[96] I admit it freely: This sequence is here in large part because I got the part after it done and thought, "That opening needs more punch. It needs... it needs a baysplosion." And because I wanted to give the rest of the Surprise's crew a role to play in shaping the outcome of the fight.

[107] This next segment, to the end of the fighting, is one of the two places in Manhunt where significant portions of text from Secrets were salvaged.

[131] Young Sara takes the place of Katie Miller, the Irish girl in Secrets, primarily because it suddenly occurred to me that this was a great way to establish how she knows (and why she admires) Gil Grissom, and where she got her interest in Vulcan culture; she's the right age, and her traumatic background is straight from the source (although the canonical version didn't run away from a foster home and spend a year living on the streets, as far as I am aware).

[230] The Ripper is a much less cheesy character here - barely a character at all, really - because I wanted to point up just what a badass villain the Butcher is. This guy is a vicious serial killer who's held Saenar in the grip of fear for more than a month, but compared to the Butcher? He's just victim number seven, one and done.

[207] Digestif, from the French: a small drink after dinner.

[322] Years later, Spock would sponsor Sara's application to the Vulcan Science Academy.

[326] Bit of a Spider Jerusalem moment for Dr. Duke here.

[415] Ard: "I think Kei may be a bint here, not a wench."

[432] This is, uh, not actually what Duke meant, but Valeris has to work these things out for herself.

[457] A combat style known as the "jailhouse rock".

[468] It's interesting that the Butcher should specifically call Valeris's face "symmetrical", as its most striking feature is its asymmetry, but perhaps that's simply a measure of how deranged he is at this point.

[505] The part of me that will always be a 12-year-old boy who likes Steven Seagal movies writhes in delight at this sequence.

[631] It's never revealed in this story what the Minister was arrested for, mainly because the principal characters have no reason to know (or really be all that interested in finding out) for the rest of the timeframe the story covers, being busy with the trial and all. Now it can be told: He was PALCON. Asrial let the knowledge of Gryphon's arrival on the planet, and the fact that he was hunting the Butcher, "slip" to several members of her Cabinet, with slightly differing details in each, in order to find out which one was passing information to GENOM, and the happenings in Queen Shiva Park made it clear that the Minister was the leak - as did the fact that he persistently sabotaged the efforts of his own ministry, as well as the Ministry of Public Security, to apprehend HN1 before Gryphon's appearance - because if they had done that, Gryphon wouldn't have shown up to be (as was their plan) killed by HN1.

Of course, GENOM will play this off as overzealous rogue operatives in the Salusian branch of CORPDEF and throw the conspirators under the bus, so that the company remains legally untouchable - but those are the risks when you play footsie with an evil megacorp.

Treason is still a capital offense on Salusia.

[653] It wasn't my specific intention going into the piece, but as it unfolded it became clear to me that it would be much more amusing if Asrial stayed in the background for the entire story, only appearing in the form of that Our Man Flint-style Red Phone Call from the President.

[661] Actually, it does, but they're either pretty lukewarm by Gryphon's standards or too intimate to be used in public.

[669] It seems unlikely that Vulcan has a specific word for 'grog', though.

[701] These officers are all characters who appeared on screen in the original Star Trek. Admiral Fitzpatrick is the flag officer from "The Trouble with Tribbles" ("And remember, Captain - you're in good hands with tribbles"), Commodore Stone is the starbase commander from "Court Martial", and Dr. Boyce was the Enterprise's original ship's doctor in the first pilot, "The Cage".

[735] Apparently in the Split Infinitive universe the Blue Riband is a literal, rather than notional, award.

[737] The Delta IV Survival Medal is a joke award invented by Lt. Finney. There's nothing to survive on Delta IV apart from the Deltans themselves.

[744] Heihachiro Nogura parlayed an offhanded mention in Star Trek: The Motion Picture into an extensive career as an abrasive, antagonistic flag officer in licensed materials throughout the '80s, in one of the greatest beyond-a-modest-canon-appearance flowerings since Boba Fett.

[761] The Commodore conveniently neglects to admit that it's not as if Gryphon (or anyone else in the Golden Age WDF) literally spent the entire 290-odd years of the outfit's history continuously on combat duty. They sometimes took vacations that ran into multiple years.

[803] Also known as "Valeris's True Lies daydream."

[919] CMCPO Radois, last seen as a much more junior petty officer as the fill-in bridge engineer of USS Challenger, has been a "follower" of Gryphon's (rather in the Salusian Navy tradition, aforementioned) for most of his subsequent career. His name - I kid you not - comes from the fact that when I was writing Split Infinitive, I was working at Livingston Enterprises, the company that invented the remote access authentication protocol called RADIUS. He acquires a first name here for the first time. His title, "Chief of the Ship", comes by analogy with the U.S. Navy submarine service's "Chief of the Boat", starships being rather submarine-like in many respects. It indicates that he's the top non-commissioned crewman aboard, for many intents and purposes a member of the command staff.

[944] Jamie's father, Lieutenant Commander Benjamin Finney, faked his own death in an attempt to destroy Jim Kirk's career - resulting in a court-martial presided over by the very same Commodore Stone here in this room. The stigma of her father's crime dogged her own Starfleet career for some time, until she came to the attention of a captain willing to ignore it entirely. (Stone and the Enterprise officers present must have been startled to see an adult Jamie take the stand in Gryphon's defense, when the Jamie they know is in her teens.) This animus on the part of certain of the brass may also explain why she's only a lieutenant despite considerable seniority and two five-year missions as a much-decorated officer of one of the fleet's finest ships.

[950] A nod to Vanessa's fellow "bridge bunnies" from Robotech/Macross.

[952] We can only assume that UF's Sulu and Chekov were gratified to learn that their otherdimensional selves are big-time heroes.

[987] Saavik's origins on a brutal (and illegal) Romulan colony world, the name of that world, and even her half-Romulan genetic heritage at all are entirely non-canonical, though they did turn up in a number of novels back in the day. I adopted them for the UF version because, well, they're interesting. They make her unique and give her a certain strength that can only come from that kind of adversity - and it gave me an opportunity to show how deeply the connection between her and the man who would become her captain runs. Spock (the other Spock) is her mentor, her role model, and in many ways her foster father, but Gryphon is... something else, something for which there may be no words.

[991] The Romulan soldiers are here because the colony has failed - spectacularly, descending into a state of utter atavism - and since it was illegal in the first place, the Romulan government decided to "sanitize" it rather than risk word about it leaking out. It was just their hard luck that the Enterprise happened to swing through the system while they were about it.

[1064] Yes, that's right - the GENOM guy is basically claiming that the Butcher is Yul Brynner's character from Westworld.

[1075] Ard: "You need a tech expert? Shame you couldn't get Zefram Cochrane in on it." She nearly got credited as Dr. Cochrane's travel agent, but the "bint" thing came first in the story. Zed's lines were a true joy to write - especially the crack about Kirk.

[1149] As were Kei's.

[1201] A subconscious holdover from having watched the Butcher's rant live on Network 23. To Kei's guilty conscience, HN1's indictment was damningly accurate, and was what made up her mind to go to the trial and do what she's doing here.

[1238] Spock's closing argument was also huge fun, as was the subsequent conversation he had with Kirk and McCoy.

[1360] Somehow it had to be the Lucky Dragon.

[1372] Indeed she has; Lt. Kanaia Henatiro, RSN (as she was in 2380, when we saw her pulling a shift as a Homeworld aerospace traffic controller), will go on to be known to us, 30 years later, as Admiral Kanaia Kirk, RSN, mother of IPS Challenger navigator Jinto Lin Kirk.

[1420] I'm immensely more satisfied with this Gryphon-Zoner parting than the awkward, stilted affair in Secrets. It's so much more natural, so much more them. Gryphon knows by now that it's useless to try and talk Zoner into sticking around then, and that he'll have to be brought around gradually. (Also, note that Zoner is not simply vanishing, to spend the next eight years pretending he doesn't know any of the old gang. There'll be phone calls, emails - you know, like they were real people with a lot of history whose lives have taken them in separate directions.)

[1448] Geoff suggested this stroke of brutal genius on Spock's part. This is another moment in which my mental Spock is almost entirely Zachary Quinto (although back in the courtroom scene, he's almost all Nimoy).

[1469] Vaughn's cameo is lifted all but verbatim from Secrets.

[1558] Like the Zoner scene, this makes me a lot happier than the way it was left before. They really seem like old lovers with a lot of water under the bridge here, not characters in a sixth-grade production of Romeo & Juliet. Mind you, how they get from here to Kaitlyn in eight years, I don't know, but I don't really feel a great need to at the moment.