Davian Quintaine

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Name: Davian Quintaine
Age: 29
Parents: Vaude & Marisa Quintaine
Siblings: Marcus Quintaine


Where to begin...

I suppose the first time I realised I wanted to live my life in the vastness of space was back home, on Planet Cambridge, where my brother Marcus and I used to spend hours watching the ships come and go through the clear azure skies overhead. As children, we went off-world very rarely; usually once a year to make the short trip to New London where my grandparents had retired. We were fascinated by the seemingly limitless possibilities of space, the freedom it bestowed and the idea that any man with a ship and a few credits could go out and make his fortune amongst the stars.

During our early childhood, our father spent almost all of his time off-world. He was a foreman for BMM, and from what I can recall, a man of some importance. I remember he used to come home with fantastic tales of alien species and pirate armadas, which we listened to with un-blinking attention. He was larger-than-life in our eyes, whose bravery and command of respect was the pinnacle of what we wanted to achieve. Our mother was a polar opposite in most respects. She was quietly-spoken and intellectual, which suited her role as a mid-level researcher at the Cambridge Research Institute. She used to sit in the garden, surrounded by plants, and softly hum to herself for hours. I remember that, on occasion, my father would return and a blazing argument would ensue in which my mother would accuse my father of ‘desecrating the natural order of things’ and ‘violating nature’. We never understood at the time that they were heading down very different paths.

When I was 11, my brother Marcus (who was 12) and I were sat down by our mother and told that, for reasons she couldn’t explain, our father was not coming home. He had decided to leave Cambridge permanently and re-settle in the Dublin system where he had worked most of his professional life. She seemed un-emotional at first, but in the months that followed we would hear her sobbing and rambling to herself late at night. She seemed to be coming un-glued, and her erratic behaviour eventually led to her dismissal from the Institute and a series of psychological evaluations being ordered. It was during this time that my grandparents up-rooted themselves from New London and came to Cambridge in order to instil some sense of normality into our already tumultuous childhood. Within months of our grandparents arriving, my mother announced she was going to ‘find herself’ and that we were to stay with our grandparents until she returned. The last time we saw her, she gave us each a kiss on the forehead and told us to be good, then turned and walked up the ramp into the ship destined for parts unknown.

As we grew older, our desire for knowledge about our parent’s whereabouts became ever stronger. Marcus once held our grandfather up against a wall and threatened to kill him unless he divulged their respective whereabouts. On the eve of my 17th birthday, a representative of the Bretonian Armed Forces arrived at our door and asked to speak to the closest relative of Marisa Quintaine. My brother and I refused to be harried out of the room whilst the officer stated his business, and stood in silence as he informed us of her death at the hands of the Bretonian Armed Forces. It became clear as he spoke, that our mother has become involved in some kind of ecological terrorist cult known as the ‘Gaians’. We finally understood why her relationship with our father had disintegrated, after all, how could she live with a man who split nature open to harvest the innards in the name of profit and expansion? During the fallout from my mother’s terrorist revelations, a man in a suit arrived at our door asking to speak to Vaude Quintaine. I informed him that my father had long-since re-located to the Dublin system. He gave me a puzzled look and informed me that a woman named Talia Kerrigan has given him a similar story some time ago when he visited Graves Station in the Dublin system. A man named Vaude Quintaine had left his fiance and small child to visit family on Cambridge and never returned. The man informed me that he was a representative of BMM, investigating an apparent fraud operation aboard Graves Station, and my father was somehow connected. Given his dubious behaviour, it became clear that he was more than partially involved. An investigation had uncovered a massive scam to defraud BMM of millions in credits and minerals, and funnel it to a group known as ‘The Mollys’ who, in exchange, were to provide a safe haven for those responsible. In all the time I spent on Cambridge after that, I never heard anything more about the investigation or what became of my father.

On my brother’s 18th birthday a few weeks later, he announced he was leaving to find our father and reclaim the little family we had left. The last I heard he was seen in a bar somewhere in the Dublin system. I haven’t heard from him since, and that was 8 years ago. I spent the next few years tending to my ailing grandparents until they both died a few days apart, shortly after my 22nd birthday. With nothing keeping me on Cambridge, and a modest inheritance from my former guardians, I purchased a small freighter and headed out into the blackness of space to make those childhood dreams, faded as they were, a reality.

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