Showing our newest recruit the King Alexander had seemed like a simple and relatively unimportant, but well-repaying act. If we impressed upon him the power of our nation’s military, surely it would awe even a man of the Fringe’s great star nations. Looking back on it now, I wish I had never ordered my brothers to grant such a view. How idiotic we must have seemed to him, lauding our triumph as if it were not but a gnat before the gaze of an apex predator. He may as well have been a nascent god in that moment, and we the ignorant primitives exclaiming with wonder at our discovery of fire.

  The first detail that struck Arthur was the ship’s color: a flawless, reflective bronze which gleamed like the polished arms of ancient Greek hoplites he’d seen in historical holodisplays—a hue that whispered of antiquity, tradition, and war. The second, washing over him with a wave of quiet awe, was the sheer and breathtaking scale of the vessel looming before him.

  Even if reckoned by the Fringe instead of the Mid-Rim, the flagship was monstrous.

  The King Alexander hung in the void like a colossal spearhead forged for the stars. Its prow was a wicked, ornate blade that echoed the predatory grace of the ships he’d glimpsed at the Graecian Calypso point, and promised a hateful wrath for any that dared challenge its dominance. Her hull stretched vast and unbroken, a bronze titan that Arthur estimated at nearly 1,500 meters from stem to stern.

  At her widest point, swelling near the rear where her form flared into angular wings; she spanned perhaps 800 meters—a rough guess, but one honed by memories of void warfare even then reawakening within his mind. The shuttle’s lazy arc around her revealed a topside bristling with armament: ten triple-barreled plasma batteries per flank, their barrels built with staggered layers to weather the recoil of their immense projectile blasts, and each one linked in clusters that warned of apocalyptic fusillades.

  Between these juggernaut capital weapons sat rows of double-barreled laser cannons; anti-starfighter defenses built at a 4:1 ratio to the main guns—their sleek forms glinting faintly under the distant starlight.

  As the shuttle looped languidly over the flagship, Arthur’s gaze caught on a peculiar detail: the ship’s center wasn’t a solid mass. Instead, her hull split along a tapering seam— reminiscent of a paper airplane’s folded spine—and widened as it swept back toward the stern. Within that divide was built a colossal cylindrical structure, shielded by the overhanging halves.

  “A launching tube,” he murmured quietly, its scale dwarfing anything he’d imagined Graecia capable of.

  The massive central construction ran the majority of the length of the ship, and if his guess was correct; housed multiple squadrons of interceptors, heavy fighters, and bombers that the warship could deploy at a moment’s notice.

  Given the style of the design, Arthur also assumed it to be one of the special deuterium-infused hyper-acceleration catapults used to launch Eidolons.

  While all starcraft could use such constructs to launch and land, it was the nature of Eidolons that required such construction. The war machines were not ostensibly difficult to build, but given that fully capable Eidolon pilots were such a critically rare minority of any population, it was seen as foolish bordering on idiotic to not mitigate risks when it came to their preservation.

  An Eidolon was rarely more vulnerable than when on approach to an enemy starship, and thanks to their distinctive energy signatures, size, and dimensions; they were priority targets for any enemy within the battlespace. An Eidolon’s power was in the speed of its combat maneuvers, and that meant the machines often sacrificed redundant plating or defensive technology for greater burst acceleration.

  It also made them extremely dependent on not being hit.

  The solution was elegant in its brutality, and paired well with the madness inherent to most daredevils that called themselves Eidolon pilots: launch them fast—faster than any targeting system could track. When ‘fired’ out of a launching tube with comparable velocity to a railgun, that goal was far more easily achieved.

  “What’s her classification?” Arthur asked out loud while the shuttle looped under the colossal flagship and gave him a view of the matching sets of turrets mounted on her ventral hull. The bottom of the vessel was another flat plane, dispelling any idea of a keel. Given the time for the loop, he further estimated the Graecian flagship to be nearly 400 meters high from its bottom-most surface to its topmost.

  “She’s no Carrier,” he continued as the realization bloomed alongside a flood of voidspace tactics he hadn’t possessed even moments before. “Even with that Supercarrier-sized catapult, that prow’s built for ramming.”

  “Well-observed.” Atreus replied, his tone carrying a flicker of approval—or perhaps satisfaction—as he shifted his attention from the warship back to Arthur. The Myrmidón’s black armor caught the shuttle’s dim light, a stark contrast to the bronze beyond the viewport. “The King Alexander is the title ship in our Basileus line of Super Dreadnoughts. You see how the catapult is smaller in profile than the highest points on top and below?”

  “Yes,” Arthur said while his eyes traced the split hull’s overhang.

  “The two sections of hull can close like a seal,” Atreus explained with evident pride in his nation's achievement, “shielding the catapult and creating an unbroken spearhead. At that point, special emitters built into the prow create a plasma lance she can use to punch through just about any ship in space.”

  “They come together?” Arthur asked with genuine surprise. “Like, what, two halves of a paper airplane?”

  Atreus snorted, a rare crack in his stoic facade. “Yes, Magellan. Like two halves of a paper airplane.”

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  Laughter rolled from the cockpit—Perseus, no doubt—and Arthur’s lips quirked into a wry smile.

  The example had made sense to at least one other person, at least.

  “And the bridge?” Arthur continued without preamble a moment later. “Where is that?”

  “Two-thirds back, in the most heavily armored part of the King Alexander.” treus answered after a brief pause, as if weighing how much to reveal. “Only the Alcubierre Drive, Compression Drive, and Conversion reactor are more heavily shielded.”

  Arthur nodded, his thoughts spiraling as fragments of knowledge—unbidden, instinctive—coalesced into clarity. The more he learned, the more his mind seemed to key into what he needed to learn next, and the questions he asked were spurred on by the veritably thirst for information his compulsion to know more created.

  “Would it be too much to ask, Atreus, about which factor of drive you’ve iterated?”

  Silence stretched after the question was poised, heavy and deliberate.

  Atreus’ hesitation was palpable, and Arthur understood why. Though his path seemed tied to Graecia, he could still walk away—could still carry secrets to another power. The Myrmidón was likely calculating: was this knowledge too proliferated to matter, like the Basileus-class details he’d already shared? Arthur doubted anything about the King Alexander would surprise rivals like Parthia, but drive factors were another thing entirely.

  Arthur very much doubted any of what Atreus had told him about the King Alexander would be a surprise to the other nations of the Hyperion Cluster. Especially not Parthia.

  A few more moments of deliberation later, Atreus finally answered.

  “Sixth Factor.” The tall and black-armored Myrmidón said simply.

  That was a critical piece of information that Arthur made sure to file away.

  While the Alcubierre drive was a crucial piece of technology that almost all of humanity made use of, it was the ‘Mass Factor Rating’ which stood as one of the most defining elements in the military and economic power of different star nations—it defined their hierarchy when compared to peer powers, and was instrumental in a cluster’s power standings.

  The insight hit him as naturally as his own pulse.

  More information came, and he reflected on it hungrily.

  Mass Factor Rating, or ‘Factor’ in the shorthand, determined the tonnage a drive could warp, a multiplier of maximum warpable mass (wm). Every colony ship launched from Sol carried Third Factor blueprints—wm × 3, or 300,000 cubic tonnes, given the baseline of 100,000 tonnes without exotic matter coils

  Warpable mass, Arthur remembered, was controlled by specific and carefully curated exotic matter coils. These coils interacted with the Alcubierre drive to create a larger bubble of warped space without compromising its stability, though the technology was limited both by understanding of the exotic matter’s production, and the various minutiae of the Alcubierre drive’s development.

  Maximum warpable mass without the coils was fixed at 100,000 cubic tonnes.

  A Third Factor drive’s coils could thereby warp up to 300,000 cubic tonnes.

  A Sixth Factor drive’s coils in comparison could warp up to 600,000 cubic tonnes.

  “So she’s at capacity,” Arthur surmised with a steady voice as the numbers clicked into place in his mind, and his eyes—with new knowledge and understanding blooming behind them constantly now—swept over the King Alexander with critical analysis.

  “Including the interceptor, heavy fighter, and bomber squadrons as well as her shuttles, supplies, crew, and deployable escort craft?” Atreus clarified gruffly. “Yes.”

  “What’s her unburdened weight?”

  “Five hundred and sixty thousand tonnes.”

  Arthur let out a low whistle, genuine admiration breaking through to show on his features while he turned back to Atreus. “Impressive. Especially this far Rimward from Sol.”

  “The Ascendancy may be a minnow in the humanosphere,” Atreus said while his voice warmed with quiet pride, “but in the Hyperion Cluster, we’re a whale.”

  “So I’m learning,” Arthur murmured, his mind alight with returning fragments—history, tactics, technology—and each piece slotting in like puzzle pieces fitting togeter to fill his artificial void of understanding.

  The Inquisitor truly had done a number on him.

  The last views of the King Alexander filed past his window while they spoke, and the last Arthur saw of the flagship was the blazing luminescence of her plasma drives pushing her through the patrol path she occupied; each one housed within a hexagonal thrust cone depressed into the rear of the gargantuan flagship.

  Five main thrusters comprised her rear complement, with smaller honeycomb patterns of sub-engines patterned among the larger majority. It was a popular design choice among stellar warships, and followed the logic of using many individual smaller thrusters linked to a central control so as to avoid losing a large amount of propulsion from a single strike at the engines.

  The fact that thrusters were depressed into the rear of the hull under the watchful gaze of her rear guns and a plethora of dedicated point defense lasers surrounding the ‘rectangular maw’ of her engine block certainly helped.

  That strike, of course, would still need to penetrate the attached battle group of battleships, battlecruisers, cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and corvettes patrolling in formation with the monstrous flagship.

  Not to mention what Arthur assumed was more than a few squadrons of starfighters.

  The King Alexander was a colossus, but she didn’t stand alone.

  “The King Alexander almost never leaves Graecia.” Atreus commented while Arthur watched the colossal starship fade from view. “She’s the fulcrum upon which our home fleet is centered.”

  “Because the star fortresses can’t move to interdict starships,” Arthur said when the clarity of thought came to him. “Though that assumes an enemy breaches the Calypso cordon and penetrates past the warp anchor before you can respond.”

  “No bulwark is impenetrable.” Atreus said in a sober and pragmatic tone. “There is a reason we named our border fortress at the Korinth Calypso point Thermopylae. Our ancestors learned the price of prideful presumption well.”

  “Hope for the best, prepare for the worst,” Arthur said quietly, the words a reflex from a life he could almost taste again.

  “And be ready for the catastrophic.” Atreus intoned with a hint of approval.

  With that, Arthur realized, both Magellan and Zacaris whole-heartedly agreed.