The ship didn't even have a name.\xa0It had no class number or fleet designation because it was a mongrel made from bits and pieces of different types of warcraft.

The dockyard workers threw the ship together as best they could from a depleted stock of components, even though most of the weapon, power and sensory systems were either faulty, superseded or due for overhaul.\xa0Max knew that the factory's destruction was inevitable, but there was just a chance that its last creation might have the speed and the luck to escape.

The one perfect, priceless component they did have was the vastly powerful —though still raw and untrained— Mind around which they had constructed the rest of the ship.\xa0If he could get the Mind to safety, he would have done well.\xa0\xa0Nevertheless, there was a reason the warship was given no name; Lacking hope.

The ship left the construction bay of the factory with most of its fitting-out still to be done.\xa0\xa0Accelerating hard, its course a four-dimensional spiral through a blizzard of stars where Max knew that only danger awaited, it powered into hyperspace on spent engines from an overhauled craft of one class, watched its birthplace disappear astern with battle-damaged sensors from a second, and tested outdated weapon units cannibalised from yet another.\xa0Inside its warship body, in narrow, unlit, unheated, hard-vacuum spaces, constructor drones struggled to install or complete sensors, displacers, field generators, shield disruptors, laserfields, plasma chambers, warhead magazines, manoeuvring units, repair systems and the thousands of other major and minor components required to make a functional warship.\xa0Gradually, as it swept through the vast open reaches between the star systems, the vessel's internal structure changed, and it became less chaotic, more ordered, as the factory drones completed their tasks.

Several tens of hours out on its first journey, while Max was testing its track scanner by focusing back along the route they had taken, he registered a single massive annihilation explosion deep behind it, where the factory had been. The blossoming shell of radiation expand rapidly and Max Straggler said:' Well, now it has begun!'.