Novel Hook: Sundiver
Banner art by digital artist Kaj de Jong.
This is the first chapter (the "hook") of a novel I am currently editing. It goes by the name "Sundiver" only because the final title has not been chosen; I assign a simple and non-final "project name" to every novel project I start.
How the book opens represents my desire to follow Michael Stackpole's "Get in late, get out early" advice about deciding where a story begins and ends. We find our mercenary heroes already weeks into their bounty-hunting operation, just when they make their first big break.
I keep this post up to date with the state of the chapter in the master manuscript. The most recent time I made changes to this chapter was in January 2022.
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As Captain Nicholas Madoc stepped through the airlock and boarded pirate starship Piranha for the first time, he couldn’t help but notice the signs of a vessel in poor repair. Past the looming figures of the boarding party who’d preceded him, wiring and flexible piping bulged out of gaps in the bulkhead paneling like the guts of a disemboweled beast. The stained deck plating clearly hadn’t been properly cleaned in years, perhaps decades.
Though Nicholas was annoyed by the disorder visible along the long corridor running from port to starboard, the silent aether proved far more troublesome. Beyond the single encrypted band used by his troopers, his earpiece didn’t pick up any other signal activity. Even the systems status channels were silent. Those signals, a vessel’s technological heartbeat, should have indicated the health of critical machinery. In their absence, and without even the harsh squawking alert indicating widespread system failures, Nicholas felt like he was boarding a long-dead ghost ship, not a notorious prowler of the spacelanes.
With a grimace of annoyance, he consoled himself in the fact that the crew who had let their ship fall into such disrepair were all dead or in custody. It was a very un-Christian thing to want them to suffer for their crimes against technology as much as for their crimes against humanity, but only one of these things created an immediate problem for Nicholas and his spacers.
Waving off the military-attention stance of the troopers, Nicholas gestured toward the imposing figure of the boarding team commander. “Good work, Mr. Chayka.” He would be only too happy to sign off on the boarding team’s sizable close-combat bonuses. “Any casualties?”
“Two of ours were wounded taking the bridge, but they’ll both live.” Chayka’s deep, precise voice carried through his sealed helmet easily, without the use of the suit’s speakers.
Nicholas nodded, hoping his relief didn’t show on his face. He’d learned long ago that a good commander never seemed emotionally effected, even by good news. “Your initial report said you took Captain Reuter alive?”
“Someone claiming to be Reuter, Captain. Description matches well enough.”
“Take me to where you’re holding Reuter.” No other pirate in the Strand could convincingly impersonate Bart Geiszler’s favorite lieutenant, despite Chayka’s misgivings.
With a curt gesture, Chayka instructed most of subordinates to help unload the equipment and personnel from the pinnace, then led the way down the narrow corridor. A single trooper fell into step behind Nicholas, bracketing the mercenary captain between two corridor-filling armored titans.
Chayka led Nicholas to deck three amidships, where a small skipper’s duty office was squeezed into the space between the hardened command center and a lift well. Another combat trooper stood on guard in front of the closed office compartment, his suit-linked automatic railgun pointed safely toward the deck. A pirate lay in the corridor, his body riddled with tiny blood-ringed holes. Chayka stepped over the corpse without so much as a glance, and Nicholas did his best to do the same, avoiding the empty, staring eyes of the dead man.
Without waiting for the command to do so, Chayka unlocked the door and tromped in. Nicholas pressed himself to the bulkhead to let the armored man who had been following him go in as well, then activated the audio recorder in his pocket prior to making his own entrance.
Everything in the skipper’s office gleamed, as if the whole ship’s worth of regular cleanings had been focused on this one place. The small compartment seemed even smaller since hand-installed fixtures choked the room, taking up most of its free deck and bulkhead space. In addition to the standard stamped-metal desk and high-backed chair, both bolted to the deck, the pirates had crammed a collapsible acoustic cleanser, a food-processor unit, a sanitary stall, and most of the other fixtures of a junior officer’s cabin into the tiny compartment. A beige hammock hung from the overheads in lieu of a proper bunk. Most of the additions were partly recessed into haphazardly cut openings in the bulkhead paneling. A single framed art print behind the desk was the space’s only ornamentation.
The skipper sat at the gravitational center of this unorthodox compartment. Though now a prisoner under armed guard, a woman Nicholas recognized immediately as the pirate Tavia Reuter leaned back into the padding of her sturdy chair, hands folded behind her head and eyes closed, as if she had just been daydreaming and hadn’t noticed the thundering entrance of her visitors. Reuter possessed the elfin build and bone structure of someone who’d grown up in a low-gravity environment, but without the stature that usually accompanied them. Her dusky skin lacked any visible tattoos, piercings, or scars, which was almost unheard-of among Strand pirates, and she kept her dark hair tied back into a single thick braid which hung down her back, counter to the usually savage styles of the region’s underground. The only thing halfway piratical about her appearance was the garish green Kearsa-leather coat draped over her shoulders, its sleeves emblazoned with the chain-draped avian insignia of her piratical master.
Nicholas glanced down to the screen strapped to his left wrist, where what little he knew about Reuter was summarized. She had no official datasphere footprint, having apparently grown up among the pirates. Climbing the hierarchy of thieves to become the favorite protégé of the local warlord Bart Geiszler, she’d come far in her short life. Most of the Cardonan pirate-watchers estimated that she was about twenty-five T-years old.
Nicholas wondered why, despite the traditions of Strand pirates, she had allowed herself to be taken alive. Most preferred a death in battle, hoping this would make their villainous careers more memorable to posterity. Building a legend was at least as important to any Strand pirate as building a fortune, so why had this upwardly mobile pirate skipper refused a blaze-of-glory end?
As Reuter made a show of calm and lack of concern, Nicholas wondered how to proceed. Her very un-piratical appearance suggested that the rumors he’d heard were true – that there was no-one in the Strand closer to Bart Geiszler. Her unorthodox manner of dress and bearing probably served as a reminder to other pirates of close ties with her master, who similarly affected a neat, professorial appearance that belied his cruelty.
With a deep sigh, patience exhausted, Reuter opened her gray eyes and made no secret of the measure she took of the captain who had captured her, or of the disappointment this measure provided her. "What’s it going to be, mercenary?"
Nicholas ignored the comment, meeting the pirate's flat gaze evenly. She was goading him, but to what end he couldn’t imagine. If the woman was at all concerned with her situation, she gave no sign of it.
Reuter narrowed her gaze and leaned forward in her chair as her comment failed to provoke any reaction. "Look, Nick Madoc. Cut the mind games and tell me what you want."
"Why the rush?" Her knowing his name was not the surprise she might have intended. In fact, he would have been more surprised not to have been recognized. Any good pirate kept their ear to the aether when big-ticket Core Worlds mercenaries showed up in their stomping grounds.
“How did you expect this to go?” Reuter smiled humorlessly, then leaned further forward with an exaggerated arch of her back and placed her elbows on the desk. "Did you expect me to break down and beg for my life? To claim I was a poor little girl who got in over her head?" With a snort, the pirate leaned back into her chair and closed her eyes. “You want something. If you didn’t, you’d have left the messy business to your goons.”
Nicholas refused to parley on her terms; that would be an admission of weakness. "And you want something, or you wouldn’t have let yourself be taken alive.”
"Everyone makes mistakes, even me. Hells take your games, merc. We both know I’m dead when you next make port. You only have to keep me alive long enough to let some pompous fool bang a gavel for the newsfeeds."
“Your bounty pays out for a corpse just as well as it does for a trial.” She wasn’t the brigand his company was after, but at least she’d fetch a modest bounty if Nicholas couldn’t persuade her to help him fry bigger fish.
“I couldn’t manage to be beaten by someone interesting?” Reuter put her hands behind her head. “Last chance to get to the point before you put me to sleep.”
Nicholas waited several seconds, choosing his words carefully. Even as a captive, the less she knew, the better. “We’re after a bigger bounty than yours. Our employers have agreed to be lenient with any pirate who helps us.”
“Help you?” Reuter snorted. “Death's a sight better than a lifetime in some prison.”
“Ten T-years maximum.” Nicholas pulled the official document chit from his pocket and tossed it onto Reuter’s bare desk. "Behave yourself for the pompous fool with the gavel, and you could be out in five or six.”
“I’d be gutted on the inside after six weeks if I helped you. You’re still in ‘hells take your games’ territory.” She picked up the chit and flipped it into the air like a coin but didn’t insert it into the reader in her desk. “Maybe if you cut me loose…”
Nicholas shook his head. Releasing her into a post-Geiszler power vacuum would solve none of his employers’ problems. “You’d go under the cranial atomizer to protect another pirate? What does Bart Geiszler do to earn that kind of loyalty?”
Reuter opened her eyes, a frown replacing her caustic smirk. “You’re going after Geiszler? Sure, you can knock my Piranha down with that museum cruiser of yours, but you’re damned under-equipped to take on the Head Devil.”
Nicholas frowned at her sudden change of demeanor. “I’ve seen force reports, and I like the odds.”
Reuter nodded, leaning forward again and resting her chin on her knuckles. Her eyes bored into Nicholas’s face, and a thin smile crept across her lips, then vanished as quickly as it had come. “You’re a damned fool to think you can get the better of him.”
“Taking you out was easy enough.” Perhaps the pirate-watchers and intelligence reports had missed something about the relationship between Reuter and her superior, but that would be something to investigate later.
“Maybe we can work something out.” Reuter held up three fingers. “I stay on my ship, in command of your prize crew, until you have Geiszler.”
Nicholas raised a hand to object, but the protest died before he spoke it. Having Reuter’s cooperative voice and face on comms to sell the ruse would make Piranha a more valuable piece of bait, and with his prize crew manning most stations, she would be incapable of doing anything rash on her own. If Reuter had set up any special back-doors into Piranha’s systems, his techs would erase them, along with every other piece software the pirates had installed aboard.
“Secondly, Piranha and I are going to be in the fight when you try take him down.” Reuter ticked off the second finger. “If I’m going to put a knife in him, it’s going to be in the front. Ideally below the belt.”
Nicholas nodded once more. There was, despite all the old stories, no honor among thieves, but there were often friendships – and, more likely to explain Reuter’s choice of metaphors, stormy romances. Perhaps the rumors cited in the intelligence reports hadn’t been as incomplete as he thought.
“Thirdly, if any of your people ever make demands of me unrelated to your mission, the deal is off.” Reuter lowered the third finger. “Also, I will kill them.”
Nicholas frowned. “We have a job to do. If my people ask something of you, it will be related to that.”
Reuter shook her head. “Are you really that dense, Nick?” With one fluid motion, she stood up and sidled around her desk, where she leaned back on its front edge, crossing one leg over the other. Nicholas could see an empty holster attached to her belt, evidence that Chayka had already searched and disarmed her. “Do use your imagination, Captain, if you haven’t already.” Her tone dripped with enough acid to eat through hull plating.
Chayka and the other trooper reached for the sidearms as Reuter moved closer to their commander. Nicholas held up a hand, and the troopers froze. “We’re not pirates, Captain Reuter. My spacers are professionals.” Every mercenary officer knew better than to perform in-depth background checks for any but his most senior subordinates, but he ran a more disciplined operation than most mercenaries. None of his Core Worlds-born officers would want to fraternize with a Silver Strand pirate.
“No, you aren’t pirates.” Reuter nodded cautiously. “If you were, you would not be here to negotiate. You would be here to demand.”
Nicholas concluded Reuter meant this as an insult. “I can agree to your terms.”
“Fourthly.” Reuter rolled her head back, staring up at the hammock hanging from the ceiling panels. Either she didn’t remember holding up three fingers, or she had come up with another item to throw in his face while dictating the first three. “I do not answer ‘why’ questions under any circumstances.” As she finished, she met Nicholas’s eyes and raised her eyebrows, as if daring him to defy the demand.
“I’ll ask what I’ll ask when it serves the contract or involves the lives of my employees.” Nicholas found this demand easy to agree to; he hoped to deal with Reuter as little as possible. “I care about why when it pertains to Geiszler. Beyond that, your affairs are yours.”
Her only response was a humorless, tight-lipped smile. “Then I’ll help you take him down. Now, kindly get your troopers off my ship and send over the new crew.”
“The crew has already started to sanitize your ship.” Nicholas noticed Reuter twitch at his mention of sanitizing. “Mr. Rolf Holzmann will be your executive officer.”
“Holzmann. Now why does that sound familiar?”
Nicholas knew better than to answer that question. “I’ll make sure he knows your terms.”
Reuter responded only with a condescending shooing gesture. Nicholas stood his ground for five seconds, then walked out of the compartment, the two troopers following. He didn’t look forward to dealing with her for the next few weeks. Fortunately, Rolf was the most patient man Nicholas knew; he could absorb Reuter’s unpleasantness better than anyone.
Nicholas led his two heavily-armored escorts toward the lift well before tapping his wrist controls to key in a comms call. “Rolf, where are you?”
“Bridge.” Rolf’s Bavarian-accented voice replied immediately in Nicholas’s earpiece. “Do we have a source?”
“Captain Reuter is cooperative. I’ll be there in two minutes to go over her terms.”
As he waited for the lift, Nicholas prayed that the pirate’s abrasive manner would not get under his skin or those of his subordinates, at least until the job was done. Despite Reuter’s assertions, he knew his mercenaries were prepared to take down any backwater outlaw, even a warlord like Geiszler.
“We don’t need her, Captain.” Lance Chayka’s voice momentarily startled Nicholas.
“Maybe not.” Chayka’s helmet concealed the trooper’s expression from Nicholas, but he easily guessed that the big man didn’t like Reuter. “Still, I’ll take all the venom she can throw if it means we get this done quickly and cleanly.”
“If she had still demanded her freedom in exchange, boss, what then?”
Nicholas frowned. He had arranged “accidental” escapes of useful informants in the past, but none with anywhere near the notoriety of a pirate skipper. “If we let her go just to catch Geiszler, she’d just fill his boots. What would that solve?” If he let Reuter free, hundreds of innocent spacers would pay for his weakness with a one-way trip to the chattel pits which made the Strand notorious throughout settled space.
"In the Service, we would never need help from scum like her.” Chayka was referring to the Third Fleet’s pirate-hunting patrols on the Coreward Frontier, which he’d participated in. The Navy had firepower and numbers that no pirate could evade for long.
Nicholas was saved from thinking of a response by the arrival of the lift. He led the pair of troopers inside, then instructed it to take him to the bridge. Chayka and others might grumble about being led to their prey by Reuter, but the company had employed unsavory informants in the past and would do so in the future.
When he reached the bridge Nicholas couldn’t help but contrast its filth with the scrubbed-clean neatness of Reuter’s office. Though most of the odd refuse and loose equipment in the compartment had already been swept into corners, the sheer quantity of detritus and the thick stains on the deck-plates disheartened his Navy-trained notions of how a warship should be run. The handful of mercenary techs who stood to acknowledge his entrance wore gloves to protect their skin from the greasy patina visible on the console surfaces.
Nicholas quickly waved the techs back to work, relieved that no bodies remained. Several of the pirates had made their last stand in the bridge, but no sign of them remained except a faint smell of blood.
The impressive view was the highlight of the dilapidated compartment. The forward half of the sleek old destroyer's hull curved away ahead of three huge panels of armor-glass. Another transparent panel showed only inky sky above, perpendicular to the false gravity-well created by the ship's A-grav axis. Nicholas peered out and tried to spot his own ship, Matthew Ridgway, but the cruiser’s blazing running-lights were too distant to be seen. Nothing but the yellow-orange spark of Cardona's Star, slightly less than sixty light-hours away, glowed in the featureless void. The other stars were too weak to see against the starship’s harsh interior lighting.
“These old Anselmis were built to have quite the view.” Rolf Holzmann appeared at Nicholas’s shoulder. “They were good ships. Shame this one fell in with pirates.”
Rolf, nearly fifty years Nicholas’s senior and recently retired after a long Navy career, had been a junior officer when the Anselmi destroyers had been withdrawn from military service. Nicholas wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the old man had been aboard one before.
Nicholas gestured expansively to indicate the mess and the techs at the consoles. “I take it things are under control here?”
“Oh, as much as they can be.” The older man tapped his slate against a nearby terminal. “What armament she’s got is in good shape, and the gravitic drive checks out, but a lot of the rest isn’t so good.”
Nicholas nodded. As a fresh-faced ensign candidate, he had sat in Rolf's class Centauri Officers’ Academy. Though initially the thought of being in the same room with Holzmann had been terrifying – after all, every cadet knew about then-Commander Holzmann’s fateful decision to fire on rebel ships carrying civilian hostages during the Xianping Revolt – the man had proved far more approachable than his legend.
“I think most of the Ridgway crew would quit on the spot if they were ordered to go into combat in this ship tomorrow, Rolf.” Nicholas kicked a burnt-out picocircuit cluster out of the center walkway into one corner. “Do you have what you need to make it livable?”
"We’ll get her in shape, don’t worry." Rolf smiled, the gesture barely visible under his bushy white moustache. “You mentioned there were terms?”
“Mainly, Reuter wants us to pretend she’s still the captain of this ship.”
The older officer’s smile vanished, replaced by a concerned frown. “She must be entirely mad.”
“Most pirates are.” Nicholas shrugged. “You keep the command overrides, and act as her first officer. Do what she says as long as it’s sensible. We just need to keep her happy until we have Geiszler.”
“I suppose that can be managed. Is there anything else?”
Nicholas sent the audio recording of his conversation with Reuter to Rolf’s data-slate. “She had a few other demands. Have a listen for yourself.”
Rolf put a hand on Nicholas’s shoulder reassuringly, and Nicholas trusted that he would be understanding about his role in keeping Reuter content. “If this pirate is as close to the target as we’ve heard, we can appease a little while. If she is completely unmanageable, we'll know it long before Piranha is ready to move out.”
“That’s true. And I’ll have a few of Mr. Chayka’s troopers stay here for security, just in case.”
“That is a good idea.” Rolf gestured toward the techs working on the bridge. “I’ll go see Captain Reuter as soon as things are under control here.”
Nicholas winced at his old friend’s emphasis on the word “Captain” - but he knew that if it was possible to keep Reuter in line, Rolf would do it. “Requisition whatever you need, I’ll have it sent over right away.” He turned and headed for the lift.
Back in the lift with his two-trooper escort, Nicholas offered a quick prayer of thanks for his old friend’s support. Of all the senior officers of the mercenary company, Rolf was the only one who didn’t seem to have designs on Nicholas’s job. Rolf had come out of retirement for a stint in mercenary service, and seemed to intend to return there when he lost interest in the mercenary trade.
“Captain, I’ve selected three of my troopers to remain on-board.” Chayka interrupted Nicholas’s thoughts. “Is that sufficient to address your security concerns?”
“Three will do.” Chayka had overheard the desire for security and anticipated Nicholas’s orders. The mercenary commander expanded his prayer of thanks to include his other senior subordinates. Though most wanted the command for themselves and some made no secret of their maneuvering to claim it should Nicholas fail and lose the Board’s confidence, he knew they were all highly competent spacers. Hunting the Strand’s most notorious pirate would be dangerous work, informant or no – he would need every one of them at their best.