Wraia entered the launch bay with a reluctant Ensign Hooper in tow, and with a naval issue pulsar sidearm strapped to her hip. She didn't expect to have to use it, but regulations were clear – in the absence of communication, hostile activity must be assumed, and all members of boarding parties must proceed armed. Hooper hadn't needed much encouragement to take a weapon of her own. The young tactical officer marched along behind her, keeping any misgivings to herself. Wraia didn't judge the woman for being nervous, but she had a feeling they would need a systems expert on this little excursion.

They found the rest of the boarding team waiting for them at the loading ramp of one of the Cobra's boarding galleys. Not much more than an armoured cylinder with a big engine and a handful of point defence armaments, the little ship could hold twenty at its full capacity.

Whitlock stood with her chosen damage control specialists to one side, and on the other a trio of naval deckguards stood at attention, their darker blue uniforms marking them out as security specialists. They carried pulsar shotguns – bigger and bulkier than the pistols of the regular crew – that could easily incapacitate even an armoured enemy with their powerful blasts, without risking putting holes in the hull.

The officer in charge saluted sharply as she approached and she stopped in front of him, eyeing the young man up and down. He was a lanky trooper, standing almost a head taller than her, with a swarthy skin and a crisp black goatee. She could see a faint shadow of equally black hair just below the rim of his beret.

"Senior Deck Officer Mayeda, reporting for duty," he said, snapping his heels to attention. The deckguards flanking him repeated the motion.

"As you were," Wraia said, nodding to the shuttle ramp. "Are we ready?"

"Aye, ma'am."

"Alright then." Clasping her hands behind her back, she exhaled deeply through her nose and raised her head, addressing the boarding team. "We don't know what we're going to find over there, but we all need to be prepared for the worst. Just remember your training, follow all search and rescue protocols, and we'll get to the bottom of this."

She wished she felt as confident as she'd managed to sound. But then again, that was a command prerogative – instilling confidence in your subordinates weather you felt it or not. Back straight and head held high, Wraia marched up the galley's main ramp, and her crewmates fell into step behind her.

Narrow halls closed in around her as she ducked inside and turned left along the thin gangway that ran the length of the galley until she reached the cramped, conical bridge. She slid into the pilot's chair, and Ensign Hooper took up position alongside at the co-pilot station, while the others fastened themselves into the rows of seats in the crew compartment a few meters behind.

After running through the galley's pre-flight checks Wraia opened a comm channel.

"Launch-1 to bridge," she said as Hooper spun up the ship's main engines. "All systems show green. We are ready for departure. Repeat, ready for departure."

"Copy that, Launch-1," Gallagher responded crisply. "Still nothing from the Manticore, ma'am. No sign of any other ships in the area. Tactical AI is still working on the interference. We'll keep you posted."

"Acknowledged."

"You too, ma'am. You're cleared for departure. And, ma'am, be careful."

She allowed herself a smile at that. "We will, Lieutenant. You as well. Launch-1, out."

At the signal red lights flashed and a warning klaxon thundered through the deck area, followed by the monotone voice of the vessel's AI telling the deck hands to clear the area. Well, drilled, the naval ratings were already dispersing and with the deck cleared and hatches sealed, the Cobra's portside launch doors opened.

"Everybody strapped in back there?" Wraia called, allowing herself a brief moment of informality.

An affirmative chorus echoed through from the rear compartment. Wraia reached to the left of her control station, flicking three switches to activate the ship's HUD overlay from the forward cameras. Black space greeted her as the main screen came to life, smeared with stars, and with the messy band of the mysterious asteroid belt just visible in the centre of her view.

A fresh tremor of unease swept through her, but she squashed it down. She didn't need to be here. The Cobra's crew contained dozens of qualified pilots for a launch like this, but she couldn't sit on the bridge right now. A sense of urgency gnawed at her. She wanted to know; wanted to be the first to understand just what the hell was happening out here. The thought of sitting in her command chair and waiting was more than she could stomach right now.

Counting three soft breaths, she nodded to Hooper. The ensign's hands flashed over the controls once more, and there was a gentle clunk that shook the boarding galley's hull.

"Docking clamps disengaged," Hooper announced. "We are free and clear."

"Engines to one quarter till we've cleared the ship."

"One quarter, aye."

A gentle lurch from the engines sent them gliding out through the launch bays, out from the protective armour sheathes of the Cobra and into the unknown. Once they were clear of the ship Wraia increased their speed to maximum, and as they closed in on the asteroid field, the sharpened optics of the cameras soon picked out the glinting, battered hull of the Manticore ahead of them.

"Bloody hell," Hooper murmured as they closed in, getting an agonizingly close look at the damage to the other ship.

They passed within fifty meters, close enough to see great tangles of ruined wire, pieces of furniture, floating munition rounds and even a drifting boarding galley, its hull half mangled by whatever had torn its carrier to scrap. The launch bay behind it wasn't in much better shape, its decking horribly warped and bulkheads balked; doors buckled open. She wondered if the crew of the Manticore had attempted to abandon ship.

"Looks like the launch bays are a lost cause," Wraia said quietly as they inched closer. "I'll make a slow pass. See if you can find me a docking hatch that isn't torn to pieces."

"Aye, ma'am."

Breathing slowly, she guided the shuttle with gentle motions, bringing them in close to the mangled starboard flank of the Manticore. She lowered the thrust, crawling their way along the lower section in grim silence, until eventually Hooper spotted one hatch that still looked undamaged.

Gripping the controls tightly, Wraia guided them through a minefield of wreckage, avoiding chunks of ruined armour plating bigger than the galley itself, before easing the nose-cone of the galley into position.

With painstaking care she lined them up and pressed forward, using tiny bursts of thruster to inch them into place. The ship bumped and shifted awkwardly, then jolted to a halt. Something in the cockpit bleeped.

"Magnetic locks engaged – we've got a hard seal," Hooper announced. With one hand she rattled another command into the shuttle's sensors, and her brow furrowed. "I'm not reading any atmosphere, ma'am, and artificial gravity is offline too."

"Not even emergency power," Whitlock murmured uneasily from the rear compartment. "She's completely dead."

Wraia tried not to speculate. Focus on the facts. That's why you're here. Instead, she nodded slowly. "Can we complete boarding?"

"Seal is good. We can override their lock from our side," Hooper confirmed.

"Then do it," she said, unbuckling herself from the pilot's seat. "Suit up, everyone. We're going in."

*

EVA technology had come a long way since the early days of space exploration, but no amount of fancy tech could quash Wraia's instinctive dislike of the sensation. The sleek navy issue spacesuit hugged her frame from throat to ankle, bulked out with sections of high impact armour plating. The pulsar sidearm remained strapped to her hip.

In front of them, Officer Mayeda and his deck guards took the lead, their shotguns unslung and aimed at the docking hatch. Hooper stood off to one side at the hatch controls looking thoroughly skittish now, though she was doing her best to hide it, while Whitlock and her engineers hung back.

Breathing deep and tasting the chemical crispness of the suit's air, Wraia drew her pistol and nodded to Hooper.

"Open it," she said.

"Aye, ma'am," Hooper answered nervously, her voice crackling in Wraia's helmet speakers. The young officer turned back to the panel and punched in her override sequence.

A series of echoing clunks sounded from the docking hatch as its mechanisms fired. Wraia fought the urge to step back as the circular slab of metal rolled aside, and beyond it a corridor of pitch blackness emerged.

Beams of light sliced into the gloom from helmet-mounted torches, and without hesitation, Mayeda and his guards scurried forward, weapons raised to their shoulders, footfalls silent in the empty atmosphere.

"Clear!" came the call a couple of seconds later.

Wraia flicked her own helmet lights on and stepped forward, the magnetised boots of her suit keeping her level as she walked. Hooper tucked in behind her along with Whitlock's damage control specialists. Stooping through the hatchway, she emerged into a broad corridor that, if there had been light, would have looked just like any passageway on the Cobra.

That, and the fact that the right wall was buckled inwards as though some gigantic fist had smashed into it from the other side. She swung her light left and right over the forms of her crew mates, and Ensign Hooper appeared beside her, a palm-sized diagnostic reader in one hand.

"Just like we thought," she confirmed uneasily. "Main power and life support are offline."

"You see that warping?" Wraia pointed to the buckled wall. "What do you suppose caused that?"

"Anything powerful enough to penetrate this far would have put a hole clean through the ship," Whitlock interjected, stumping forward to examine the plating. "Looks like the whole thing was just ... bent out of shape. Like some kind of localised torquing in the internal gravity."

Wraia frowned. "How could that happen?"

"Buggered if I know, ma'am."

That didn't make her feel any better. Sighing, she tapped her helmet comm, opening a local channel to the Cobra. An immediate snarl of static greeted her, but she spoke anyway.

"Launch-1 to Cobra," she said, her voice firm. "Come in?"

"Cobra here," Gallagher responded a moment later, though his transmission was a sizzling mess of disrupted signal so she could barely make him out. "Ma'am, I'm not r-... you very...interference affecting comms."

Grimacing she pressed on, speaking slow and clear. "Copy that, Lieutenant. Same to you. We have successfully boarded. Proceeding into interior of ship."

"Say ag... ma'am?"

Wraia repeated the message. This time Gallagher seemed to get the gist of it.

"Copy that, ma'am. Still working... ference. No sign... Merlin yet. Will keep you appr-."

Damn this interference! Wraia tried not to let her frustration leap out of her, averting her face from the expected gazes of the boarding crew as she let her face contort with annoyance. Eventually she nodded.

"Understood. We'll check in in thirty. Launch-1 out." The broken conversation was making her agitated and she was glad to be rid of it. 

Wraia straightened up, turning her lights onto the boarding team again. "Alright, we're not going to figure any of this out by sitting around here," she told them. "Mr. Mayeda, you'll accompany myself and Ensign Hooper to the bridge. Ms. Whitlock, send one of your people and an escort to the gunnery decks – I want to see if they've been shooting, and if they have, I want full tactical telemetry pulled from the gunnery stations - manually if you have to. The rest of you head to engineering and see if there's any way we can get emergency power back online." She made a sharp gesture with her free hand. "Go. Radio check ins every ten minutes."

The orders rolled out of her sharp and clear, just as she'd been taught, and Whitlock and the others dispersed without another word. Sol-Navy ships differed in size and class, but there were basic design layouts that remained constant across them, meaning her shipmates needed no further direction before they set off down the different connecting passages of the Manticore's skeleton.

Wraia herself took the lead ahead of Mayeda, the desperation to find some kind of answer to this grisly riddle driving her onward more harshly than any drill instructor.

The somnambulant halls of the Manticore didn't do anything to help her nerves. Without atmosphere there was nothing to hear except for her own breathing and the whispered communications of their companions. Hooper stopped every ten meters to take a hull integrity reading, or check a dead computer screen, or a doorway. Mayeda's hyper-vigilance gave away his own uneasiness, as he faced every empty hallway with the barrel of a gun.

They moved on, climbing up through several levels of the Manticore's bulk on their way to the bridge, and they didn't see a soul. They didn't even encounter a locked door, which set alarm bells clanging in Wraia's brain. In the event of the catastrophic damage the vessel had suffered, its tactical AI should have sealed bulkheads in critical sections to protect portions of the ship that still had atmosphere.

It was possible to override the system, with the right command codes, but she couldn't imagine why Captain Ackerman would have done such a thing. Perhaps a last ditch attempt at evacuation? But if sections of the ship were already without atmosphere, that would have just put the rest of the vessel at risk.

"Ma'am?" Mayeda said, dragging her attention back to the present.

"What is it?"

"Over here."

She swivelled to find the Deck Officer standing with his shotgun trained on a door emblazoned with the designation: DECK 8 – RECREATION. Wraia clumped over to join him, pistol in hand, and she immediately noticed the door hatch was ajar. She frowned, leaning in to examine the lock only to realise that the mechanism had been completely melted.

What the hell?

That's what she wanted to say. Instead, she repressed that uncouth response, cleared her throat, and looked at Mayeda.

"The lock was deliberately destroyed," she said, in a statement of fact.

"Looks that way."

"Explosive charge?"

"Not like any breaching charge I've seen." Mayeda shook his head.

"Could be a jury-rigged incendiary," Hooper chimed in, speaking quickly. "Unclaimed space is crawling with pirates and bootleggers. It would fit their gear."

"You think a pirate scow did this to a Herculi-Class ship, Ensign?" Wraia gave her an incredulous look.

"I... well, no but..." Hooper's voice trailed off into a helpless shrug.

"Whatever blew the hatch, they must've done it for a reason," Mayeda interjected and he motioned them both back. "Let's take a look."

Letting him take the lead, Wraia rested her pistol across her left wrist for stability, and tucked in behind him. The deck officer prodded the hatch with his shotgun and it swung soundlessly open, to reveal a mess hall that looked more like warzone.

Tables were overturned and chairs smashed; the food processors across the right hand wall were wrecked and sparking with residual energy. Mayeda stepped slowly across the threshold, scanning left and right, and as she followed him in, she saw the unmistakable scorch marks of pulsar fire on the walls and floor.

They fanned out, just like the training manual advised, and Wraia forced herself to parse everything down to its smallest detail. The remains of meals were scattered across the floor, and she saw dark smears that could very well have been blood. The deck plating was strangely dented, as though someone had come through it bouncing a bowling ball.

A bowling ball that would have had to weigh several tons.

"Good God," Hooper breathed. "What happened in here?"

"They must've sealed that door to keep something out." Mayeda turned on the spot, his shotgun tucked tightly against his body as he examined the scorch marks. "From the trajectory of these pulsar hits, they came from inside the room, firing out – towards the hatch."

"So what were they shooting at?" Wraia muttered grimly, casting her light over the coffee stains, broken chairs and wrecked tables. "And where are they?"

"Ma'am?" He turned to face her.

"The crew, Mr. Mayeda," she snapped. "Where in the bloody hell of space is the crew?"