"A star carrier is not a battleship, it's weapons are primarily defensive. There are no weapons on this ship that could completely destroy fourteen Kristang ships, there would be detectable debris. Also, Kristang ships have drones which are automatically launched in case the ship is severely damaged; these drones carry the ship's flight logs and sensor data, and they are stealthed. Multiple drones are carried by each ship, for this ship's sensors to find multiple stealth drones launched from each of the fourteen Kristang ships would be difficult, even with me operating the sensors. Also, I must caution that those fourteen Kristang ships, even with their lesser technology, do pose a threat to this ship." I noticed that Skippy had dropped his smart-ass attitude when talking about killing lizards. "All this is academic, anyway, Colonel Bishop. As I told you, I am restricted from using weapons."

"But I'm not."

This time, the pause was long enough that I wasn't the only one who noticed. "I don't see how-"

"You get those weapons ready, and locked on target, and I'll press the button, or whatever they use on this bucket." I said, looking around for anything that looked like it might be a weapons panel. It all still looked like a gothic nightmare to me. "You can do that, right, your programming doesn't prevent you from preparing weapons to fire, as long as you don’t actually initiate the firing sequence?"

Another long pause. "Colonel, I may have underestimated you. That is almost a clever idea." For the very first time, I heard a tiny bit of respect in that artificial voice. "Are you certain you want to do this?

Through the window, I could see that Lt. Colonel Chang, Major Simms and the others had heard everything I said. "When I was in prison, waiting to be executed for refusing to kill innocent hamster women and children, I told myself these Nazi lizards can go straight to hell. Just now, I was thinking we could only disable their jump engines." I checked the aft viewport, to the rows of Kristang cruisers and destroyers latched onto the star carrier. "But these lizards are threatening Earth." I looked at Major Simms, and she nodded to me. "So fuck them." I said, with anger that scared me.

There was a noticeable pause before Skippy spoke. "I may have to reevaluate my assessment of you."

"You can do this?" Then I remembered Skippy's overly literal use of the English language. "You will do this?"

There was no pause this time. "I can prepare the weapons so you can use them. Yes. Which weapons do you want activated?"