By the time they reached Larkspur Haven again, the return had already turned into more work than rest.
Aurelian had spent most of the trip reviewing the archived data tied to the sealed vessel in the bastion, and the more he looked, the more his interest slowly turned into mild curiosity about the ship.
At first glance, it had only been a large warship held back inside an old shipyard, but once Astra managed to pull more complete records from the damaged archive layers, it became clear that it was not just another heavy hull waiting to be powered on.
It belonged to a class he had never seen in any of the records they had until now.
That alone was something he had never expected
The design lineage was old, but not crude, and it did not fit neatly into the categories he knew.
It was larger than the cruisers currently under his command, but it still fell short of a true line battleship in mass and overall bulk.
