Born from Fire: Tales from The Longview - Episode 1 Page 9

CHAPTER 7

  This Criminal

  THERE WAS DEATH. And now there isn’t.

  This criminal wakes—but the waking is all wrong. Sunlight blinds its eyes, and it cries from fear and shock, and arms hold it, and a voice comforts it.

  This criminal has a body it cannot control. It cannot speak. It cannot ask.

  It remembers what it was, but that is no longer what it is.

  Yet the voice comforts it. The arms hold it.

  After a while, this criminal stops fighting.

  And it sleeps.

  Afterword

  THIS SERIES WASN’T born in the usual manner. Most of the time, if I come up with a series idea, it’s because I sat down and intentionally brainstormed concepts until I figured one out.

  But I would have sworn the only stories I was going to write in Settled Space would have Cadence Drake as the main character.

  Here’s how I tripped over The Longview.

  I was writing Warpaint, the sequel to Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood. And I was having an awful time getting the scale of the ship in my head. I’d done a ship layout on quad paper, and had my scale figured out. I knew where things were. But the drawing was about seven inches long from nose to tail, and Cady’s ship was about 280 feet (about 87 meters) from nose to tail.

  I was having trouble looking at that tiny line drawing and visualizing Cady and her crew moving around inside the ship, and, as frequently happens when I’m struggling with a story problem, I had this crazy idea.

  I thought, I can just build the damn thing in Minecraft, and go inside it and walk around and then I’ll know what it’s like in there.

  So I figured one block for one meter and I carefully laid out the ship, following my schematic. Built the whole thing, furnished it, filled it with secret areas and notes to myself about who went where (stuck on signs.)

  And then, because it was so incredibly useful to stand in the middle of the ship and know exactly what my characters could see and do, where they could go, and how they could get there, I built the other two ships from the Cadence Drake series so far.

  And then I built the Bailey’s Irish Space Station for the upcoming third novel in the series, The Wishbone Conspiracy.

  I was hooked, you see. Having these places that I could walk around in was fun...but better than being fun, the places I'd built were talking to me. They were telling me stories.

  But then I ran out of things to build.

  The little voice in my head whispered, How about building an ancient, mysterious spaceship from the days before TFN travel, when people were trying to colonize space in giant sleeper ships? Just for fun. No pressure. You aren’t going to use it. You’ll just build it.

  I may have an odd idea of fun, but I started building that mammoth ship. And floating through its vast reaches, feeling the dark and the weight around it, I realized its first inhabitants never reached their destination. I understood that when it was salvaged, the person who bought it and retrofitted it was going to have to be someone odd. Someone with a secret plan, and a hidden past.

  Someone with a use for a ship that big that had absolutely nothing to do with the ship’s apparent purpose.

  Suddenly I wasn’t building a spaceship for fun anymore. I had to know what was going on.

  And here we are. I hope you’ll accompany me through the next episode, when we’ll rejoin the crew of The Longview as they deal with the extraordinary interstellar ruckus caused by The Selling of Suzee Delight... and look a little deeper into the lives of the folks from this tale.

  Holly Lisle

  Thursday, April 3, 2014

  This is the complete first chapter from

  TALES FROM THE LONGVIEW: Episode 2

  The Selling of Suzee Delight

  CHAPTER 1

  Transcript: Suzee Delight — Preliminary Death Sentencing Interview #1