After Solo’s innumerable gunboats destroyed the Eternal Fleet in the Median War, Varvarossa began building new ships. The inglorious end of the Eternal Battleships could not cure the priesthood of designers of excess, poetic embellishment, or their habitual faith that a proper name, an armour charm, and protective iconography would grant an object an additional, weightless layer of spiritual armour. This time, however, mindful of the painful loss of the old fleet, the learned shipwrights put worldly engineering first: the power plant and powerful modern guns designed and cast in Ovida. The whole religious, magical, symbolic array, although it entailed considerable additional expense, had almost no effect on the new ships’ fighting qualities or seaworthiness.
