In the wake of a deal gone bad, no-one better stand in the way of Cornelius Barden when he’s out to get back what’s owed him…

Writer’s Commentary

With Payback I wanted to write a story with a central character who was a swine of the highest order, yet one who you still wanted to come through in the end. Cornelius Barden was born with that rationale in mind and he’s a character I’d love to come back to at some point because he was someone I’d intended for a longer run than he actually got. The story’s set on Karis Cephalon, the planet that’s the setting for the Inquisitor game. Originally, Gav, myself and a few other friends had planned to write a joint anthology of stories set on Karis Cephalon that would be linked by various themes, geographic areas and characters. Unfortunately, with the closure of Inferno! Magazine, that never came to pass, though the idea’s still hanging around and refuses to go away. This story was also an attempt to try out a radically different style of writing, as I’d been reading a lot of James Ellroy at the time and I loved his stripped down, bare prose that really captured the raw character of the time and characters. I wanted to try and capture that same feeling as I felt it really suited the feel I felt appropriate to the story. It’s a pretty brutal story and there’s not much light in it, but sometimes you need that real darkness for the heroes to shine.