Season 1 - Fringe Gambits
The Dutchman is new. The crew is newer. What starts as a salvage tip on a cheap token turns into the crew's first real look at what they are capable of and what the galaxy they have chosen to operate in is capable of right back. Getting out of the Borg mission alive feels like the hard part. It is not. Zedd's past shows up uninvited, a cargo run turns out to be a trap, and a derelict ship in a nebula that nobody was supposed to find changes what the Dutchman is in ways that cannot be undone. By the time the season closes the crew has been tested in ways that count and made a choice that says something real about who they decided to be when it mattered. The galaxy has noticed. Whether that is good or bad depends entirely on who is doing the noticing.
Group Post Count: 0
Included Missions
Treasure Alcoves
Post Count: 0The 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.
A Running Tab
Post Count: 0The 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.
Double-Crossed Cargo
Post Count: 0A 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.
Ghost in the Nebula
Post Count: 0Laying 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.
As Thick as Thieves
Post Count: 0A 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.