Hammer placed his helmet on his head and waited for the suit to tell him he was good to go.

“Suit pressurized,” a monotone female voice told the airlock.

Hammer hit the button on the side of the tunnel and heard the door to the interior close shut and seal. The air around him slowly vented into space, and then the door in front of him silently slid open.

Hammer wasted no time, after securing his weapon to the magnetic lock on his back, he leapt into the black void of space. The target ship was a few hundred meters ahead of him. He turned on the sensor in his helmet and projected the most secure landing for his boarding maneuver. At 50m, his suit began to fire out small counter bursts of air from various nozzles.

The program then turned him around and had him land lightly on the hull of the shard runner. Hammer clicked his heels and felt the magnetic locks activate and secure him to the side of the ship.

“Hammer on deck,” he said into the comms.

“Tracking,” Asdrubal said back. “We’ve got you on sensors, Hammer. Not showing anything else out there.”

“Copy. I am about to initiate boarding,” Hammer answered and headed down the side of the ship. He made his way to the airlock and began to manipulate the keypad he found. He knew the override codes that should allow entry into most ships.

Nothing happened.

“No power,” Hammer said into the comms. “Attempting manual entry.”

Hammer pulled the wrecker off his back and applied the tip of the weapon into the crack of the door. After finding the spot he liked, he struck the end of the weapon several times. The doors slid open.

The other side of the airlock was open space, with a jagged entry wound in the hull. Hammer knew they were all dead. He reported in.

“Explosive decomp. Looks like a ship to ship ordinance. Copy Harpy.”

“Harpy copies, Hammer. That’s what we were afraid of,” answered Fatima.

Silence crackled over the line for a moment before she added.

“Keep checking Hammer. See if you can find out anything else from the inside.”

Hammer clicked twice to acknowledge.

He picked his way through the entry and was careful to not snag himself on any of the sharp pieces of metal that ballooned into the interior of the ship.

Hammer hated to see what had become of the shard runner. It had been a beautiful space yacht, and Captain Drake had kept most of the hull intact and instead of increasing cargo space had made the ship faster. It was eerie to see the once well lived in halls empty and filled with pieces of detritus floating about absently.

Hammer was nothing if not thorough, and checked each of six berths quickly. The first five were all empty, a couple whose doors had been open at the time of depressurization and most of their contents lost to the vacuum.

The last contained a member of the crew. Jack? Hammer thought, though he had only met the man a couple of times when he was a mechanic. Now he was dead, much like the rest of the crew.

The man had run out of oxygen and had clawed his fingers to the bone trying to leave his room. Hammer shut the door to what had become a grave and moved on towards the bridge.

The bridge was as empty as the rest of the ship.  A few of the screens had been punctured by the shrapnel, blood stained part of the floor under the copilot's seat, but had flash frozen. No sign of Drake. Hammer put his hand under the captain's console and found what he was looking for. A small black drive.

Hammer checked the rest of the ship and found nothing of use. He found the cargo bay had been wrenched open and was empty. After he was satisfied there was nothing else to find, he made his way back to the Harpy.

As he was about to touch down back on the ship, he looked up at the strange place his planet had become. The Harpy was currently between the first and second inner rings of the system. Nearly a half dozen had coalesced since the planet had shattered, all of them moving slowly around the monstrosity at its center. Something about it always made him uneasy.

Hammer entered the opened airlock and let the feeling of gravity return to his bones. He made his way to the bridge and handed over the drive.

“Only thing I found that might tell us something,” he told the bridge crew. They had seen everything his helmet had and offered up no more explanations than he did. They began to download the drive's contents as Hammer went to stow away his gear.

He returned back to the bridge just wearing his undersuit and saw the projection of Captain Drake's face on the main viewing screen. Hammer could see the solar sails were deployed and they were underway.

Asdrubal nodded to Hammer and let the recording move forward.

“We are under fire. Last port of call was on Jades Mine.”

That’s where they were headed now, Hammer thought to himself as he saw the usually cool Captain Drake begin to lose his composure.

Pressurization alarms were going off in the background as Drake made eye contact with the camera and in the silence of vacuum he mouthed the word pirates.