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Towering through the darkness is the immense prow, thrusting through the murk, the empty eyes of the skull on the prow gazing into eternity, the bared teeth above the crossbones snarling defiance across the decades. Destroyed, yes, but never defeated. Not quite.

Then the wind dies down, and the mists close in again.

She was launched in the Emperor’s shipyards orbiting New Byzantium, the capitol of the Third Dynasty. For years she lay in orbit, as a mass of machines and men swarmed over her, fitting and cutting and melding, turning her from a skeletal mass of metal to what she was born to be, the greatest battleship ever to sail the spaces between the stars.

The Empress came in person at the great ship’s formal launching, clad in her formal robes, with the High Crown on her head and the sceptre in her hand, to show she was acting in the Emperor’s name. I’ve seen her picture at the formal launching, her small oval face framed in the high collar of her gown, pale except for the vivid red of her mouth and the blue-green shading around her eyes. For an Empress, she’d been young and pretty, her motions graceful as she had formally soldered the last connections in platinum and pressed the red button that had set the machinery humming. Her last act before leaving had been to name the vessel.

"I name thee the Imperial Battleship Star Eater."

For three more years the ship had hung in her orbital docks, as her systems were checked and integrated, her turrets and missiles fitted, and slowly, but surely, she became the battleship she was to be.

The Empire made no attempt to keep her secret. She was a force-in-being, a warning to the subject worlds to blot out all thoughts of rebellion. She was a symbol, too, of the Empire’s domination of the starways. For once she was complete, what force could ever challenge her, or her sister ships to follow?

But those were turbulent years for the Empire, with wars draining the treasury, internal dissent burgeoning, and the threat of revolution now real and growing. First one and then another province had broken away, and open defiance had grown from a rarity, swiftly squelched, to such proportions as to become virtually the norm. And those provinces and systems which had totally broken away had proclaimed the Union of Republics. Open warfare raged across the spaces between the stars, and the Empire, unable to count on the support or resources of colony worlds any longer, was getting the worst of it.

From a symbol of Imperial power, the Star Eater had become a necessity, something essential if the Empire was to survive.

Such were the circumstances when her operational crew had finally come abroad. Most of the navy was already deployed in combat, but the best men were still removed from battlefields across a third of the galaxy to crew her. Weapons specialists, engineers, navigators, she had them all, and even her own battalion of startroopers.

And her captain and admiral came aboard, too, both decorated and experienced officers, absolutely loyal to the crown since both of them were related to the royals by blood. I’ve seen enough pictures and videos of theirs to be able to recognise them instantly: Baron Imamura, the captain, long-faced and with drooping eyelids, as though he was always sleepy. And, his superior, Rear Admiral Prince van Enkelvoort, one of the tallest officers in the navy, so tall that special royal dispensation had had to be sought to give him his commission. Van Enkelvoort’s pictures clearly show the black implanted irises of his eyes; as an albino, his vision wouldn’t have allowed him anywhere near an Imperial commission otherwise, royal blood or no.

The plan had been to take the ship away from New Byzantium to the region of the asteroid cluster known as the Seven Sisters for working up and training so as to make her fit for combat. But by this time the Empire’s frontiers were crumbling, the navy destroyed and dispersed, and the threat to the core planets, even New Byzantium itself, was very real. The time for such luxuries as extended working up and training was long past. Star Eater would be going right into combat, to save the Emperor and the Empire from utter and complete defeat.

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