She paced around the chamber, while the Spline’s weird hyperdrive muscles pulsed. ‘Before the fallback order came, we’d just taken a major hit. Do you know what that’s like? Your first reaction is sheer surprise that it has happened to you. Surprise, and disbelief, and resentment. And anger. The ship is alive; it’s part of your crew. And you live in it; it’s as if your home has been violated. So there was shock. But most of the crew went to defence posture and began to fulfil their duties, as per their training. There was no panic. Pandemonium, yes, but no panic.’

‘And in all this you decided to disobey the fallback order.’

She looked me in the eye. ‘I had to make an immediate decision. We had an opportunity; we were close enough to strike, I believed, and we were in a situation where my orders weren’t valid. So I believed. I decided to go ahead.

‘We went straight through the chop line and headed for the centre of the Xeelee concentration, bleeding from a dozen hits, starbreakers blazing. That’s how we fight the Xeelee, you see. They are smarter than us, and stronger. But we just come boiling out at them. They think we are vermin, so we fight like vermin.’

‘You launched the Sunrise.’

‘Hama was the pilot.’ My unborn, unconceived child. ‘He rode a monopole torpedo: the latest stuff. A Xeelee Sugar Lump is a fortress shaped like a cube, thousands of kilometres on a side, a world with edges and corners. We punched a hole in its wall like it was paper.

‘But we were taking a beating. Hit after hit.

‘We had to evacuate the outer decks. You should have seen the hull, human beings swarming like flies on a piece of garbage, scrambling this way and that, fleeing the detonations. They hung onto weapons mounts, stanchions, lifelines, anything. We fear the falling, you see. I think some of the crew feared that more than the Xeelee. The life pods got some of them. We lost hundreds . . . Her face worked, and she seemed to reach for happier memories. ‘You know why the name “Sunrise”? Because it’s a planet thing. The Xeelee are space dwellers. They don’t know day and night. Every dawn is ours, not theirs - one thing they can’t take away from us. Appropriate, don’t you think? And you should see what it’s like when a Sunrise pilot comes on board.’

‘Like Hama.’

‘As the yacht conies out of port, you get a flotilla riding along with it, civilian ships as well as Navy, just to see the pilot go. When the pilot comes aboard the whole crew lines the passageways, chanting his or her name.’ She smiled. ‘Your heart will burst when you see Hama.’

I struggled to focus. ‘So the pilots are idolised. We aren’t supposed to have heroes.’