Mutiny and Murder
by
"Lord of the Flies" meets "The Expanse" in this harrowing tale of survival, betrayal, and the fragile line between civilization and savagery ...
Inspired by the true story of a 17th-century Dutch Shipwreck …
Two thousand light-years from Earth, the ultimate survival game has begun.
The Dauntless was supposed to be a beacon of hope—a state-of-the-art colony ship carrying four hundred souls to a lush new world. But beneath the starched uniforms and corporate protocols of the Westmoreland Corporation, a rot is spreading.
First Mate Adrian Jacobs is drowning in resentment. Chief Engineer Jeronimus Cornelis is a charismatic sociopath, with a silver tongue and a taste for power. Together, they whisper of a secret cargo—a fortune in Cortium-7—and a mutiny that will turn the ship into their private kingdom.
But space has no mercy for the greedy. When a desperate gamble to seize the ship ends in a catastrophic collision, Dauntless is left a mangled wreck on a desolate, twin-asteroid system. Abandoned by their Captain in a search for rescue, the survivors are left in "The Graveyard"—a world of oppressive heat, bone-chilling shadows, and a rapidly vanishing water supply. And as the thin line between order and anarchy vanishes, Jeronimus rises not as a savior, but as a tyrant.
In the cold vacuum of P-48, water is life, power is absolute, and the greatest threat may not be the environment after all—but the person standing next to you.
This tale is loosely based on the true saga of the Batavia, a Dutch ship that wrecked off the coast of Australia in 1629.
Editors:
Cover Artists:
Genres:
Word Count: 51,000
Setting: Asteroid
Languages Available: English
Word Count: 51,000
Setting: Asteroid
Languages Available: English
ORDERLY THIRD CLASS Marty O’Rourke squinted at the jagged crater rim. Cosmic rays from the blue star on the horizon flared against his visor, baking his suit. He had throttled the cooling system to conserve power; now, sweat stung his eyes and streamed down his face behind the reinforced glass of his helmet. How did I end up in this mess?
I better get as much ice as possible and haul it back to camp, toss it into the hopper as soon as I can. Everybody in the habitation modules was thirsty, and getting thirstier. And now, O’Rourke could feel his own throat getting dry.
READ MOREHe avoided getting too close to the ice because, while it was 45 degrees Celsius in the light, it was negative 41 in the shade. His suit could adapt to the sudden drop, but that would drain the battery. So O’Rourke kept his distance, standing back and using a hand-held mining laser to cut up chunks of ice, which the bot, known as “Theo,” picked up and tossed into the back of the buggy.
It was hard work keeping the transformer tanks as full as possible. O’Rourke knew they would run dry soon if they didn’t hurry. I have to stay focused.
He glanced up and found himself staring at the other asteroid, the one that dominated the sky above the horizon. It was the twin of the one he was standing on. The permanent-daylight hemisphere of P-47 stared back, its rocky face pockmarked with craters and crisscrossed with mysterious ridgelines and mountains. The stars behind the small rocky sphere slowly revealed themselves as P-47 pivoted around its slightly larger neighbor in a never-ending circular dance. The two asteroids were so close they were almost touching; it almost seemed to O’Rourke that if he lifted up a gloved hand, he might touch the surface of the secondary. In fact, the other orb was a mere 230 or so kilometers away from where he was standing. Blue starlight bounced off its massive face and back to P-48, increasing its surface temperature by another degree or two, and making O’Rourke sweat just a little bit more inside the claustrophobic suit.
He turned back to the vein of ice that hugged the ground in the frigid shade underneath the crater rim, fired the laser again, and started cutting up another chunk while Theo stood by, waiting patiently.
A sudden flash of light made him look up. There was some object above the horizon – and then the light flashed off it again. O’Rourke could not make out what it was. He stared. Whatever it was, it was hurtling through space in what looked like a corkscrew trajectory – and headed right in his direction. When it got close, he could see it was roughly spherical.
O’Rourke turned around and watched the object plunge into the surface behind him, sending a large cloud of dust up into the vacuum.
“Theo,” he said.
“Yes?” the bot asked.
“How far away is that object? And what is it?”
“The nature of the object is unknown,” the bot said. “Its distance is about 500 meters.”
O’Rourke pulled out his binoculars and got a visual. One end of the sphere was sticking up out of the gray regolith. He still couldn’t figure out what it might be.
Five hundred meters was close enough to check it out. So he put away the laser, told the bot to get in the copilot seat, and sat down behind the wheel. He fired up the buggy’s engine, got it into gear, and goosed the throttle.
As he spun the buggy around he shook his head, the sweaty hair clinging to his forehead, and asked himself for the umpteenth time –
How, again, did I end up in this predicament?
COLLAPSEMy writing technique for Wreck of the Dauntless includes “historical allegory,” in which fictional narratives, characters, and settings are inspired by actual historical figures and events. It is not new to science fiction; for example, Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” is based on the Roman Empire and "Star Trek" was inspired by the British Navy. However, my book is the first to transform the historical event that was the Batavia shipwreck of 1629 into a fictional narrative. I chose this historical event because I believe it to be uniquely interesting in the annals of history, and because the maritime aspect of it is transferable to an outer-space setting, basically using spaceships instead of sailing vessels.
To that end, many of the characters in my book are based on real historical figures. In my book, a main protagonist is Captain Francisco Pelzard of the Dauntless. In real life, Francisco Pelsaert was the admiral of the Batavia expedition. The villain of my book, Jeronimus Cornelis, is a character based on a real-life historical figure of the same name, who was a senior officer and mutineer on the Batavia. Into this mix I added many fictional characters and events in order to suit the science-fiction narrative. I created a protagonist named Marty O’Rourke, who does not have a real-life counterpart in the true Batavia story. And while many pivotal events in the book have historical counterparts, others do not. For those readers who are familiar with the Batavia story, you can probably spot which is which.
My task was to transform the true story of the Batavia shipwreck of 1629 into a science fiction novel. This involved changing a seafaring narrative into a spacefaring one. For example, in the true story, the mutineers on board the Batavia decided to alter the ship's course in the middle of the night in order to separate the ship from her convoy, thus giving them an opportunity to seize the ship by force without interference. They were able to, because the mutineers were senior officers who had access to the ship's wheel in the middle of the night. When morning came, Batavia was truly isolated on the Indian ocean. Before the mutineers could seize the ship, though, it struck a reef.
In my book, I had to change this plot point into a science fiction setting. I did this by envisioning that the Dauntless would be connected to Earth via a communications system or "Comm." The mutineers wanted to sever this connection, so they changed the ship's course so that it entered a solar system dominated by a neutron star, whose magnetic field jammed the Comm.
In the true Batavia story, the course change caused the collision with the uncharted reef, after which the passengers and crew ended up on a nearby desert island. In my story, the new course results in Dauntless being struck by an asteroid, which forces the crew to crash-land the ship on a binary asteroid system, the equivalent of a desert island in space.
I wanted to retain the narrative of the mutiny leading directly to the disaster and the shipwreck. In both cases, it was the hubris and greed of the mutineers that led them to ignore the danger of steering the ship into uncharted territory. They disregarded the risk in pursuit of personal gain, and as a result, many innocent people would suffer. In this way, I attempt to preserve a kind of historical "echo" -- the reader encounters a plot point based in reality, but in a science fiction setting. The technique aims to make the story feel more "real." The motivations of the characters feels plausible, because it is, in fact, based on something that really happened. There are many more examples of this throughout the book.
