“Why the hell not? Everybody knows we’re here. There’s no point trying to be stealthy.”

“Roger that.”

She bent over her console and I switched my attention back to the main screen and the tactical overlay.

If we could only—

One moment, the skies were clear; the next, the Adalwolf filled my view, his knife-sharp prow facing us from two thousand metres ahead of our own, and with all his torpedo tubes open and primed.

I cut off the alarm. Everything on the bridge went quiet, and I felt like a rabbit in the crosshairs of a poacher’s shotgun.

If the Trouble Dog and her brother were talking to each other, their conversation would be happening many orders of magnitude faster than I could possibly follow. All I could do was check the defence cannons were armed—not that they’d be much use if the other ship fired its torpedoes at such close quarters—and brace myself for destruction. My fingers squeezed the arms of the control couch and my ears filled with the oceanic roar of my own circulation. My chest rose and fell, and I realised my next breath might be my last. Unwilling to exhale, I bit my lip. The moment stretched into an agony of dreadful anticipation…

And then the Adalwolf lit up.

For a second, I flinched, thinking the light had come from its launch tubes. But then I realised a third ship had joined us, and the redness painting the side of the Carnivore came from the newcomer’s targeting laser.

“Holy…”

The ship was easily twice the size of the Adalwolf and the Trouble Dog put together, and shaped like a rugby ball. Its armoured hull bristled with weaponry—torpedo tubes, rail guns, missile batteries—and I could see the starry banner of the Conglomeration Navy sprayed across its flank. I had heard of these ships in the war, but never seen one with my own eyes. They were called Scimitars, and they weren’t heavy cruisers; they were fully fledged capital ships, the largest of any human faction, and capable of delivering enough firepower to rival half a dozen lesser vessels.

A soft chime informed me the brute had locked a second laser onto us.

The Trouble Dog’s avatar appeared in the corner of my screen. “We have been ordered to stand down,” she said with a shrug.

“And the Adalwolf?” I couldn’t understand why one Conglomeration vessel should be targeting another.

“Him too.”

“What’s going on?”

Instead of answering, the Trouble Dog opened a new window in the display. It showed the image of a Conglomeration flag.

“We have an incoming transmission from the Scimitar,” she told me. “From Admiral Menderes of the Scimitar Righteous Fury.”

The flag disappeared and I found myself facing a round-faced man with grey stubble on his scalp and a neck almost thicker than his cranium.