The Drake antimatter cruiser was one of the fruits of Feron experiments into military applications of exotic energy and matter. Instead of a melee weapon, the Drake’s weapon segment contains an antimatter reactor. This antimatter can fire forward in plasma form like a breath weapon, giving the Drake its nickname. Additional antimatter also vents outward in gaseous form as the Drake traverses the battlefield: The Drake’s honeycomb segment has dishes that generate Nephelium fields, allowing the Drake to disperse the antimatter gas to create a smokescreen effect or to concentrate the gas and direct it at enemy ships. The Drake was the Feron’s secret weapon at the outset of the War, and its successes against Malleon admirals who’d never seen anything like it made it a powerful propaganda tool for the Feron fleets. It also became the boogeyman of the Malleon Navy, a fearsome ship that could burn a hole clear through the hull of a Venture-class. The Drake was a mystery to the Malleon for most of the War because the antimatter it vents makes it difficult to scan or capture, and Drake captains were ordered to overload the antimatter reactor rather than let the ships fall into Malleon hands.

At 650 yards, the Drake is somewhat smaller than a Wasp but close enough in size that enemies sometimes mistake one for the other at a distance. It follows a three-segment “totem pole” design similar to the other Feron ships, but its honeycomb and weapon segments are substantially redesigned. Its weapon segment resembles the snout of a dragon. The antimatter reactor itself is recessed deep inside the weapon segment, close to where it meets the honeycomb. The “snout” part is a particle accelerator that heats some of the antimatter gas flowing out of the reactor into plasma and expels it toward the enemy. Where the weapon segment meets the honeycomb, there are long, narrow, angled vents that send the antimatter gas toward the honeycomb segment. The Drake doesn’t carry any support craft, and instead has dishes that use Nephelium fields to shape the antimatter gas into different patterns for offense, defense, and stealth. Because these dishes replace the open bubbles that most other Feron ships, they were reinforced with heavy armor to give the Drake much more survivability than the Wasp even before accounting for the antimatter’s defensive uses. The command segment is proportionately the smallest of all the Feron ships because, without crew to man carried craft, there’s more room for officers and engineers in the honeycomb segment. It has a single large exhaust port plus four small exhaust ports arranged in a cross pattern around it.

The Drake is a multi-role cruiser that can hide allied ships behind a screen of sensor-disrupting antimatter gas, shape the gas into defensive clouds that disintegrate enemy projectiles passing through it, and wield the antimatter as a devastating close-range weapon. In “smokescreen” mode, the Drake disperses antimatter as widely as possible as to create sensor dead zones, hiding friendly movement from the Malleon to prevent them from lining up their devastating firing solutions before the Feron ships could close the distance. For defense, the Drake can use its dishes to shape the antimatter gas into dense clouds that can annihilate small objects, and enough gas positioned correctly can even block an entire broadside. On offense, the Drake’s main weapon is its “antimatter breath,” a cone of antimatter plasma fired at high speed from the particle accelerator in its snout. This breath weapon has a short effective range because the cone becomes less deadly as it expands, but at close ranges where the plasma is still concentrated, the antimatter can burn through any kind of armor with little resistance. It’s especially effective against Fresnel armor because its reactive plating doesn’t work on antimatter. In addition to the breath weapon, the Drake can also use its dishes to weaponize the trail of antimatter gas it vents. This has even less range than the breath weapon, but if a Drake is passing close by an enemy ship, it can send push the whole gas trail toward the enemy, which won’t breach the hull but can disrupt or destroy a swath of turrets. It can also concentrate the gas and send it toward a weak point or a hull breach created by allied ships like the Rhino or Silverback. In larger engagements, the Drake contributes to fulgressus by hiding friendly numbers and movements from the enemy so that they have less time to react and assemble into effective formations. Once the battle is joined, the antimatter gas creates dead zones that disrupt Malleon efforts to coordinate and rally while leaving Feron, who are trained to operate autonomously in a chaotic battlefield, relatively unaffected.