Liner Notes for Small Craft Operations

 

Liner Notes for my story Small Craft Operations

It’s the standard life of a free trader. Go to a planet, make plans, the authorities decide to arrest you because you’re doing deals with dodgy people and you have to make a daring escape. Like a day at the office.

This is, I’m afraid, the set up for the first half of the serial, with an action sequence sandwiched in between. To start with Gunn offers Naomi some choices. Stay on the ship, have them sell their data and then be sent safely on their way, or vanish and try and look after themself. Events intervene and Naomi choses to stay on the ship. If Naomi weren’t hurried would they have done that? The point is moot.

Gunn’s not on a state of the art patrol ship to make his escape. But he’s up against a dozy planetary police force that’s been caught napping. So he manages to get away with it, a little bit of lying and misleading, pretending to be a shuttle run by idiots that has blundered into the zone.

Goddata. Naomi knows it’s valuable but has misunderstood the nature of it. It’s not merely data from a god-like intelligence. It’s data about the nature of such a being. As such, much more hazardous.

If I don’t have much to say it’s that almost all of the brainstorming and research and (mostly) imaginative content is in the flight operations. Who does what. What has to be done before something else can be done. How to send communications, how to detect, how to evade. And then almost all of that (or at least all of that that I could use and made sense) is on the page.