Or maybe she was projecting her own emotions onto it.
“How did you build the Dragon?” she asked. “Why didn"t Concordance stop you acquiring the materials and the tech?”
Ondo studied a screen held in his hand, checking the ship"s telemetry. “I didn"t build the Dragon. I don"t think you could really say anyone built it. Better to say it evolved over the centuries.”
“A ship can"t evolve.”
“Its innermost core is old; it predates the war, certainly. A ship"s Mind intertwined with a metaspace propagation drive would have been incredibly rare and valuable even in an age of regular interstellar travel. If you needed a bigger ship, or a newer ship, and you had a functioning core, it would have made sense to build around it rather than starting from scratch. So far as I can tell, that happen
