Liner Notes for A Higher Authority

The liner notes for my story A Higher Authority

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In Star Trek whenever a superior officer turns up it’s bad news. They order people to do things they don’t want to at best; at worst they have terrible agendas of their own. I averted that in the first volume of the Deep Patrol; Captain Angela Tiger is competent, smart and backs Gunn even when he does something that is not her style.

But we’re back with that idea with Captain Krull. Imagine joining the Deep Patrol and thinking the organisation chart is the important thing! I mean someone has to do the logistics work. Still.

Of course Gunn and his team can run rings around a bureaucracy. When you train people to deal with strange governments and cultures, to be able to navigate unknown societies, dealing with your own boss is your normal work on easy mode. A cultural contact expert is going to be able to make their own organisation sit up and beg. Except, one assumes, that their leaders will have been through the same training and experiences. Maybe I should write that story one day, everyone wants to read my space opera bureaucratic skirmish.

Betrayal and plots in Novapolis; I’ve tried to make it a techno-cyberpunk-renaissance world, and part of that is inviting people over for a nice dinner and then just murdering them. In fact that’s something that happens in a lot of history but they had a higher standard of nicer time than most periods and so the murder comes as an especially odd counterpoint.

Quintillius is dead I’m afraid. People are dying. This has always been a possibility in the Deep Patrol stories, where death is not that serious. Quintillius will have been backed up somewhere and a resurrection and rehabilitation unit will be notified. But now we don’t have him, and Gunn won’t have him. This is probably a bigger problem than whatever’s coming down the line from higher command.

Anyway, big problems all around. Flyers have weirdly vanished into the dimensional gate from Silence, Prosperine has defected to the Shattered Realm and now someone is using gravitational energy to manipulate the gate in Novapolis. Worse still, it seems one of the Guardians is behind it.

It’s almost like I’m building towards a climax.