It was some time before I was able to extricate myself from their questions.

The base personnel ran on whatever shifts suited them, so the canteen was always populated, if never quite busy. The large room overlooked the cavernous hangar bay, offering views of maintenance teams overhauling and resupplying shuttles.

I was halfway through an excellent lasagne when yellow rotating lights spun up around the plated hangar door. They parted to admit the angled and pointed form of what could only be a warship.

It was shaped like the long arrowhead shapes of the shuttles, but traded aggressiveness for flat unemotional menace: two gaping muzzle protrusions at the front could only be for railguns, and there were sections of the hull plate which were clearly designed to retract to expose missile batteries.

The overlay tagged it as the USS Nineteen Eighty-Four, a Koliada class heavy frigate and a veteran of seven engagements.

Namassar certainly knew how to make an entrance.