Unnamed pirate Bowhead

An unidentified Bowhead-class comet chaser was used by a group of Samrati space pirates to prey upon transports inbound from Showalter. These pirates made use of the Bowhead's onboard mining and ore-processing machinery to engage in a unique form of piracy; rather than disabling ships to forcibly board them and steal their cargo, they used the Bowhead's mounted railgun to obliterate their target ships entirely, then scooped up the debris to process it into ingots to sell on the conventional market.

To catch their prey vulnerable and flat-footed, these pirates would seed the primary transport lanes between Showalter and Samrat with thousands of loose iron meteoroids. Any ship unlucky enough to collide with one of these meteoroids would be forced to stop and make repairs before landing on Samrat, at which point the Bowhead would swoop in swiftly, destroy the ship with a single railgun shot, and scoop up the debris. They left no survivors in these raids, actively hunting and destroying any escape pods that managed to deploy.

On one raid, the Bowhead  destroyed the cargo freighter Chandrakanta with all hands aboard. Only Maya Prasad and Maureen Conover survived the Chandrakanta's destruction, protected against all odds against the explosion and resulting debris field inside the Chandrakanta's severed airlock chamber. As the Bowhead sweeped the debris field, Prasad and Conover maneuvered the airlock through the debris field using their EVA rigs, managing to dock it manually with the Bowhead's own airlock. Re-pressurizing the severed airlock using air taken from their dead crewmate's suit, Prasad managed to convince the Bowhead's computer to create an airlock bridge with the Chandrakanta's airlock, then opened the outer airlock door into space. The Bowhead rapidly depressurized, ejecting its atmosphere and entire crew into the vacuum outside.

Its original crew now dead, Prasad and Conover commandeered the Bowhead for their own.