Liner Notes for Close Manoeuvring
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We’re back again with Thomas Gunn, space ranger, once of the Deep Patrol. No longer though, now he’s astrogator aboard the merchant ship Clear Tangent. How did he get here. Was he fired, did he retire, resign? I regret to say that I’m not answering that right now. This is a serial, so some bits of information are being kept back for later episodes. That’s just the way it is.
The point, such as it is, is that Tommy Gunn may have left the Deep Patrol. He may be trying to lay low, to just have a normal life. A normal career. But he’s not good at that. In TetraHedron we made the point that he’s died and been cloned and had his memories restored. And every time he made himself more of a patroller, streamlining himself to travel through space and solve problems on weird planets.
So he can’t take a normal, planet-bound job. (He can’t find his way to a pleasant retirement place, one where they have embraced post-scarcity economics so he can live a life of ease and luxury). He’s got to be out on the space lanes. And not a simple, regular route, but a merchant-adventurer, seeking cargoes and information beyond normal bounds.
He's also still a knight-errant. When Naomi asks for help he hesitates. Or does he? He’s looking for a reason to rescue them, looking for someone to save. The goddata makes his path obvious. Yet I think we know he’s going to try and help Naomi. He’s got a responsibility to his crew, and maybe, maybe won’t take the same risks. Still, Naomi’s coming off the Deadnought, one way or another.
Ah the Deadnought. A haunted-house gothic-tomb abandoned spaceship. Has this been done before? Perhaps so which is why I have it as the backdrop. An archaeology site, a salvage project. Disreputable people digging up forbidden knowledge, resurrecting dangerous old technology. Was it spooky? The problem is, Gunn’s seen this stuff before, he’s not afraid of a mere hundred-year-old kilo-death site. They’re the sort of thing he sees before breakfast on a slow Tuesday.
Maybe that should be something to be afraid of.
I’m telling the story and I’m leaving some dangling threads. There’s twelve more stories to go in the sequence, so you shouldn’t be surprised at that. Anyway, you’ve got the new status quo, Thomas Gunn as astrogator aboard the merchant-adventurer Clear Tangent. He’s trying to do a professional job of it. But the ship and crew aren’t professional, not to his standards. And nor is he, he’s taking unnecessary risks to help a stranger.
A stranger who has something important and valuable. How did we get here? What happens next? To be continued.
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