A vein throbbed in his neck. “Damn you!” With visible effort, he forced himself to stop shouting. He sat back and his voice dropped to little more than a hoarse whisper. “Damn you to hell, you Outwarder filth.”

He mashed the keypad in front of him, and an alarm rang on my bridge.

“The Fury’s launching torpedoes,” the Trouble Dog said.

I made eye contact with the admiral and shook my head. “Please, don’t,” I said. “Don’t do this. You can’t win.”

He glared at me like a vengeful bull. For a couple of seconds I watched him struggle to put his hatred and defiance into words. Then he let forth an incoherent growl, told me to “get fucked”, and cut the connection.

“Eight torpedoes in the air,” the Dog said. “Four aimed at us.”

“Can the white ships stop them?”

The screen lit with a series of explosions as, one after the other, the warheads blossomed in a string of incandescent bursts.

“They already have.”

“And the Fury?”

“She sustained blast damage.”

“Can you raise the admiral?”

“He isn’t answering hails.” The alarm sounded again. “But he has launched another eight torpedoes.”

“Really?” I was tired of this now. I rubbed my eyes with the thumb and forefinger of my left hand. The stupid, stubborn old bastard was going to fight to the last. Rather than admit defeat, he was going for martyrdom. He wanted to die with his boots on, trying to achieve his mission against all the odds—a Conglomeration hero. “Can we stop him?”

“Only by destroying his craft.” The Trouble Dog’s voice was calm and professional-sounding. Tactical analysis was one of her specialties. “Based on an analysis of his war record, I believe he’ll keep fighting until there’s nothing left of his ship.”

“And then?”

“I expect that rather than surrender, he would prefer to detonate the Scimitar’s power plant in the hope of damaging us.”

“What about his crew—can’t they stop him?”

“If they tried it, he’d probably detonate the ship before they could remove him from his command position.”

I felt a flush of irritation. The builders of the Marble Armada had shaped the planets of this system into three-dimensional ornaments, and somehow Menderes still thought he could somehow oppose their ships. I’d tried to talk sense into the man, but if he insisted on this course of action then, as a captain in the House of Reclamation, there was only one thing I could do—and that was to resolve the situation with minimal loss of life. I could ask the Marble Armada to blow the Scimitar to dust, but that would mean murdering his crew, at least some of whom were likely only obeying the chain of command. Instead, I fired up the defence cannons. Then I spoke to the Trouble Dog.