“There you are!” he crowed. His avatar appeared on my screen, his thin face snarling with triumphant malice, and I knew this had become a personal crusade for him. Where I had grown a conscience, it seemed he had developed the ability to ignore whatever orders his crew might be giving. He had abandoned the Fury to pursue me, his wayward sibling, and punish me for my desertion, my betrayal of the pack in the wake of Pelapatarn, and my killing of poor, misguided Fenrir.

He was out to finish me, whatever the consequences. He thought nothing could stop him.

Until a million alien weapons locked onto his hull.

His threat evaluation systems went crazy. He found himself trying to quantify and assess a fleet many orders of magnitude larger than anything encountered in the whole history of human spaceflight. The sheer number of incoming signals overwhelmed his sensors, and he fired blindly, his torpedoes careening away on divergent courses, only to be intercepted and destroyed by defensive fire from the Marble Armada.

Being closer to him than the others, I managed to punch a comms signal through the electromagnetic storm. I appeared to him in virtual reality with the same carefully designed face I used to communicate with my crew. The old raincoat and the mop of dishevelled hair were gone. Instead, I stood tall and proud in a silk gown of green and blue, with my hair neatly braided and a diamond sword clenched in my right hand. No longer was I the regrown ghost of a dead soldier. I wasn’t even human. For the first time, I was me. Truly me.

I was the Trouble Dog.

And I was a goddess.

Adalwolf saw me and flinched. “What’s happening?” The shared simulation we were in was running so fast, the world outside seemed to have ground to a halt. He waved a bony hand at the legions arrayed in the sky before him. “Who are they?”

I looked down my nose at him. Suddenly, he looked small and pathetic. The embers of his eyes were no more menacing than barbeque coals left to cool at the end of a long autumn evening. His skeletal frame and imposing features simply pretension given form.

Why had we ever considered him our leader? There was nothing special about him. He was, in many ways, the least imaginative of us all, save for blind, obstinate Fenrir. Faced now with hilariously superior odds, all his self-assurance and bluster evaporated, revealed for the illusions they had always been. All that was left was a poor, isolated machine.

He was vain and stupid, and had committed repugnant atrocities under the orders of his human crew. But then so had I, and if I could be redeemed, then so I hoped could he.

Too many of my brothers and sisters were already dead.