Dejean
Dejean is the fifty-nine-year-old captain of the arkship Diligent — the professional shipboard counterweight to Josias’s politics and Ellie’s field command. She keeps a generation vessel runnable through settlement drain, Gath refit, Traveler crossfire, and the final ZPZ-enabled flight from Dolod.
Command versus ownership
Dejean is the arkship’s captain, not its owner. Josias holds the ship as political and economic asset; Dejean holds the bridge problem of entropy drives, crew, and hull survival in a Cluster already owned by Celestials. That split matters when most original crew leave to settle Hafnir and Otylia suggests a Gath refit crew — Dejean must absorb new personnel, new mission profiles, and Finn’s long campaigns without losing the arkship’s identity as a human vessel rather than a client yacht.
Early reclamation at Kinnox already shows the political environment: an Imperial Celestial Navy escort that shoots up ships’ entropy drives while the Ilum (chartered from the Enfoe dynasty) recovers the Diligent. From that point Dejean’s job is continuous negotiation between Dominion law, Traveler markets, and liberation-adjacent adventure.
Campaigns: ZPZ, Kingsnest, Dolod
After Gyvoy trades a Terrik Papuan ZPZ generator for Diligent entropy drives, the ship becomes a true deep-space actor under Dejean’s command. Its runs take in Hoa Quinzu and Kajval, with ghosts, saberstones, and the Celestial dropship theft alongside Elsbeth McQuillan; Kingsnest for the Archimedes Engine OS; multi-decade gate hops; and the late return to a Kelowan system already in crisis. Ellie and Finn run ground and interface ops; Dejean’s domain is whether the hull can still fight, flee, or dock when they come home.
Endgame: ZPZ trigger and Capo Frois
At Dolod, Finn returns with an anchor ship crammed into a hangar after Engine work and Gyvoy’s betrayal. Ellie reports the forced induction-pad interface and memory wipe. Dejean triggers the ZPZ generator; the Archimedes Engine transfers momentum to the Diligent via the anchor ship, accelerating the arkship at extreme gee (~10,000 G) out of the engagement envelope before Commander Radwarno’s capture order can land.
The flight toward Capo Frois is both escape and political admission of guilt in Helena-Thyra’s framing — enough for her to issue a kill order. Dejean’s final on-page importance is that single command decision: ship survival over waiting for Celestial due process. She embodies the professional baseline-human captain caught between oratory revolution and post-human empire — and choosing the hull.
