THE STARSHIP HAD NO NAME; it didn’t have a serial number or even a marque. Only one of its kind had ever been built. As no more would ever be required, no designation was needed; it was simply the ship.

It streaked through the substructure of spacetime at fifty-nine light-years an hour, the fastest anything built by humans had ever traveled. Navigation at that awesome velocity was by quantum interstice similarity interpretation, which determined the relative location of mass in the real universe beyond. This alleviated the use of crude hysradar or any other sensor that might possibly be detected. The extremely sophisticated ultradrive that powered it might have reached even greater speeds if a considerable fraction of its phenomenal energy hadn’t been used for fluctuation suppression. That meant there was no telltale distortion amid the quantum fields to betray its position to other starships that might wish to hunt it.

As well as its formidable stealth ability, the ship was big, a fat ovoid over six hundred meters long and two hundred meters across at the center. But its real advantage came from its armaments; there were weapons on board that could knock out a half a dozen Commonwealth Navy Capital-class ships while barely stirring out of standby mode. The weapons had been verified only once: the ship had flown over ten thousand light-years from the Greater Commonwealth to test them so as to avoid detection. For millennia to come, primitive alien civilizations in that section of the galaxy would worship as gods the colorful nebulae expanding across the interstellar wastes.