{"id":1421,"date":"2021-07-05T12:58:18","date_gmt":"2021-07-05T12:58:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1421"},"modified":"2021-08-20T11:32:24","modified_gmt":"2021-08-20T11:32:24","slug":"draiken-dies-by-adam-troy-castro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1421","title":{"rendered":"Draiken Dies by Adam-Troy Castro"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Draiken Dies<\/em><\/strong> by Adam-Troy Castro (Analog<\/em>, September-October 2020)1<\/sup> is the sixth of his \u2018John Draiken\u2019 stories but one which features another character, Delia Stang, a physically imposing woman with golden skin. She starts the story as a prisoner undergoing interrogation, partially paralysed by a device attached to her neck:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 The voice of her interrogator could be old or young; male, female, or any of the other associated genders; human, or some representative of several possible alien races. The golden woman has her suspicions. All she can determine of its character is a total lack of empathy.
\u201cYour name is Delia Stang.\u201d
\u201cYes.\u201d
\u201cIs that your actual name or just some alias you\u2019re using?\u201d
\u201cYes.\u201d
\u201cI would advise you not to play games with me.\u201d
\u201cI\u2019m not playing games. It\u2019s both my name and my alias. These are two different things.\u201d
\u201cExplain the distinction as you see it.\u201d
\u201cI was not born Delia Stang. It is the name all my associates know, the name I use when I think of myself. I could give you the one my parents gave me, but you are not interrogating a child with no choice over who she chooses to be. You are interrogating a grown woman who can be anyone she wants to be. I have used other aliases, but this is the only name I recognize.\u201d
\u201cIf it suits me, I will call you anything I like and train you to accept it.\u201d
\u201cThat would be exerting your techniques pretty early in the conversation, I think. I\u2019m being cooperative enough. \u201c
\u201cVery well. Your name is Delia Stang. \u201c
\u201cGlad we have that settled.\u201d
\u201cRestrain from sarcasm.\u201d
\u201cThat wasn\u2019t sarcasm.\u201d  p. 173<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This intermittently amusing cat-and-mouse conversation makes up about half the story; the other half is concerned with what Stang was doing in Hallestagh (a dreary town of algae-eaters on the backwater planet of Garelagh) before she was taken prisoner. This latter thread begins with her beating up and seriously injuring a local strongman because of what he did to a young woman called Naline, who Stang then takes under her wing.
The rest of this part of the story oscillates between Stang interacting with Naline (mostly in a rented room above a bar where Stang has her sleep pod) and Stang tramping about the desolate local area (during which she sees an anomalous one hundred metre square indent in the landscape).
Meanwhile the interrogation thread dribbles out a steady stream of backstory, including the revelation that Stang killed Draiken because he asked her too (Stang says that Draiken had grown weary of hiding from the unnamed organisation of which the interrogator is part). Later, Stang is also asked about another man called Jathyx, who Draiken and she earlier freed from a space station.
These two threads merge at the end of the story (spoiler) when Stang is approached by an old man who tells her that she is being \u201ctalked about\u201d in the wider population. We learn at the end of the story that this is Draiken in disguise, and he is passing on a warning that the shadowy organisation is about to attack her room and take her prisoner. The attack scene, with the exploding gel mattress that immobilises many of the attackers, is excitingly done, even though Stang is eventually captured.
The climax of the story (which occurs after Stang is once more visited in her cell by the disguised Draiken) sees Stang tell her interrogator that she is a decoy, that there is an attack vessel in orbit commanded by Jathyx\u2019s mother, and that Draiken is alive\u2014after he \u201cdied\u201d a medical team immediately revived him (this was all done to give Stang a cover story that would stand up against a lie-detector).
At the very end of the piece, after the organisation\u2019s hideout has been taken, Stang tries to get Draiken to return with her to Greeve (they have romantic history), a tropical planet where Draiken used to live\u2014but he elects to continue pursuing the shadowy group that has been hunting him.
This is a pretty well done piece of SF adventure, and one that stands alone quite well considering that it wraps up a plot arc that has spread, presumably, over the previous five stories. That said, I\u2019m not sure that this is really an SF story\u2014more like a story with lots of SF furniture, and you could probably transplant the whole thing into a contemporary Mission Impossible<\/em> movie. Still, not bad.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 20,200 words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. This story won the novella section of the Analog Readers Poll\u2019 (The Analytical Laboratory<\/em>) for 2020.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Draiken Dies by Adam-Troy Castro (Analog, September-October 2020)1 is the sixth of his \u2018John Draiken\u2019 stories but one which features another character, Delia Stang, a physically imposing woman with golden skin. She starts the story as a prisoner undergoing interrogation, partially paralysed by a device attached to her neck:  The voice of her interrogator could […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[347],"tags":[296,217,348,33,29],"class_list":["post-1421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adam-troy-castro","tag-296","tag-3-5","tag-adam-troy-castro","tag-analog","tag-novella"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1421"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1555,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1421\/revisions\/1555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}