A Century ago, the expedition aboard the Faraday disappeared mysteriously, amidst rumors of a mutiny. Today, Arbiter has found the Faraday’s survivors on a forgotten planet, but these are children of the mutineers. They’re guarding a secret they’ll give anything — or take anything — to protect; and they’ve set their sights on Arbiter.

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Listen to the free podcast: Part One | Part Two | Part Three

This episode has also been novelized and is available in multiple formats, including iBooks, Nook and Kindle. Details here.

This script was written in September, 2000 — about 45 pages of it on a single day the weekend before it was performed! It only got written because there was a hole in the schedule for the main stage at Farpoint 2000. The year before, my friend John Vengrouskie had organized a live radio play in which I’d performed; and Bill Pullman had performed the following Christmas in an adaptation of It’s a Wonderful Life at the Kennedy Center, which was aired on network television. Pullman’s pages flying as he dropped his script inspired me to try live radio! So I took the characters from my (already drafted) novel Taken Liberty and worked them into the outline for a rejected novel, and I had a sixty-minute radio script. There was no series title. We just performed it. The audience liked it, and applauded when Paul Balze asked them, “Do ya want us to do more of these?”

Thus was born The Arbiter Chronicles as a radio series. In my experience, there never was so fortuitous a hole in a convention schedule.

CAST:

Announcer – Paul Balze
Aide – Steven H. Wilson
Fournier – Paul Balze
Atal – Dave Keefer
Carson – Scott Farquhar
Kaya – Beatrice Kondo
Cernaq – Renfield
Metcalfe – Steven H. Wilson
Trace – Renee Wilson
L’lanck – Paul Balze
Andrews – Andrew Bergstrom
Dawson – Bill Weithers
Aer’La – June Swords
Captain Trat – Scott Farquhar
Faulkner – Cindy Shockey
Technician – Cindy Woods

Directed by Steven H. Wilson
Music – Scott D. Farquhar