In the story ‘Marion and The Children’ when Marion was escaping from the Anazide V Military Front with the children of the diplomats held hostage by the same terrorist group, one of the children had a very neat pair of wings that he used to get him up the stairs from the service level of the space station to the shuttle hangar.

Orissan Medal of Honour is the pay off from that small part of the previous story. Marion and Kristoph visit Orissa, the home planet of the boy with wings. I gave quite a bit of thought to how a society where people fly might look. Examples in science fiction aren’t altogether helpful. About the best of them are the Hawkmen of Sky City in the 1980 Flash Gordon film. The Orissans are much like them in appearance. But their city is more like Manhattan in reverse. If people fly, not walk, then their ‘ground floor’ is the penthouse. The ground is a far off place they rarely visit. The roofs of the skyscrapers are their parks and gardens. The spaces between buildings are their highways which they travel either on wing or in the graceful gondolas beneath cigar shaped balloons as described. Just use your imagination about how beautiful that would look and how it would be to travel in it.

The object of the visit, apart from describing a world and a species quite unlike Human or Time Lord, was, of course, to recognise Marion’s efforts with the children and award her a medal. Hasn’t she come along since she was that timid young woman on Leeds railway station? In these short stories there isn’t really room to expand much further. Orissa gets a more complete treatment in a Theta Sigma story, The Orac of Orissa III in which a dark secret at the bottom of the skyscrapers is revealed as well as some more about Orissan life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Gordon_%28film%29

http://www.pearsecom.co.uk/Marion/87marionandthechildren.htm

http://www.pearsecom.co.uk/thetasigma/100/134oracoriss.htm