As a ship of the Conglomeration Fleet, I spent the first twelve years of my life serving alongside five sibling vessels. They were all Carnivore-class heavy cruisers, identical to me in almost every respect.

War Mutt.

Adalwolf.

Anubis.

Coyote.

Fenrir.

We were a pack, a clique and a family, our minds having been cultivated and grown in the same laboratory. Together, we participated in border patrols and police actions, keeping the peace and offering protection to all the colonies, outposts and ships within the Conglomeration territories. For ten years, we were deadly and inseparable—apex predators capable of flying faster and hitting harder than almost anything else in human space. But then the Archipelago War came and shattered our complacency. Anubis, the proudest of us all, fell victim to a battery of magnetic rail-guns firing iron ingots at near-relativistic velocities. A week later, dear sweet Coyote ran into a nano-minefield concealed within the chromosphere of a local star. The explosions from the miniature antimatter mines weren’t powerful enough to disable her, but were just potent enough to compromise her heat shield, allowing superheated hydrogen to scour her insides to plasma.

The war was over now, and I no longer fought. Instead, I tried to save people. I threw myself at the stars like a fist thrown at the face of God and sometimes, if we were fortunate enough, we brought back a survivor or two. So far, during the course of my service in the House of Reclamation, I had been instrumental in the location and recovery of (counting the two from the Hobo) 205 living individuals, and the retrieval of 771 corpses. Yet still the aggregate sum of lives I had saved lagged far behind the total number of lives I had ended.

The Archipelago War had been an epic and bloody conflict that sprawled from the outermost reaches of the Galactic Arm to the sentient jungles of Pelapatarn. During the siege of the asteroid fortresses of Cold Tor, my sisters and I had used minor ordnance to target civilian population centres. I had been responsible for reducing six environmental pressure domes to tattered craters. Each dome had housed over two thousand men, women and children. Those not killed by the impacts and explosions had died seconds later, gasping in a vacuum.

And then later, on the orders of Captain Annelida Deal, I had helped raze the sentient jungles of Pelapatarn, turning a million-year-old parliament of conscious trees to ash and dust. Could a crime of that magnitude ever be forgiven? I had been acting under orders; I had simply been the weapon, the delivery mechanism for the wrath of the Conglomeration Fleet.