Dead Reckoning
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 6
I should explain what we were before I explain what we did.
Pirates are not what the stories make them. The stories require a certain kind of villain — romantic and excessive, all black flags and walking planks and treasure buried on moonlit beaches. The reality was considerably more mundane and considerably more brutal, which are not contradictions. Mundane brutality is the most accurate description of what we practiced.
We were thieves. Efficient, organized, occasionally violent thieves operating in a jurisdiction too vast for adequate policing. We targeted vessels that could not defend themselves adequately, took what they carried, and left their crews alive when it cost us nothing to do so and dealt with them otherwise when it did. I am not going to apologize for this on these pages. Apology requires an audience capable of receiving it and I have run out of time for performances.
What I will say is that I was good at it.
My military training gave me advantages that most pirates did not possess. I understood formations and tactics and the psychology of men under pressure. I knew how fear moved through a crew and how to use that movement. I knew where to position myself in an engagement for maximum effect and minimum exposure. I knew how to end things quickly, which sounds like cruelty and is actually its opposite. Prolonged violence serves no one.
The crew learned what I was capable of in the first engagement after I came aboard. A merchant sloop out of Barbados, well loaded, poorly defended, her crew of eight making the reasonable calculation that resistance was more expensive than surrender. Six of them made that calculation immediately. Two did not.
I will not describe what happened to the two who did not except to say it was brief and that afterward the crew of Calico Jack looked at me with a particular quality of attention that I recognized from Flanders. The attention men pay to someone they have decided is more dangerous than they initially assessed.
That attention was worth more than any weapon I carried. Reputation is armor. I had learned that early and confirmed it repeatedly and on Calico Jack’s ship I built one with deliberate efficiency. I was vicious in engagement. I was quiet between them. I asked for nothing beyond my share and I delivered more than my share and I never created problems in the ranks.
Within three months I was regarded as one of the most dangerous members of the crew.
Nobody knew what I was. The disguise held because it had always held — because I was completely committed to it and because people believe what costs them nothing to believe and because my reputation made casual scrutiny feel inadvisable. Men who might otherwise have noticed something irregular in my appearance or manner found reasons not to look too closely.
Anne found this privately amusing. She told me once that I had accidentally constructed the perfect protection — that I had made myself so frightening that nobody wanted to examine me carefully enough to discover I was a woman.
I told her it was not accidental.
She laughed. Anne had a laugh that startled you every time because it was completely unguarded, nothing of performance in it, and on a ship full of people performing constantly it landed like something foreign and clarifying.
I did not laugh easily in those years. But Anne could occasionally produce itHis name was Thomas.
He was perhaps twenty, possibly younger, with the particular combination of bravado and terror that young men carry when they are trying to become something and have not yet determined what. He was good with ropes and navigation and possessed of a quick intelligence that he had not yet learned to trust. He had been with the crew for four months when the trouble started.
It started the way trouble always starts on ships. Over nothing. Over everything.
We had taken a merchant vessel three days out of Kingston, a well found sloop carrying rum and dry goods and a crew of eleven, several of whom elected to join us rather than face the alternative. One of these, a merchant sailor named Garrett, was large and experienced and possessed of the specific confidence that comes from having survived many difficult situations through violence rather than intelligence.
Garrett and Thomas fell into dispute over a gambling debt. The details are unimportant. What mattered was that Garrett, understanding Thomas’s inexperience and calculating the advantage correctly, escalated the dispute to a formal challenge. A duel. Pistols and cutlasses, the old rules, witnessed by the crew.
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