When Runt Hake locks onto the Saturn’s trajectory, every man aboard knows what that means. Hake does not bargain. He boards, he takes what he wants, and he leaves ships behind as frozen tombs. With a crippled engine and no hope of outrunning him, Captain Hanson can only stall for time while the cargo is stripped away and the pirate chief announces he will dine before attending to “business.”
But Lancelot Biggs—recently demoted from First Mate to emergency cook—has been studying more than recipes. Armed with cookbooks, a physiochemistry text, and a theory about how certain substances affect the human system, Biggs prepares a banquet that may be the last meal the Saturn ever serves. As pirates and spacemen sit down at the same table, the crew must swallow more than fear. If Biggs has miscalculated, the price will not be embarrassment. It will be extinction.
Nelson S. Bond created Lancelot Biggs as one of science fiction’s most charmingly improbable heroes. Bond’s work appeared regularly in Astounding Science Fiction, Blue Book, and Amazing Stories, and he built a reputation for stories that combined scientific playfulness with brisk pacing. The Lancelot Biggs tales follow a lanky, theory-driven thinker whose book learning repeatedly collides with hard space reality—usually to explosive effect. “Lancelot Biggs Cooks a Pirate” stands as one of the most memorable entries in that series, blending humor, peril, and a solution only Bond could have served hot.
