“I see,” the reporter nodded thoughtfully. “Getting back for a moment to your early difficulties, what would you say was the greatest obstacle you had to overcome?”
“Ignorance.”
“Ignorance?” Erickson echoed, caught off guard by the abruptness and brevity of the answer. “Could you elaborate on that a bit?”
“Certainly. Our biggest problem was our own ignorance… na‹vet‚, if you will. We were out to beat the pirates at their own game, but we had no real idea of what that game was. Blackjack was the first pirate we had met face to face, and we wouldn’t have known it if he hadn’t told us.”
“And this ignorance hampered your early efforts?”
“It did more than hamper them, it crippled them. I’ve already given you an idea of how long it took us simply to find our suppliers. If any of us had crewed on a pirate ship, we would have had the information and known exactly where to go.”
“But once your ship was outfitted, things started to go easier, right?”
“Quite the contrary. It wasn’t until our ship was fully outfitted and we went hunting for our first opponent that we began to realize how little we knew about pirates. In many ways, that’s when our real problems first began….”
CHAPTER THREE
“How much longer until they can see us?”
As Puck’s voice came over the intercom, Tambu punched the ‘talk’ button on his command console, not taking his eye from the two ships on the viewscreen.
“Stow the chatter, Puck.” he ordered. “Just keep watching that upper turret.
As might well be expected, they were all nervous. The next few minutes could well be the culmination of nearly a year’s preparations.
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