The torpedoes had proximity fuses, which meant they were set to detonate when they got within an effective blast range of their target. The first exploded a couple of hundred metres off the Carnivore’s port bow, sending the ship tumbling away like a paper cup on a windy pavement, one side of her armour glowing a livid yellow.

The second warhead was the coup de grâce.

The missile arced down from above and hit the spinning vessel amidships, snapping her spine. Mortally injured and trailing smoke, the Fenrir tried to regain altitude control. I saw her manoeuvring jets fire in clusters as she struggled to control her spin. But there wasn’t much she could do. Great sections of damaged hull were peeling and flaking away, exposing half-melted innards. Secondary explosions shook her from within and, no longer able to resist the sun’s ferocious gravity, she began to fall.

“Holy shit.” The words were little more than a stunned exhalation. I couldn’t take my eyes from the scene. I could barely breathe.

No longer under any semblance of control, the Fenrir yawed onto her side and tumbled, still spinning like a leaf, towards the seething ocean of plasma below us.

For an instant, I wondered if Captain Parris and his crew might still be alive, buried in their reinforced bridge at the heart of the vessel.

“We have to save them!”

But then the ship hit the surface of the star, sending up great fiery gouts of burning gas, and I knew all was lost. Had the external hull been intact, there may have been some hope of their survival. But now, with the damage the Fenrir had already sustained from our torpedoes, its innards would have been liquefied in seconds.

I sat back, deflated, and watched the bright splash mark on the stellar surface, hardly able to think or speak, finally managing only to croak out the single word, “How?”

The Trouble Dog’s expression betrayed a mixture of triumph and sorrow. “I deceived her.”

“I don’t understand.”

The avatar became serious.

“We deduced the nature of the weapon that crippled the Hobo and the Geest van Amsterdam. Our guests, Ms Petrushka and Mr Childe, were able to confirm some of these conclusions.”

“Yes.”

“So, I took precautions. I made a copy of my mental state and installed it on my primary server. Then I deleted from it all memory of my plan, and buried my actual consciousness way down deep in my secondary processing substrate, hidden behind a barrier that made it look like a cache of encrypted data.”

“So, when the Fenrir attacked…”