Future Considerations

Debts, Public and Private

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.

Dark Signal

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.