Flag In Exile

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

It was very quiet on PNS Conquerant's flag bridge.

It had taken three and a half minutes for their light-speed systems to give them the details of the brief, terrible destruction sixty-three million kilometers behind them, but the disappearance of TG 14.1’s impeller signatures had already told them what those details would be. One battleship, Thomas Theisman thought numbly. Only one battleship had survived!

He knew who was in command back there, who it had to be. Intelligence had been wrong about how quickly Grayson could refit captured SDs, but it had been right about where Honor Harrington was, for that brutally professional slaughter bore all the hallmarks of her touch. She'd done it to the People’s Navy again, he thought. Smashed them with consummate skill, made it look easy.

He wanted to hate her, but he couldn't. Hate what she'd done to his navy, yes, and long to smash her in return, but he'd met the woman behind the name. He'd seen what it cost her to kill her enemies and lose her own people, and somehow that kept him from hating her.

He knew he should break off. Operation Dagger had just been blown out of space with the man who'd conceived it and God alone knew how many thousands of others. Harrington had enough overtake to catch him millions of kilometers short of the hyper limit on his present course, but his smaller battleships had the acceleration edge over even her SDs. If he altered course by ninety degrees, her overtake advantage wouldn't matter; he'd be generating an entirely new side vector, one she could never catch him on, and that was precisely what he should be doing, but...

He ignored his staffs stunned silence, ignored the white-faced citizen commissioner in the chair beside his, and punched a command into his console. He watched the computers obediently reconstruct what they could of the brief, savage battle astern of Conquerant, and his eyes narrowed.

"Kill our deceleration, Megan."

His ops officer stared at him for one second, then swallowed.

"Aye, Citizen Admiral," she replied, and he heard her passing the orders to the rest of the task group.

"What are you doing?" Dennis LePic hissed in his ear, and he turned his head to regard the citizen commissioner much more calmly than he felt.

"I'm thinking instead of simply reacting, Sir."

"Thinking?" LePic gasped, and Theisman nodded.

"Exactly. I'm thinking that running away may not be our best option." LePic stared at him in total disbelief, and Theisman smiled thinly. "That's Honor Harrington back there," he said conversationally. "Intelligence said she was here, and she's the only 'Grayson' officer with the guts and savvy to pull that off, but she's not a god, Citizen Commissioner. She got hurt, probably badly. Probably badly enough that we can still take her."

"Take her?" LePic's horror at the devastation of Meredith Chavez's task group was plain on his face. "Are you insane? You saw what she just did to twenty-four battleships, and we only have twelve!"

"That's correct, Citizen Commissioner, twelve undamaged battleships which now know what they're really up against."

"But she's got superdreadnoughts!"

"Yes, she does. But one of them was totally destroyed, a second's suffered obviously heavy damage, and the other four have almost certainly been hurt as well. And she's exhausted her missile pods. She can't swamp us like she did Citizen Admiral Chavez and Citizen Admiral Thurston. No, Sir," he shook his head, "the odds aren't as bad as you may think. Not nearly as bad."

LePic swallowed again, but the shock was fading in his eyes as he made himself consider what Theisman had said.

"Are you serious, Citizen Admiral?" he asked quietly.

"I am." Theisman turned his head to look at his ops officer. "Megan, what's your analysis?"

"Citizen Admiral, I can't give you one, not from this range. Our data's too poor."

"Based on what you have," Theisman pressed. He cut his eyes briefly sideways at LePic, and Megan Hathaway recognized the warning in that glance. She drew a deep breath and made herself speak slowly and deliberately, forcing any hint of panic out of her tone for the civilian's benefit.

"Well," she said, "you're right that they've lost an SD, and from what we can see from here, it looks like a second one's suffered enough drive damage that it's having trouble staying with the rest of her formation. She's lost six battlecruisers, as well, and more of them must be damaged." She paused and frowned, twisting a lock of hair around her right index finger, and she sounded almost surprised when she resumed. "You may be right, Citizen Admiral. Certainly her other SDs must've taken some damage. The question is how much."

"My own thought, exactly." He turned back to LePic. "Citizen Commissioner, we don't dare execute our part of Dagger with combat effective ships of the wall behind us. If we pull put for Endicott and they follow us, they can trap us between themselves and whatever ships are already picketing the system. But if they've taken as much damage as I suspect they have, if, in fact, they aren't combat effective anymore, we can engage and destroy them. And if we do that, then we can still achieve all of Dagger's objectives, because there won't be anything heavy enough to stop us."

"And just how do you propose to find out if they're combat effective, Citizen Admiral?"

"There's only one way to do that, Sir," Thomas Theisman said quietly.

"My Lady, Force Zulu has now reversed acceleration," Commander Bagwell said. "They're coming back in."

Honor felt her lips tighten. She gazed at Bagwell for a moment, then nodded and looked at Mercedes Brigham.

"What's our status, Mercedes?"

"Not good, Milady," Mercedes said frankly. "Glorious is gone, and the Gift's accel is less than a hundred gees, right on point-nine-six KPS squared. Magnificent can make about two fifty gees; Terrible and Courageous have impeller damage of their own, but they're both good for about three sixty. I wouldn't push them harder than that with so many shot-up nodes unbalancing their wedges, Milady." Honor nodded, and Mercedes rocked back in her chair. "Furious's drive is actually in the best shape, but she took a real pounding in that last exchange. She's lost half her energy weapons and three-quarters of her missile tubes, and Captain Gates says his starboard sidewall is 'iffy.'" Her lips twitched at Gates' choice of adjective, then she shrugged. "For all intents and purposes, Milady, Terrible and Courageous are all we've got, and neither of them is what I'd call healthy."

"Analysis, Fred?" Honor asked, switching her gaze back to Bagwell.

"My Lady, they can take us," he said flatly. "They're faster, they're undamaged, and they've got the force advantage. We can probably destroy six or seven of their battleships; the other four or five will destroy us while we're doing it, and that assumes we can get to energy range. We've lost so many tubes a missile engagement would be suicide."

"Recommendation?"

"We'll have to avoid action, My Lady." Bagwell didn't like saying that, yet he seemed surprised she even had to ask. "If we fall back to Grayson orbit now, they don't have the firepower to take us and the forts."

"I see." Honor turned her chair back to her console, hiding her face from her staff, and let her own desperate weariness and fear show for just a minute. Nimitz unhooked himself from his safety harness and slid down into her lap, then rose on his true-feet and turned to press his muzzle against her cheek. He purred to her, and she slipped an arm around him and hugged him close while she wondered who was in command of those Peep ships. Who'd kept his wits about himself well enough to realize what Bagwell had just so succinctly summed up? What officer had watched the brutal destruction of twice his own strength, yet had the courage to realize he could still reverse the verdict and win?

She bit her own lip and forced her exhausted brain to work. She could avoid action, but only if she started immediately, and even then she couldn't save Manticore's Gift. The battered SD lacked the acceleration to evade the incoming Peeps, so Honor would have no choice but to write her off. She might have to abandon Magnificent, as well, but Fred was right about Terrible, Courageous, and Furious. They could still avoid the enemy and reach the cover of the forts, and that would save half the squadron.

Yet would it? Would it save them? If that Peep CO was confident enough to come back in at all, he wouldn't give up. He could still retreat to the outer system, still send missiles in on ballistic courses. For that matter...

She inhaled deeply and squared her shoulders, then turned back to face her staff.

"I'm afraid that won't work, Fred," she said, and the ops officer stared at her. "If we break off, we lose the Gift and, probably, Magnificent. That's bad enough. But if we fall back, then whoever's in command out there will know, not just suspect, but know, we can't fight him. If he wants to, he can carry out a long-range cee-fractional bombardment of Grayson, and we can't stop him. I don't think he'd be crazy enough to go for the planet itself, but he could take out the forts, the shipyards... the farms."

She saw the stark understanding on the faces of her Grayson staff of what losing two-thirds of their world's food sources would mean, and nodded.

"Nor is that the only consideration," she went on. "There's those freighters and transports. If they were here to take apart our shipyards, they would have come in with Force Alpha, but they were detached as part of Zulu. That suggests they were intended to go somewhere else from the outset, and the only place I can think of is Endicott."

"Endicott, My Lady?" Sewell asked, and she nodded again.

"Suppose those ships carry Marines, Allen, or even just a cargo of modern weapons. The Endicott picket doesn't have anything heavier than a battlecruiser; they couldn't stop Zulu from breaking through to Masada, taking out the orbital bases, and landing whatever the transports are carrying. And if the Faithful get their hands on modern weaponry..."

She broke off as Greg Paxton winced in understanding, then went on in a soft, almost regretful tone.

"We don't have a choice, people. If they decide we're too battered to interfere with them, they can do whatever they want outside the reach of Grayson's orbital weapons even if they decide against bombarding the forts from deep space. They can take out our asteroid industry, wreck all the orbital infrastructure in Endicott, turn Masada into a bloodbath... we can't let any of those things happen."

"But how can we stop it, My Lady?" Bagwell asked.

"There's only one way I know." She looked at her com officer. "Howard, contact Magnificent. Find out what her maximum safe acceleration is."

"Aye, aye, My Lady," Lieutenant Commander Brannigan replied, and Honor turned back to Sewell.

"Once we have Captain Edwards' max accel, plot a squadron course to intercept Force Zulu at her best speed, Alien."

"But..." Bagwell started, then drew a deep breath. "My Lady, I understand your logic, but we don't have the firepower for it. Not anymore."

"I think we can at least cripple their battleship element," Honor replied in that same soft voice. "We can do enough damage to make it unlikely they'll take on the light forces we have left here and in Endicott."

"And while we're doing that, My Lady," Bagwell said very, very quietly, "they'll completely destroy this squadron."

Honor regarded him for a moment. The fussy, detail-minded ops officer looked back without personal fear, but she understood the deeper fear in his eyes. More than that, she knew he was right. But sometimes the price which had to be paid was just as fearsome as the people who had to pay it feared it would be, she thought, and held his gaze for another ten seconds, then lowered her eyes to her com screen to Terrible's bridge.

"Captain Yu," she asked with a small, tired smile, "do you concur with Commander Bagwell’s analysis?"

"Yes, My Lady, I do," Yu said, meeting her gaze levelly.

"I see. Tell me, Alfredo, did you ever read Clauzewitz?"

"On War, My Lady?" Yu sounded surprised. She nodded, and he frowned for an instant, then nodded back. "Yes, My Lady, I have."

"Then perhaps you remember the passage in which he said 'War is fought by human beings'?"

He gazed at her for another long moment, his eyes almost as opaque as they'd been the day she discovered he was her new flag captain, and then he nodded a second time.

"Yes, My Lady, I do," he said in a rather different tone.

"Well, it's time to find out if he's still right, Captain. As soon as Commander Sewell has that course for you, get us moving along it."

"Citizen Admiral, the enemy is changing course." Citizen Rear Admiral Theisman held up one hand at his com screen, breaking off an earnest, hurried conversation with Citizen Rear Admiral Chernov, at Megan Hathaway's announcement. He looked sharply at her, and the ops officer studied her console for a moment. Then she raised her head, a puzzled crease between her eyebrows.

"They seem to be settling down on a rough heading of oh-seven-three, oh-oh-eight true, Citizen Admiral. Acceleration approximately two-point-four-five KPS squared, call it two-five-oh gravities."

Theisman frowned, then strode over to Conquerant's master plot and glowered down into its depths. That low an acceleration suggested Harrington’s ships had to be as heavily damaged as he thought they were, but his frown deepened as he watched CIC’s projection of her course stretch out across the plot. It wasn't the head-on intercept she'd sought against TG 14.1, yet her new heading would bring her force across his own line of advance in little more than forty-seven minutes. And the fact that she would cross it rather than come in on a reciprocal meant she'd have far more time, at least twenty-six minutes of it, CIC estimated, in which to engage before he crossed her range envelope.

His eyes hardened, and he bit his lip gently. If she had four healthy superdreadnoughts over there, or even four that were only moderately damaged, supported by nine battlecruisers, his twelve battleships and sixteen battlecruisers were unlikely to last twenty-six minutes against them. But she couldn't have healthy ships, not after the pounding she and Thurston had just given one another! Only if she didn't, then why was she on a heading like that? She wasn't simply accepting battle, she was courting it!

"Punch in a same-plane evasive course change to port at four-seven-oh gees and set for continuous update," he said quietly. His astrogator spoke quietly to CIC, and the plot changed once more. A new course projection speared out from Conquerant's own light code, and Theisman tapped an order of his own into the plot. A broad-based, shaded cone of green blinked alight, spreading out to port, and a digital time display appeared beside it. Conquerant was the apex of the cone, and a three-quarters sphere of amber light stretched out ahead of it. The time display ticked downward, and as it did, the cone shrank and the amber both filled in about it and moved steadily aft. Theisman gazed down at the plot, humming softly under his breath, then turned his head as he felt a presence at his elbow.

"What is it, Citizen Admiral?" Dennis LePic's eyes were calm, and if perspiration beaded his forehead, Thomas Theisman didn't hold that against him.

"Lady Harrington has decided not to wait for us, Sir," the citizen rear admiral said. "She's coming out to meet us."

"Out to meet us?" LePic repeated more sharply. "I thought you said her ships were too damaged to fight us?"

"What I said, Citizen Commissioner, is that I believed them to be too badly damaged to fight us and win, and I still believe that."

"Then why isn't she trying to avoid us?" LePic asked tautly.

"An excellent question," Theisman admitted, then gave a frosty smile. "It's always possible she disagrees with my own evaluation, I suppose."

LePic started to say something, then paused, and his lower lip whitened under the pressure of his teeth as he stared down into the plot. Seconds trickled past, and then he cleared his throat.

"What does this indicate, Citizen Admiral?" He gestured at the green and amber lights and time display, and Theisman chuckled without humor.

"That, Citizen Commissioner, is the space we have to dodge in. If we alter course to any heading which lies within the bounds of the amber zone, we'll pass within missile range of Lady Harrington but remain outside her energy range. If we alter course to stay within the green zone, she'll be unable to bring us to action at all."

"And if we stay within neither of them?"

"Then, Citizen Commissioner, we'll have no choice but to pass through her energy envelope at some point."

"I see." LePic watched the time display tick downward from 12:00 to 11:59 and swallowed.

"If they don't change course in the next twelve minutes, My Lady, they won't change it at all," Mercedes Brigham observed quietly, and Honor nodded without looking up from her own display. Damage reports were still coming in, and they were even worse than Mercedes' original estimate. Their chance of inflicting decisive damage on the Peeps, if it came to that, was already lower than she'd hoped, and it was shrinking steadily. She pinched the bridge of her nose again, harder this time, hoping the self-inflicted pain would somehow pierce her fatigue. There had to be something else she could do, some other way she could turn up the pressure, something... but what?

LePic was dabbing at his forehead now as sweat trickled into his eyes and he stood hunched over the plot, watching the green cone shrink. The amber zone was slowly, inexorably shrinking as well, and Thomas Theisman felt an urge to wipe his own forehead as he stood beside the commissioner.

Damn it, he knew he was right! By now, his long-range scans had confirmed the atmosphere and water vapor trailing Harrington's SDs in clear proof of heavy null breaching. The range remained impossibly long for any sort of visual examination of her units, but he didn't really need that, did he? Her drive strength was down, her ships were bleeding air, her active sensor emissions had changed as she brought secondary systems on-line to replace shot-up primaries... all of it pointed to ships with massive damage.

And yet, damage or no, she was still coming, coming when she had to know defeat would cost her the total destruction of all four of her SDs. Why? Why was she doing it when she knew as well as he that he could take her?

He wanted to pace, but such obvious worry on his part would only finish off the resolution to which LePic clung so painfully, and so he settled for rocking slowly up and down on his heels. He'd studied Harringtons record with care since Operation Jericho's dismal failure. Intelligence had done the same thing, of course, and with far better information access, but he had a personal motivation they lacked. She'd beaten him, captured his ship, captured him, and that gave him a special insight, a special desire and need to understand her. And as his mind ran back over all he'd read and heard about her, he remembered the final phases of the Second Battle of Yeltsin. Remembered how Honor Harrington had taken a crippled heavy cruiser on a death-ride straight into the broadside of a battlecruiser, knowing it would destroy her... because she'd believed that before her ship died, it could inflict enough damage to prevent its enemy from carrying on to attack Grayson.

His eyes went very still for a moment, and he fought an urge to swallow. Was that what this was? Second Yeltsin on a grander scale? Was she actually willing to sacrifice four SDs and another twenty-four thousand people in a fight to the death simply to cripple TG 14.2s battleships?

His mind ticked harder, faster, considering the possibilities. If she took out his battleships, the rest of Task Force Fourteen's survivors would be unable to take Yeltsin or Endicott away from their other defenders. But she couldn't do it, a corner of his brain insisted stubbornly. She couldn't have the firepower over there to pull it off! He was certain she didn't!

But...

He clenched his fists behind him and swore silently. As he himself had told LePic, Harrington wasn't a god. Not even she could do the impossible. But she was Honor Harrington, and if she thought she could pull it off...

"Seven minutes, My Lady."

Honor nodded again. She didn't need the quiet reminder, and part of her wanted to snap at Mercedes for inflicting it on her brutally strained nerves, but it was a chief of staffs job. Besides, Mercedes had to be feeling the strain, too, and if an occasional unneeded reminder was all the sign of it she gave, then she was doing a better job of hiding it than most.

Honor looked around her flag bridge. Mercedes sat calmly at her own console, watching her plot, inputting an occasional update as her earbug whispered reports from other units of the squadron to her. Fred Bagwell sat very still and straight, face blank, shoulders slightly hunched, and rested his motionless hands on his tactical console. He'd already set up the best fire plan his crippled missile tubes and energy batteries permitted; now all he could do was wait, and a drop of sweat trickled down his right cheek.

Allen Sewell had his command chair shock frame unlatched so that he could lounge back and cross his legs. His elbows rested on the chair arms, his hands steepled across his stomach while he whistled silently, and Honor felt her own mouth quirk in wry amusement. Did Allen even begin to realize now his obvious "relaxation" shouted out the tension which had produced it?

She glanced at Howard Brannigan. The sandy-haired com officer was as quietly busy as Mercedes, monitoring the communications nets, but he seemed to feel Honor's eyes upon him. He looked up and met her gaze for a moment, then nodded with a brief smile and bent back to his duties.

Gregory Paxton was at his own work station, and a steadily lengthening block of alphanumeric characters crawled up his display. He was actually jotting down notes, Honor thought, and wondered if he was recording his personal impressions or updating the official post-battle report he was so unlikely to survive to present.

Neither Stephen Matthews nor Abraham Jackson were present. Her logistics officer had taken over in Damage Central to free Terrible's surviving engineering officers to lead repair parties, and her chaplain was busy with his own grim duty to the dead and dying in Terrible's sickbay.

Her officers, Honor thought wearily. A microcosm of the entire squadron. People she'd come to know and care for directly, as individuals, and she was taking all of them to their deaths, and she couldn't think of a single other option. If only there were some way to bring just a little more pressure to bear on the Peeps. They had to be sweating it, as well, and, unlike her, they could break off and run away. But...

And then her exhausted eyes sharpened and she shoved herself upright in her command chair.

"Howard!"

"Yes, My Lady?" Brannigan turned from his com console, startled by the sharp energy of her voice.

"Warm up the pulse transmitter for an FTL Flash Priority transmission to Courvosier."

"Courvosier, Milady?" Mercedes Brigham looked up with a frown. Mark Brentworth's Raoul Courvosier was way the hell and gone out-system, almost on the hyper limit, over a hundred million klicks behind Force Zulu. The enemy had accelerated right past her and the rest of her squadron on his way in while they hid under a total emissions shut down, out even if the eight of them had been powerful enough to threaten the Peeps, they were hopelessly out of range.

"Courvosier," Honor repeated. "I've got a little job for Captain Brentworth," she said, and Mercedes blinked at the sudden, almost mischievous twinkle in her tired eyes.

"Status change!" Megan Hathaway snapped, and Theisman whipped around as a warning buzzer sounded. He stared back down into the plot, and, for just a moment, his heart seemed to stop.

Superdreadnoughts. Eight more Gryphon—class SDs of the Royal Manticoran Navy, the most powerful ships of the wall any navy had yet built, had just blinked into existence on the plot. They were a hundred and seven million kilometers astern of TG 14.2, but they were accelerating hard. Eight Grayson battlecruisers spread out to screen them as they closed, and an icy chill ran through his blood. That force changed everything. Even if he somehow managed to beat Harrington with no losses at all, that many fresh ships of the wall would make mincemeat of what was left of TF Fourteen, and...

His panicky thoughts stopped suddenly, and his brows knit. Yes, that many SDs could smash everything he had, but where had they been all this time? They were behind him, coming down his track, but his sensors would have detected their hyper footprint if they'd just translated into n-space. Of course, Manty stealth systems were good. They were 5.9 light-minutes back, and the Manties had proven in the fighting around Nightingale and Trevor's Star that they could hide low-powered impeller wedges from the PN’s sensors at as little as six light-minutes. That meant it was possible they'd been here all along, creeping in under cover of their EW in an effort to ambush him as he ran into their arms on his way out, away from Harrington after TG 14.1’s destruction. And the timing was about right for Harrington to have sent a light-speed message calling them in openly as soon as she realized he wasn't going to break off and let them ambush him after all.

All of that was possible... but he didn't believe it for a moment. If those were real SDs, Harrington would already have broken off. She wouldn't need to close with him, even as a bluff, for their mere presence would have been enough to force him to run for it. No, he thought coldly. The battlecruisers were probably real enough, but they were "screening" EW drones set to mimic SDs, not real ships of the wall.

He started to say so, then stopped. The flag deck recorders had taken down everything he'd said to LePic, every word of his confident explanation of how he could defeat the surviving Grayson ships of the wall, and any board of inquiry which reviewed those recordings would know he'd been right. But he'd said those things before Harrington headed out to meet him. Before he was faced with the certainty that she was going to fight, and that even after he'd won, most of his battleships would still have been pounded to scrap. Now...

"What is it, Citizen Admiral?" LePic asked urgently.

"It would appear to be a squadron of Manty superdreadnoughts, Citizen Commissioner," Theisman heard himself say calmly.

"Superdreadnoughts?" LePic stared at him in horror.

"What... Where... How can they be here?"

"Manty stealth systems are better than ours, Sir," Theisman replied in that same calm, dispassionate tone while his own eyes dropped to the steadily narrowing green cone in Conquerant's master plot. "It's possible they've been there all along. If they were too far out-system to rendezvous with Harrington before she came out to ambush Citizen Admiral Thurston, and, given their current positions, that would have to have been the case, they could have been coming in under stealth to catch us if we'd run straight back to the hyper limit on a reciprocal of our original entry vector."

"But..." LePic clamped his jaws together and scrubbed sweat from his forehead, blinking furiously, and Theisman watched him dispassionately. "This changes the situation, doesn't it, Citizen Admiral?" the commissioner said after a moment in the tone of a man fighting desperately for calm. "I mean, even if you completely destroy this force..." he pointed to the light codes of Harrington's oncoming ships "...this one..." he pointed at the newcomers "...will still prevent us from carrying out the rest of Operation Dagger, won't they?"

"Eight Gryphon-class superdreadnoughts?" Theisman snorted. "They certainly would, Citizen Commissioner!"

"But you still think you can destroy Harrington?"

"I'm certain of it," Theisman said firmly.

"But you couldn't carry out Dagger afterwards?" LePic pressed.

"Not against a full squadron of Manty SDs," Theisman admitted.

"I see." LePic inhaled deeply, and then, suddenly, he seemed to calm. "Well, Citizen Admiral, I can only say that I'm impressed by your determination and courage, especially after what's already happened here, but your ships are too valuable to throw away in a hopeless cause. If we can't carry through with Operation Dagger even if you defeat Harrington, then I see no way to justify the losses we'd take from her in reply. Speaking for the Committee of Public Safety, I instruct you to break off."

Theisman glanced back into the plot. There were still a couple of minutes to go before the green cone disappeared, he noted, and let an edge of mulish obstinacy into his expression.

"Citizen Commissioner, even if we lose every battleship in the task group, the loss of four superdreadnoughts to the Alliance would..."

"I admire your determination," LePic said even more firmly, "but it's not just the battleships. There are also the transports and the freighters, not to mention the units of your screen." The commissioner shook his head. "No, Citizen Admiral. We've lost today, through no fault of yours, but we've lost, so let's not throw good money after bad. Break off, Citizen Admiral. That's an order."

"As you wish, Citizen Commissioner." Theisman sighed with manifest unwillingness, and looked at his ops officer. "You heard the citizen commissioner, Megan. Bring us hard to port and go to maximum acceleration."

"Aye, Citizen Admiral." Hathaway managed to keep the relief out of her voice, but she shot her admiral a look of approving admiration when LePic couldn't see it, and Theisman turned away with a hidden smile of wry regret.

You've done it to me again, My Lady, he thought at the oncoming, damaged superdreadnoughts. I could still have you, we both know that, don't we?, but I'm afraid I'm not quite as eager to die today as you are. Another time, Lady Harrington.

"They're breaking off!" Bagwell said sharply. "My Lady, they're breaking off!"

"Are they?" Honor leaned back in her command chair and felt a deep, painful shudder of relief go through her very bones. She hadn't really expected her threadbare bluff to work, but she had no intention of complaining, and she gazed down at her com link to Alfredo Yu. "It seems wars are still fought by human beings, Alfredo," she murmured.

"Indeed they are, My Lady," Yu replied with a smile, "and some of them aren't quite as good at calling the cards as others are."

"You knew," Bagwell said softly. Honor turned to look at him, and the fussy ops officer's brown eyes positively glowed as he stared at her. "You knew they'd break off, My Lady."

Honor started to reply, then stopped herself with a tiny headshake. Let him keep his illusions, she thought, and shoved up out of her command chair. She gathered Nimitz up and crossed to the master plot with slow, careful steps, mindful of her unreliable knees, and gazed down into it. The Peeps were running flat out for the hyper limit at right angles to their original course, and already Mark Brentworth and Courvosier were turning to pursue, though there was absolutely no chance of overhauling them. She could trust Mark to rotate replacement decoy drones into place smoothly enough for no one to notice when the new ones took over from the old, and with eight "superdreadnoughts" in pursuit, the Peeps wouldn't stop running now that they'd started.

Despite all she could do, her knees started to go, and she caught her weight on one hand, leaning against the plot for several seconds, then forced herself back upright once more.

"I believe I'll go to my quarters, Mercedes," she said.

"Of course, My Lady. I’ll buzz you if we need you," her chief of staff replied quietly. Honor nodded gratefully to her, then made her way to the flag bridge lift. Simon Mattingly followed her without a word, and she felt the admiring gazes of her staff and felt dishonest for not telling them the truth, not admitting how desperate, how frightened, she'd been. But she didn't, for that wasn't how the game was played.

She stepped into the lift and made herself stand upright until the doors closed, then sagged heavily against the bulkhead. Simon stood close beside her, ready to support her if she needed it, and she felt nothing but gratitude, unflawed by any trace of resentment or shame, for his attentiveness.

The lift stopped, and somehow she managed the short, rubbery-legged walk down the passage to her quarters. Mattingly peeled off to take his place beside the hatch, and she staggered across her cabin to the huge, comfortable couch and let herself collapse across it, cradling Nimitz to her chest.

Just a few minutes, she thought drunkenly. I'll just sit here a few minutes, only a few. Just a few minutes.

Five minutes later, James MacGuiness walked soundlessly into the cabin, and Admiral Lady Dame Honor Harrington didn't even stir as he eased her down to lie flat on the couch and tucked a pillow under her head.