Nakmor Drack: The Old Krogan of Clan Nakmor

Nakmor Drack was an aged and grizzled krogan veteran, old even by the standards of his long-lived species. He had spent more than 1,400 years in the Milky Way as a soldier, mercenary, and at times a pirate, and centuries of fighting had left much of his body replaced by cybernetics. When his clan was offered a place on the voyage to Andromeda, Drack signed on, and in the Heleus Cluster he joined the crew of a Pathfinder aboard the Tempest. He was the grandfather of Nakmor Kesh, superintendent of the Nexus.

A warrior of the Rebellions#

Drack was born on Tuchanka around 700 CE and was a young warrior when the Krogan Rebellions began in earnest. He and his krantt accounted for over two hundred kills, a tally that, by Drack's own claim, included three of the then newly founded Council Spectres. He was a descendant of Shiagur, the famed female Warlord of the Rebellions, and bore the clan brands to prove it. He had not been born into Clan Nakmor but chose to join it when he came of age, drawn by the strength of the clan's shaman and the beauty of the Kraddack Wastes.

After the salarian-designed genophage brought the Rebellions to an end, Drack took a new path. Bounties and military bulletins across the centuries that followed showed him working as a pirate and a soldier of fortune for whatever conflicts came his way. Over so much fighting, multiple injuries cost him several limbs and organs, all replaced with cybernetics, until his body was held together as much by machine as by flesh.

The voyage to Andromeda#

Drack's search for one last horizon eventually brought him to the Andromeda Initiative. He did not travel alone but accompanied most of Clan Nakmor on the journey, including his granddaughter Nakmor Kesh and the clan leader Nakmor Morda. He and Kesh maintained a close relationship, exchanging regular messages no matter where their duties in Heleus took them, and Drack's reputation for hardheadedness was so legendary among the clan that Kesh's own stubbornness was attributed to his blood.

He originally traveled aboard the Nexus, the Initiative's central station, but his time there soured. When mutineers threatened the station in its early days, Drack was woken alongside Morda to help crush the uprising. With the rebellion put down through krogan strength, he accompanied Morda into a meeting with the Nexus leadership to claim the political representation the krogan had been promised, only to witness Director Jarun Tann refuse to honor the deal. When tempers flared among the krogan present, Drack kept them in check, intimidating two of his own kind into restraint while urging Morda to heed Kesh's wiser counsel. After the krogan exodus from the Nexus, they founded their own colony, and Drack threw himself into defending it.

Aboard the Tempest#

Drack first encountered a Pathfinder on Eos at a kett base, announcing himself by hurling a dead wraith through a window. Wary of the Initiative because of how the Nexus had treated the krogan, he warned that their inexperience would get them killed and declined an early offer to join the Pathfinder's team. Later, after the activation of a Remnant vault had made Eos more hospitable, he was found fighting kett at a future outpost site, and judging that he and the Pathfinder worked well together, he formally joined the crew. He took up residence in the kitchen of the Tempest, though he could be found elsewhere aboard the ship as well.

Drack carried old grievances openly. He spoke bitterly of how the turians had been rewarded by the Citadel Council for crippling the krogan with the genophage while he had received only a medal, a memento an old friend had fashioned from scrap and pinned to his chest. He was acquainted with Vetra Nyx through Kesh, the two having a long-running joke at his expense after Vetra outmaneuvered him over supplies during the Nexus construction. After learning of the kett practice of exaltation, Drack warned that the Archon, the kett leader, was too dangerous to leave alive, urging swift and overwhelming action against him; depending on the Pathfinder's outlook, this counsel might be embraced or tempered toward less brutal solutions.

Survival and legacy#

For all his hardness, Drack carried deep wounds. After his granddaughter Kesh asked the Pathfinder to look out for him, he was found in the medical bay being warned by the doctor Lexi that his redundant organs were beginning to fail and that he needed to be more careful. He explained that an arm, his side, a hip, and part of a leg had been replaced by prosthetics, with a thread balanced across his spine to ease the strain. He recounted having fought through the Krogan Rebellions and watched his culture disintegrate, only to be brought down at last by a single fool with a pack of frag grenades.

After that injury, Drack confessed, his body had repeatedly rejected the implants meant to keep him functional, leaving his prosthetics out of sync and causing him constant pain. He fell into a depression and lost all sense of purpose, nearly succumbing to it, until a shaman placed the newborn Kesh in his arms and told him she was worthless and bound to die. The responsibility of proving that wrong gave Drack a renewed reason to live and pulled him from his despair, and the bond with his granddaughter remained the steadying force of his long life.