“How do you figure that?” the reporter urged.
“Well, I’ve always felt Blackjack could have given us more trouble, but he didn’t. Pirates are not the devil-may-care adventurers people think they are. Even though they risk their lives in combat, they’re usually very careful about the reward they are gambling their lives against. Before we armed our ship, we would have been easy prey for a ship such as Blackjack’s, but there was no reason for him to fight us then.”
“How about vengeance? You embarrassed him in front of his crew there in the bar. Wouldn’t he want to get even for that?”
“Vengeance is an expensive habit, Mr. Erickson. It’s a luxury few businessmen can afford, and for all his flaws, Blackjack was a businessman. No, he believed us to be cargo haulers and decided it would be better to wait until sometime when he caught us with a full cargo hold. If he realized our actual plan of becoming pirate hunters, he probably would have attacked us at the earliest opportunity.”
“You make it sound as if a confrontation between your ships was inevitable. I should think it would be a long shot at best.”
“Not really,” Tambu corrected. “While space itself is vast, there are a limited number of settled planets, and even fewer which have substantial space traffic in and out. Most ship-to-ship encounters occur in orbit over a planet rather than in space. If both our ship and Blackjack’s were prowling the heavily trafficked lanes, it would only be a matter of time before we collided–especially if we were looking for each other.”