I was designed to annihilate. Before I was decommissioned, I carried an arsenal with the potential to ruin worlds and incinerate hostile armadas. When I later grew a conscience and became a ship of the House of Reclamation, I was permitted to retain a range of defensive weaponry—ECM missile screens, chaff launchers, point-defence cannons—but the inability to kill, to inflict terrible and decisive damage, itched like a severed limb. My combat reflexes were hardwired. They couldn’t have been removed without fundamentally altering what or who I was—and I had not been about to agree to that. Instead, I found a way to put my skill set to good use. Flying search and rescue for the House of Reclamation, I needed to be fast, sharp and fearless. I needed every scrap of guile and tactical experience I had gleaned in the navy. To effectively perform my duties, I had to be willing to enter dangerous environments and situations that had already wrecked at least one other ship; and, if that ship and its crew had been lost to piracy or enemy action, I had to be prepared to defend myself. For these reasons, decommissioned military vessels like me were particularly suited to service in the House of Reclamation. Instead of belonging to individual governments or corporations, we now served the whole of the Human Generality, and our duties brought us challenge, risk and the occasional chance to engage with hostile craft—although without being able to bring to bear the bite we could once have inflicted.

As a heavy cruiser, I had been an instrument of hard diplomacy and destruction; in the House of Reclamation, with my talents intact but my usefulness as a killing machine at an end, I had become instead a means to save lives.

It was almost enough.

* * *