Chapter 7: Through the Blockade and the Silence Between Stars

The ship was called the Naboo Royal Starship, and Arthur learned this in the same breath that he learned it was not, by any measure he understood, a ship designed for combat.

Captain Panaka said this directly, in the flat voice of a man accustomed to delivering unwelcome intelligence to people who would nonetheless require it: the vessel's hull plating was chromaline-polished, not armored; its weapons were the barest concession to self-defense that Naboo's pacifist legislature had been willing to fund; it was built to be beautiful, and beauty, the captain did not need to add, stopped nothing.

Arthur listened to this assessment in the ship's main corridor with the same expression he had once used when a quartermaster told him that the left flank's supply line had collapsed and they had three days of grain remaining. He asked what the ship did well.