Dulcinea Crew / DUL

The Dulcinea was first sold to a reputable trader named Elias Grigori fresh from the Drake showroom on Elysium when it was first christened as the Rio. The trader was in the market for a ship to take to Banu controlled borders and sell protein supplements. It was a boring job but profitable for the young family man and relatively safe.

That was until five years later when he and his crew had the misfortune to run into Tando Rackham and his Cutlass Donnager after risking a shortcut off the regular shipping lanes in order to make a sale. Tando showed no mercy, killing the quantum engines of the Caterpillar and boarding with extreme prejudice. Elias conceded the ship quickly having no taste for violence, but it didn’t matter. Tando spaced each of the crew individually, including Elias’ son. By the time it was Elias’ turn, he begged to be reunited with him. And so the Rio fell into the hands of the Rackhams, a bloodthirsty family of pirates. Common practice saw the plundering of booty and the scuttling of the ships, since acquiring a new registry for the vessels was often more trouble than they were worth, but Tando saw something in the hold of the Rio. He saw potential.

Young Davin was only nine or ten when he passed through the airlock from the Donnager to the Rio. The first thing he saw was blood flecking the airlock door. Someone hadn’t cooperated with their imminent demise. It wasn’t the sort of thing to bother him; he’d seen enough of it in his childhood. His father waited with a shit-eating grin, expecting a response to their new home.

“It’s cool, I guess.”

Tando had changed the registry, naming it the Dulcinea after something from Don Quixote that Davin had no interest in. He spent his formative years growing up in the cramped confines of the Caterpillar’s habitation module amongst some of the verse’s scummiest outlaws. The ship was used in plenty of skirmishes, acting as a staging outpost for his dad’s Cutlass and a pack of Dragonflys. A few years later, the Dulcinea became embroiled in the conflict stemming from Kellar’s Run.

Calling Lagos a port away from home, the Dul was stationed there during renowned pirate Dean Kellar’s rampage through the system that saw the UEE’s interest in reclaiming the Nexus system. Over the next five years, the pirates were embedded in a losing war with the Navy. The Dul fought through most of her engagements, relying on her modified shields and engines to outsmart unsuspecting attackers. But during the final push in orbit of Lagos, the final settlement still under pirate control, the Dul met her match. An Idris frigate had begun a bombardment of the planet’s surface, attempting to soften up the pirates’ defences for the marines. As much as Tando Rackham was a vicious cutthroat, he also considered himself an honourable one. After forcing his crying son and other crewmates onto the Donnager, he loaded the Dul with enough explosives to gouge a small moon in two and set off on a collision course with the frigate. Dav watched from the Cutlass cockpit as the Dul was beset upon by a squadron of Hornets. Bullets peppered every inch of the ship, blasting off chunks of the stubby wing. The quantum drive spooled up, Tando having overridden the safeties in a bid to ram the Idris at high speed, but the engines flickered as they took a beating from missile after missile. The course faltered, veering away from the Idris as the quantum drive fired. That was the last Dav saw his father, and the last time he would see the Dulcinea as a child. With the system taken by the UEE, Tando’s quartermaster Hal Bonny ordered the Donnager’s jump, despite the complaints from the mourning son.

The Dul spent the next couple of years drifting aimlessly through space, it’s only passenger a corpse and a full complement of explosive ordnance. It was a very peculiar salvage for Teresa Gardiner, but she took it, selling both the ship and ordnance for parts. The new owner found they had bitten off more than they could chew with their new fixer-upper and instead decided to scrap it. The Dul, still heavily damaged from its run-in with the UEE, ended up in a scrapyard in the Killian system where it stayed drifting eternally in a ship asteroid field orbiting the star. Ten years passed and nothing changed.

Until an adult Davin Rackham came back into her life, having spent a year long search for the ship after having broken off on his own. Unfortunately there was no father to find but he was content having the ship back. It became a personal mission to restore the Old Dul to what she had been and after expending his inheritance from his father’s plunder, he finally had her sail worthy. The question was, what role would she play? After altercations with the newly minted captain Bonny, Dav had found himself estranged towards the pirate life, but he was no UEE lover either. So he took to smuggling and went about finding himself a crew.