Liner Notes for Unbroken Vows
The liner notes for my story Unbroken Vows
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Trust and betrayal. This is a very minor theme so far in the Deep Patrol stories and maybe it shouldn’t have been! After all they confront threats that might kill them all the time, and every now and then much worse dangers (entities that can corrupt the future or past, control minds, destroy language, endanger the fundamental structure of the universe etc.) You need people beside you who you can trust. You need people behind you who you can trust. You need to trust the people who send you out there and the people you send to places. You need to trust them to do their job, and to do what needs doing when everything goes wrong.
And when they can’t fulfill your trust you need to pick up the pieces afterwards.
This is an off-speed story, where I pause to give you some background before then hammering home a change in status quo. It’s maybe the last spot where I can crowbar some heavy-handed world-building. Or I’m just hacking my way to the situation for the finale, take your pick. In any case I put in two load-bearing beams of the Deep Patrol that previously were only sketched.
One, which gets picked up in the next story, is about organisation and operations. The Deep Patrol are not controlled by Artificial Super Intelligent Oracles, or at least not directly. They exist in this universe (see A Robot Told Us To Do It). But to put them at the helm of the Patrol would make it a different series. E E “Doc” Smith sort of went down that route with his Lensman series, and because of that it headed towards an ending. So it’s not that you can’t do MAXIMUM SPACE OPERA (my mission statement for the Deep Patrol) with that concept. It’s more that the closer you get to the Visualisation Of The Cosmic All the less interesting it gets. Our all-seeing Mentor ought to be sending our protagonists down the simplest and easiest route to their final destination. And that means determining the final resolution and plotting my way there. Sorry, that’s not the plan.
Though the Deep Patrol ensures there are humans (or equivalent) in bottleneck command and analysis positions, it still has more powerful artificial data support than we do here in the 21st Century. Gunn works out his priorities and they’ll offer him organisational suggestions, based on the people and resources he has at hand. It doesn’t make it easier to determine what needs to be done but it does make it quicker to plot how to do it when you have.
That’s the theory anyway.
The other part is the wedding. This is a bit of Star Trek that sort of interests me, that Star Fleet is not just a career, but an entire life. People meet and get married and live aboard ship. (I should note that, for example, my Aunt and Uncle met while both serving in the RAF and continued to work there, in varying capacities, for decades. So it’s not just a fictional thing.) Gunn as commander of a semi-permanent station is also the civil administrator (and chief priest). Previously, commanding a cutter with a crew of 5 to 10, or a squadron in war time, this has not been a major part of his role. It still isn’t here, a few hundred people on a research outpost. But he’s got to do something about it now. He’s growing into the role.
Which considering the giant security failure that just happened on his watch may not be his role for long.
The Shattered Realm was the loser in the TetraHedron in terms of use as a setting. A swamp full of ruins and monsters, with a fallen civilisation that knows more about the strangeness and secrets than they ought, it ought to have been a fun pulp playground. But for monsters and adventure Silence was more interesting, for politics and negotiations Novapolis has it beaten, and for weirdness the Unbounded Plain took the prize. Worse still, if they dug up the right artefacts it would give up large segments of the plot. So it was stuck being a stalled archaeological dig.
Which made it the perfect place to hide the betrayal and secrets, the boring quadrant where nothing happened! Ah yes, it’s almost like I plan this stuff.
So what was down there? Tusk of course is cognate with Fang, the name they pulled out of Silence. Yes, the different universes behind the dimensional gates are linked. Of course they are. Gunn’s had to pull out of two of them now and more, he’s going to face consequences for it. And to deal with that he’s going to have trust the people around him even more, while doing a security audit right down to the ground.
Tough situation.
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