear, the sun is warm, and it was to prove an ideal cradle for a major space-faring species. The Captab developed relatively quickly, and as the Soni system had no appropriate worlds for any sort of colonisation they early on made the commitment to leave their solar system, sending primitive ships with colonists in cyrogenic sleep to worlds which astronomical observation had indicated could support life.

As a result, the Captab had in fact developed a modest, if isolated and underdeveloped, empire by the time they first met other species. Their first encounter, unfortunately, was with the Twis'rin: the squid people of the Periodice system had religious beliefs that considered oceanic races the very pinnacle of sentient evolution. Far from seeing the Captab as cousins and potential comrades-in-arms, however, the passionately arrogant Twis'rin saw the amphibians as a crude mockery of all they believed in. The Captab colonies they encountered were destroyed without mercy, their inhabitants exterminated, but luck was on the Captab's side in one way: the galaxy is big and even for the Twis'rin, finding specific planets within the ether without some sort of outside indication was a daunting task, further complicated by the fact that the Twis'rin had unusual difficulty for a time tracking the unique Captab transmission technology. As such, many of the major Captab planets including their capital escaped Twis'rin attention, and the Captab survived.

Their next meeting, luckily, was a friendlier one. A Captab sleeper ship believed that there was a large oceanic planet in the Qualstreit system. They were mistaken, and the planet in question was essentially a great, inhospitable swamp, but lacking the supplies to return to Soni the Captab were forced to set down on the thankfully inhabited planet of Shyaloum. This was the home of the Balorim, an advanced industrial power who were just beginning to touch nearby planets and satellites in their own solar system with probes and primitive one-man craft. The Captab crew of the colony ship, facing the choice of cooperation or death, chose the former and guided the Balorim out into the stars. The Balorim resupplied the Captab ship and sent them back to Soni, following some years later with a ship of their own and establishing formal contact between the two species, forging what would eventually be one of the most important cooperative relationships in the galaxy.

When the war began, the Captab maintained the pretense of neutrality but provided all sorts of logistical and strategic aid to the Balorim general staff. Not merely information but materiel, going as far as a few warships, were sent to the nearest Balorim colony, dragging through space on their decades-long journey and then turning around to make another one to attack some little outpost in that longest, most unwinnable of all wars. As the sheer numbers of the Twis'rin began to tell against the Balorim the Captab took a more active role, eventually entering the war as full combatants. This more likely than not saved them: thanks to their close ties with the Balorim staff, they were the first to hear that the Twis'rin had finally managed faster-than-light travel and among the first to get the technology themselves, saving them from extinction from their suddenly much faster mortal enemies. And when, thanks to the skill of the Captab and their allies the Doggei and the Balorim, the war was won, they seemed ready to settle back down to their previous slow expansion.

However, the other species were not so obliging. The Twis'rin, seeing their status as the first-rate power of the galaxy under threat, resolved upon an ambitious expansionist program. The Balorim, realising that they were on the first rank of galactic powers, decided to try and catch the Twis'rin up. And the little Captab, who had never been a very populous people, found themselves left in the dust. Their eventual approach was a more subtle one: lacking enough people to reach too far into the stars themselves, they would try and find other species not yet in space who would do it for them. Among them, the humans, granted faster-than-light technology by the Captab, in hopes of turning them into a client state.