Four hostiles had been trying to fix an explosive charge to my lower cargo doors. They had backed a truck beneath me and were using its roof as a platform as they attempted to secure the bomb. From the size of the device, I estimated there was a fifty per cent chance the doors’ integrity would be compromised. And, as far as I was concerned, that constituted an attempted attack—so I incinerated them with a manoeuvring thruster.

A second group was in the process of attacking the saloon in which the captain was sheltering, pouring fire into the front of the structure. I adjusted my AG field and began to drift across the tarmac, away from the remains of the burning truck. As my shadow fell across them, a couple of members of this second group turned their weapons on me. I listened to their bullets rattle against my armour like hailstones against a toughened glass skylight.

For sixty seconds, their shots continued to bounce off me. Then something that must have been a rocket-propelled grenade exploded against my heat shield.

The other guns fell silent, waiting to see how I’d react.

I let the smoke clear.

I felt calm, focused, and possessed of an almost hallucinatory clarity. I had been designed for combat, engineered to take satisfaction in the fulfilment of my function. Even now, having been absorbed into the House of Reclamation, that initial conditioning remained entrenched at the core of my being, etched into the carbon and silicon neurons at the heart of my processors. And, right at that moment, as I loomed over the settlement like the clenched fist of an angry god, I realised with a stone-cold certainty that no matter how many lives I saved, I would always be a killer at heart.

And right at that moment, that was fine with me.

Another RPG spiralled up at me on a twisting pillar of white smoke. I could have stopped it, but instead let it splash against my flank.

Let them test me. See what good it would do them. They were ants assaulting a wolf. They had picked a fight with the wrong ship.

I opened a channel to the captain. “Taking incoming fire,” I said. “Permission to neutralise remaining hostiles?”

The line crackled. “Can you do it without killing them?” She sounded reluctant.

My primary weapon systems may have been removed, but I still retained defensive capabilities. Using considerable (and I thought commendable) restraint, I activated my anti-collision cannons. They were the least deadly of the limited choices remaining in my arsenal. Designed to deflect and destroy potentially damaging interstellar detritus or incoming torpedoes, the cannons were each capable of dispensing fifteen hundred tungsten needles per second, at velocities guaranteed to shred any chunk of rock or ice large enough to damage my hull plating.

It was the work of a moment to assign targets and devise maximally efficient firing solutions.

“Affirmative.”