Prologue

"She's in sight captain and she's looking as plump as a thanksgiving turkey waiting to be plucked, shall I give the order to pluck?"

I looked at the screen showing the fat ship that indeed had an uncanny resemblance to a fat turkey but something didn't feel quite right so I turned to my first mate and told her, "Not yet Sandy, something smells fishy and it ain't Tank's dinner. Don't drop camouflage or engage that ship, just keep out of range of their sensors and follow them."

A Tadrunian merchant vessel this far out of monitored space, nowhere near any trade routes without a single escort ship? This was definitely a trap set by the idiots at the department of intergalactic commerce or as we liked to call them , dicks. The Tadrunians were penny pinching misers, there was no way that they would have a heavily loaded ship in deep space where the only planets are backwater hell holes where everybody is fucking their cousin.

As our much smaller ship trailed the much larger vessel silently, I waited for the inevitable to happen and sure enough a few minutes later the klaxons in the bridge went off as three ships uncloaked a few Megameters to our port side. The giant screen zoomed in on three blocky spaceships that looked like they were held together with duct tape and prayers. It looked like three of Macormic's boys took the bait, they never were too bright, in fact they were the type of bumble-fucks that gave honest pirates like ourselves a bad name.

Just like I expected immediately after Macormic's boys uncloaked, fifteen other vessels also appeared but unlike the rust buckets the Macormics owned these were state of the art sleek and silver crafts with the decal of the dicks proudly displayed upon their hulls. They quickly surrounded the three ships and fired all their state of the arts weapons at them reducing them into nothing but glowing radioactive dust which then dispersed into the infinite reaches of space, pirates were considered 'enemies to civilization' so there was a shoot to kill order on all of us. What this means is that there was no such thing as surrender for a pirate as the poor bastards just found out.

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Sandy gave a low whistle as she watched what was left of the Macormics disperse into space,"You called it captain, it was a dick trap after all. Should we get out of here?"

Dicks had to use real bait to catch pirates, with recent advances in technology a pirate can sense a decoy ship from the other side of the galaxy. What this meant is that the Tandurian ship in front of us really was filled with all kinds of goodies. A crazy idea started to form in my mind, "No, I think we should wait for a little while."

Sandy looked at me with a worried expression, "Why would we stay? And why are you smiling? You know that the crew gets nervous when you start smiling."

I pretended that I didn't hear her last comment and turned my swivel chair to a man sitting in a chair to my right. His rail thin body was almost completely surrounded by holograms that he was manipulating expertly. The most notable feature about him was his shaved head and the dragon tattoo that was coiling around it like a hat. His other notable feature was his cornflower blue eyes which were always twitching, hence his nickname , twitch.

"Hey twitch , say I give you a time window of around three seconds, can you shoot the FTL drive on the Tandurian vessel from here?"

Sandy's jaws dropped, "Captain you aren't going to do what I think you are about to do , are you?"

My smile only widened, "Smaller crafts have FTL drives that can activate quickly but larger ships have a small delay before their FTL drives can engage. If the dicks try to leave this area simultaneously with the Tandurian vessel I bet that they aren't going to factor in those few seconds meaning..."

Sandy was also starting to smile, "...meaning that if twitch can destroy the FTL drive of the Tandurian vessel before it can make the jump we will have a completely unprotected ship floating dead in the water."

"Bingo, then we will move in and pluck this juicy turkey."