The smell of brine and mildew shadowed the cabin, where Captain Reginald “One-Eyed” Locke lounged in his creaking chair. His left hand toyed absently with a cheap flash drive—a gaudy thing the color of a wounded sun, the casing dented from God knows how many ship battles.
“We risked life and limb, Olney,” the Captain began, his one good eye narrowing at the first mate, “for… that?” He gestured at the flash drive. “Some… piece of rubbish?”
Olney, painfully lanky even for a sailor, pushed his glasses higher onto his nose—a gesture so academic it bordered on absurd in their pirate world. “Depends on how you look at it, Cap’n,” he said lightly, his lips quirking with a nervous half-smile. “To someone who knows its contents—absolute treasure. To the rest of us—well. Not much more valuable than a flea-bitten sock.”
Locke let out a long whistle, the kind that started low but swelled, ominous as a gathering storm. “You’re telling me… I raided a cargo ship, lost my bloody parrot to a rogue cannonball, and caught a gash in my shin I can’t feel properly anymore—” he thumped his peg leg against the floor for emphasis, though said leg was on the other side “—all for a ‘maybe’?”
Olney stifled a laugh—it was disrespect, sure, but that was the funny part about pirates. Bound rituals of dishonor held them together as much as their plunder. “Cap’n,” he said, choosing his words like a man dodging musket fire, “you always say the best treasures aren’t jewels—they’re secrets.”
Locke’s eye glinted. “Aye, but secrets you can’t sell are just whispers in a dead man’s ear, ain’t they?”
The cabin fell silent except for the steady groaning of the ship. A low tide was lulling it like a restless infant, yet inside, tension bristled—the restrained kind, where lives or at least fortunes teeter precariously on someone’s next phrase.
“What’s on it, then?” Locke finally muttered. The question came like a shot out of sheer compulsion, as though he couldn’t help but unseal Pandora’s chest one inch further.
Olney hesitated, scratching behind his ear. “That’s the funny bit.”
Locke’s brow climbed. “Funny?”
“It’s locked,” Olney admitted sheepishly. “Encrypted. Advanced stuff. I don’t quite have the—uh, knowledge, Cap’n.”
For a moment, the Captain’s face blossomed with such quiet incredulity it could have passed for tender pain. “Let me confirm, lad. Are you telling me,” he said, leaning forward with a soft menace, “that not only do we not know what this cursed trinket contains, but we can’t find out?”
Olney shrugged, desperation creeping into his grin. “Unless one of us happened to take up computer science in between pillaging… aye.”
Locke closed his eye, letting his teeth clench over the rim of a gnarly pipe. The hiss of its unlit contents sounded vaguely serpentine. When he spoke again, his voice was reduced to a murmur of papier-mâché disdain. “Dear God. The twenty-first century’s cursed us good, hasn’t it?”
Their moment dissolved in an unintended comedy of the banal. The lantern swayed overhead, casting warped shadows of two distinctly unimpressive villains. Locke was the type of man carved for grandeur—the sharp outline of his jaw, his raven-black coat embroidered with worn gold, even the theatrical peg leg added a certain auteur air. But here he sat, bested not by naval soldiers or rival marauders, but by what was, for all intents and purposes, a common office supply.
It wasn’t until they reached the port of Calais that things escalated. Details blurred beneath the enormity of revelation, but rumors claimed Locke ransomed the flash drive to a government official, and the sum he received was unspeakably large. What remained unclear was whether the official received anything usable in return.
Decades later, sailors still whispered in bars about One-Eyed Locke’s final heist, some insisting the flash drive contained damning secrets about world leaders, others swearing it merely held a pirated season of a canceled reality TV show. Humor clung to the tale like barnacles on a keel—it was too asinine, too cruelly funny to be anything less than fate’s grand, subtle joke.
“See,” Olney had said back in the cabin, when Locke threatened to toss the drive into the sea, “it’s all perspective. One pirate’s trash is another man’s scandal.”
Locke never forgave the phrase, but he respected its truth.