Mission Groups

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The crew's first shot at a real payday starts with a gamble. A handful of cheap tokens, each one carrying coordinates flagged by other ships that picked up something interesting and moved on without investigating. Low investment, unknown return, the kind of odds that either pay off or don't and you find out fast.

What they find at the coordinates is not what anyone was expecting.

The ship is Borg. Derelict by all appearances but Borg, and that changes everything about the calculation. The threat the collective posed is not ancient history to anyone who lived through it and the sight of that hull is enough to remind the crew exactly what they are looking at and what it has been capable of.

But the technology on board is another matter entirely. What could be salvaged from even a partially intact Borg vessel would be worth more than the crew could reasonably expect to earn in the next five years of legitimate work.

Maybe more.

The ship is right there. So is the risk.

The only question left is whether they are willing to board it.

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The Dutchman is barely back on her feet after the Borg mission when an old contact of Zedd's shows up unannounced at their next port stop with information he says could not wait. The Black Nebula and the Crimson Corsairs have started asking questions about a former associate who walked away from both of them without permission and without paying what he owed. They do not have a location yet but they are getting closer and the contact is not entirely sure which side sent him to deliver the warning.

For the first time the crew gets a real look at what Zedd left behind when he built the Dutchman. The debts, the factions, the dataport that still carries the fingerprints of the people who paid for it, and the fact that disappearing cleanly turned out to be harder than he planned for. They are a crew of weeks, not years, and some of them are still figuring out what signing on to the Dutchman actually means when the thing asking that question is not a difficult cargo run but two of the Gamma Quadrant's more dangerous organizations deciding whether their captain is worth finding.

They have options but none of them are clean. Run and buy time which solves nothing and eventually runs out. Go looking for whoever is doing the asking and try to make the problem stop before it starts. Or find a way to settle the debt once and for all and close the door on that part of Zedd's life permanently. Whatever they choose they are choosing it together now because the crew knows and there is no putting that back.

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A Ferengi broker on Sampalo comes to the crew with a job that looks clean on the surface. Intercept a shipment of medical replicators bound for a New Bajor outpost on Meridian and deliver them to a waiting buyer. The payout is substantial and the market for that kind of equipment is hot enough to make it an easy yes. The intercept goes smoothly. The handoff does not. The buyer turns out to be a Dominion operative with an agenda nobody briefed the crew on and now they are tangled up in something they didn't sign up for and can't easily walk away from.

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Laying low after their last score the crew picks up a faint repeating distress signal coming from deep inside a nebula with a reputation for not giving ships back. What's out there turns out to be a Miranda class Federation vessel, experimental, adrift, heavily damaged, and carrying the kind of cargo that makes the risk feel worth reconsidering. The ship vanished during a classified Dominion War mission and nobody ever explained why. On board is a load of rare unstable dilithium isotopes worth a fortune to the right buyer and a cloaking device that, if it can be salvaged, would make the Dutchman effectively invisible to anyone looking for her. The nebula wants to kill them. The ship might too. The question is whether what's inside is worth finding out.

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A supply run to a newly formed Federation colony near Dominion territory sounds straightforward enough, and for a while it is. The colonists are welcoming, the crew finds extra work trading skills for latinum, and a few personal side deals get made on the quiet. Then the colony leader pulls Zedd aside with a request that changes the nature of the whole trip. There is a Vorta defector who needs to disappear back through the wormhole to the Federation, quietly, with information the Federation very much wants to have.

Now the crew has to decide who they want to owe them a favor. Hand the defector over to the Federation and bank goodwill with one of the most powerful organizations in the quadrant, or return them to the Dominion and see what that's worth. Either way someone is going to be very grateful and someone else is going to be very unhappy, and the Dutchman is sitting right in the middle of it.

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Lindsy finds a route through what the charts say is unclaimed space and it looks clean. It cuts time off a supply run and the data supporting it goes back further than most of the corridors the Dutchman has been using. There is no reason not to try it.

There turns out to be a reason.

The ship drops out of warp and is not alone and what follows makes it clear very quickly that whoever these people are they have been holding this space for a long time and have very strong feelings about who gets to pass through it. The Fen Domar are not in any database worth consulting and the interceptors surrounding the Dutchman are not interested in explaining themselves.

The question nobody can stop asking is what the Fen Domar are protecting in there that makes it worth defending that hard.

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Word gets around that the Dutchman came back from Fen Domar space in one piece and the wrong people heard it. The message that finds them is for a meeting that points to being optional in a way that makes it clear it is not. What is waiting at that station is a Dominion contingent and they come prepared with an explanation for what the crew stumbled into, a number on the table that is very real, and a job that only the Dutchman can do. What the Dominion intends to do with what they are asking for is a question nobody in the room pushes to find out.

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The Dutchman goes back into Fen Domar space cloaked, carrying Dominion equipment through territory that turned the crew pale a mission ago. The coordinates are precise and the intelligence is detailed. What is on the ground when they reach their destination means things that are going to be much more difficult than it had been made out to be. With limited resources behind enemy lines, the Dutchman and her crew must get their bounty.

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With the bounty secured and the Dominion waiting, the crew has run out of time to avoid the conversation nobody wanted to have. What is sitting in the cargo bay is not just a delivery and everyone aboard knows what handing it over actually means for an organization with the Dominion's history and ambitions. The argument is real and it gets loud and it does not find a clean resolution because there is not one available. Zedd has to make a call and the crew has to live with it.

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Getting to the handoff point without the Fen Domar intercepting them first requires everything the ship has. Dominion vessels waiting for them contain representatives are very interested in the Dutchman and want more than what they came for. A veiled interrogation and allure of danger surrounding the situation places both parties in a predicament they couldn't fathom. The reality is, they need each other more than they realize...

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The Dominion makes good on prior agreements and then some. A Vorta liaison arrives with friends of her own. While charming and competent, she solves some immediate problems the crew had been sitting on since before the first day. The crew has to figure out how to be themselves with people aboard who are reporting everything they see and Zedd has to figure out what authority looks like on his ship when the people the Dominion sent are not technically under his command and both of them know it.

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The Vorta comes to Zedd with intelligence on a luxury cargo vessel moving through a nearby system, lightly defended and carrying a significant shipment. Running on a schedule precise enough to make an intercept straightforward, the briefing is clean and the numbers are good. With a substantial payday looming in front of them, the dark truth behind the Vorta's intentions are easily missed by the crew and a substantial blow is dealt.

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The Vorta has a meeting with a broker and Zedd takes the Dutchman while a runabout crew heads out to survey a nearby area for potential cargo cache sites. What they find instead is a Rigellian trade vessel claiming the area, and upset about the runabout nosing around. While attempting to smooth over the situation, a boiling point is reached and serious consequences unfold. Now it must be determined who is really in charge on the ship, and what the future will look like with their guests on board...

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A routine supply contract takes the Dutchman to a small independent colony that has stopped responding to scheduled check ins. The organization that hired them wants to know why and is paying well enough that the crew doesn't ask too many questions before they go. When they arrive the colony is intact, the buildings are standing, the equipment is running, and most of the colonists are alive. That is where the good news ends.

The people they find are not right. Not visibly hurt, not obviously sick, but changed in a way that is difficult to pin down at first and impossible to ignore once you see it. They are cooperative and calm and answer questions without hesitation but nothing they say adds up and none of them can explain what happened or when it started. A few of them don't seem to remember that anything happened at all.

The crew starts digging and what they find suggests something passed through the colony not long before they arrived, something that left a mark on the people it touched without leaving much trace of itself behind. The scans are inconclusive, the colonists are not getting better, and the feeling that whatever came through has not gone far keeps growing the longer they stay.

Getting the colonists help means figuring out what they are dealing with first. Staying long enough to do that means accepting that they are doing it in close proximity to something none of them have encountered before and that has already demonstrated what it can do to people who were not prepared for it.

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The Dutchman makes a routine port stop and finds someone waiting for them that was not on the manifest. A face from Zedd's past, calm and unhurried and carrying a message from the Crimson Corsairs that has been a long time coming. The debt Zedd walked away from years ago has not been forgotten and the Corsairs have decided that enough time has passed. They want it settled and they have sent someone who knows Zedd well enough to find him to make sure the message lands the way it was intended.

The crew now has to reckon with a version of their captain they are only beginning to understand, the factions he ran with, the dataport and what it cost him, the lengths he went to in order to disappear and start something of his own. The Corsairs are not an abstract threat anymore. They are at the door and they did not come empty handed. Along with the deadline they brought an offer, not for Zedd, but for anyone on the Dutchman willing to listen. Hand him over and walk away clean, debts cleared, no further interest in the ship or her crew.

The options are not clean and not everyone is going to weigh them the same way. Settle the debt and find something the Corsairs will actually accept as payment, which is a harder negotiation than it sounds given what walking away cost them in time and loyalty and the interest that has been building ever since. Go to war with a faction that has more reach and more resources than the Dutchman can match and bet everything on coming out the other side. Find a third way, something that uses what Zedd knows about the Corsairs and the Black Nebula against both of them in a way that closes the door for good without requiring a fight the Dutchman is not guaranteed to win. Or take the offer and let the Corsairs have what they came for.

The messenger is a complication of their own. Whether they came because the Corsairs sent them or because they wanted to give Zedd a warning before things got worse is not a question that gets answered easily and figuring out which one it is matters more than it might seem.

Not every crew member has been with the Dutchman long enough to have decided where their loyalty actually sits when the cost of keeping it gets real. The Corsairs know that and they came prepared to use it.