Chapter one

      "Alfred, can you please switch the view on the main screen from first person to a third person view of the battlefield seen from above."

       Instead of the posh British accent I expected from our ship's AI, a voice with a rough Scottish accent blared out from the speakers, "Of course I can, I am a fucking artificial intelligence am I not? Did you not notice the intelligence part of that?"

      I sighed in exasperation, "Who messed with Alfred's personality matrix?"

      Suddenly everybody in the bridge of the ship became super interested in their work and started to stare closely at their screens. God sometimes I didn't know if I was a captain of a pirate ship or a kindergarten teacher, half the time I felt like I was trying to herd cats.

      I decided that I was going to let this one go, thankfully I had a backup of Alfred's personality matrix and I can get him back to normal after we were done with the Tandurians.

       Scottish Alfred eventually switched the main screen to a real time reconstruction of the battlefield as seen from above so we all clearly saw as the fifteen small ships that belonged to the dicks were enveloped in bubbles of multicolored lights as they engaged their FTL drives then vanished leaving behind the massive Tandurian vessel behind. The bubbles of lights that enveloped them before they disappeared were called temporal bubbles, they are one of the main components that made faster than light travel possible but it is also the main reason that bigger ships need slightly longer time to use their FTL drives, because it takes longer to cover a big ship in the bubble of disruptive photonic radiation than a little ship , which meant that as the ship was slowly being covered in the colorful bubble it gave Twitch plenty of time to fire our ship's main plasma cannon and fry their FTL drive. 

       On the screen I could see the Tandurian vessel get struck by a blue beam of light and the bubble that was gradually creeping over the ship flickered then disappeared, Twitch had shot down their FTL drives which was actually a pretty small device that was crammed between two of the Tandurian ship's massive boosters with only a single shot which was impossible if you asked anybody else but Twitch was a genius when it came to handling the weapons on a ship, a savant if you will. Before he joined my crew he was the best shooter in the entire federation star fleet and on the fast track to fame and riches but he was one of those people with addictive personalities, at first it started with booze but slowly he started doing hard drugs until he was dishonorably discharged. I found him inside of a gutter outside a drug den in the port of Tortuga after I heard his story from a friend I had in the fleet.

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       I personally paid for his rehabilitation and it was one of the best investments I've ever made, although he fell off the wagon now and then he was the best damn gunner I've ever seen when he manages to stay sober as was evident now as he executed an impossible shot using fully manual controls at a distance that most would balk at.

       "Good job Twitch, you are nothing short of an artist with that plasma cannon. Sandy can you please jam any signals coming from that ship?"

        "Already done Captain."

         I turned my chair to look at a large black man who was sitting in a chair at the back playing video games, "Hey Tank, it's time to suit up, these are just Tandurians and the scanners aren't reading any other life signatures so it's probably going to be a simple case of putting the fear of the devil in those bastards but be careful, you never know what those greedy bastards have up their sleeves."

         The Tandurians are a space faring nomadic race that left their home planet behind a long time ago in search of wealth. Their whole culture revolves around money, they spend their whole lives trying to get more of it, their society is ruled by it, hell their females actually charge the males for sex and it's not considered prostitution. They didn't even have a religion unless you count their unending obsession with money. Physically they are short pink bipedal creatures with long necks that looked eerily similar to a pink furry version of ET from old earth movies and they had what we pirates like to call a yellow belly. This was truly ironic since the little bastards had a yellow patch of fur on their stomachs , which made them yellow bellied in the literal and metaphorical sense. That meant that once their ship was disabled and Tank boarded it wearing his massive mech that was brimming with guns , the money grubbing assholes suddenly transformed into the most generous beings in the universe in an effort to save their fluffy pink behinds.

       We used our ship's tractor beams to load up container after container of everything that they had in their storage hold. 

         We finished robbing them blind and were on our way to Tortuga in less than thirty minutes.