The Bastion-class is a carrier and a cruiser in one hull, and the United Galactic Authority Fleet does not apologize for either half. Five hangars, and what is in them tells you what the Fleet expects of the tasking. Two triple-mount energy cannons, built to reduce a fixed target from beyond the range at which that target can answer. Stations. Fortifications. Anything that cannot move out of the way.

Set a Bastion beside a supercarrier and the comparison is unkind: six fewer squadrons, a fraction of the armor, and nothing like the presence a city-sized hull pushes ahead of itself. But a supercarrier is heavy cavalry. When it commits, the matter is settled, and everyone concerned has a long time to watch it coming. The Bastion is what the Fleet sends when the matter cannot wait that long. Set it beside anything else in the system, and the comparison stops being a comparison.

So it does the work that will not keep. Escort runs. Frontier patrols. The long transits where the freighters astern cannot fight and the nearest relief is measured in weeks. Command margins aboard are tighter than a supercarrier's by design, with a single squadron wing commander where a capital flag would carry many, and the class has never been regarded as the lesser assignment for it. The Fleet calls the Bastion a workhorse. To everyone else in Tribellium, it is the largest thing they will ever be threatened by.

The guns are for things that cannot move. Fleet gunnery doctrine is explicit that a Bastion's cruiser armament exists to service fixed emplacements, and equally explicit about the corollary every crew learns first: things that cannot move can still fight back. A Bastion opens at range because it is not built to absorb what a fortification returns at close quarters.

There is exactly one class of fixed installation in the system a Bastion does not charge its batteries near. The Authority built it.