I was pulled into the pirate ship by the remaining inertia of my toolbox turned grappling hook. Breaking a cold sweat, I gathered my breath and vowed not do that ever again. However, the fear of being ambushed by a pirate in a spacesuit put me right back onto high alarm.

I took my welding torch back from the toolbox… In principle, it wasn’t too different from a heat gun, and it might even pass as one to someone that’s never seen it before. But most importantly, I felt much safer while holding something in the vague shape of a pistol.

I surveyed the room I had landed into while my toolbox gently floated beside me.

Most cargo ships were blocky, boring machines. That was the feature you would typically use to tell them apart. Pirates would buy them because they were cheap, and they needed the cargo space to carry away the loot from a successful raid.

Therefore, you could almost always spot a pirate ship if you saw a big metal box with a few laser cannons haphazardly tacked on to its sides. As far as I could tell while vertiginously flying towards it, this model was unusual in that regard.

Seen from above, its front would be a sharp, sleek trapezium, like the front of a sports car. The bulky storage square sat at the back, and connected to the cockpit via a long rectangular section. A set of rear wings connected these two portions, and held what once was its thruster system.

I stood in the rectangular section at the center, towards the cockpit. This room appeared to be a comfy living space, with a dining table and the wiring for a display leading up to the missing chunk of hull I came through.

I wasn’t a detective, but if I had to craft a theory, this’d be the starship of a pirate that was decently successful, and had recently decided to upgrade to the priciest ship he could get his dirty hands on.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Speaking of...” I turned to the cockpit, and was surprised to find its airlock stuck half-opened, with a metal object stuck between the doors. The gap was just wide enough for a desperate person to crawl through.

Constantly checking over my shoulder, I approached the airlock and tapped its access panel. It was powered off, which explained why someone would try to force it open. However, it took me less than a minute to find the emergency release: there was a notch on the side of the panel that allowed you to remove it, and doing so revealed a mechanical lever that I could pull on.

“There should be one of these on the other side, too. Perhaps he didn’t know how to use it?”

I looked behind me once more before pulling it with everything I had. Since the airlock didn’t have any power, it didn’t even attempt to make a noise, unlike the one at the transport ship.

Carefully, I stepped into the cockpit and found it intact. I could see the latches for two seats on the floor, but only one was installed. The window screens were powered off and where a view of outer space should be, there was only a glossy dark.

“At least the pirate isn’t here.”

I took a look around the controls attached to the walls, and found a comms array that had a button for the distress beacon. Pressing it didn’t do anything, but I took a screwdriver and removed the panel under it, finding a familiar device.

A black metal box with a cylinder core at its center, attached to a rotating mechanism at the base. Its sides were lined with solar panels and an array of LEDs accompanied a tactile component on the bottom right corner of its frame.

“There you are...” I had not seen this brand or model of beacon before, but it was similar enough to the one I practiced with during that crash course.

I powered on the beacon and encoded a simple “Under attack by pirates, please rescue” message. I then took a deep breath of relief, feeling a massive weight come off my shoulders.

“There’s that, I guess...” As much as I wanted to drop everything and celebrate, whether a mercenary or Falcon Empire ship would stop by and rescue me was fully up to chance. Even if I was confident in my good karma, or if I were ten or twenty times lazier than I am, I still wouldn’t be able to sit still watching my oxygen timer tick down.

Easing my rushing heart, I put down the beacon and gripped my welding torch tight, making my way into the opposite side of the broken pirate ship.