“Who are you people?” she asked in a soft, wondering tone.

Standard English had been the interstellar language of humanity from the earliest days of the Diaspora. It had become that almost inevitably, for it had been the international language of Old Earth and had been carried to the other bodies of the Sol System long before it left them for the stars. Many worlds and even star nations spoke other languages among their own citizens—German in the Anderman Empire, for example, or Spanish on San Martin, French on New Dijon, Chinese and Japanese on Ki-Rin and Nagasaki, and Hebrew in the Judean League—but every educated human being spoke Standard English. And, for the most part, electronic recordings and the printed word had kept its pronunciation close enough from world to world for it to be a truly universal language. But Honor had to concentrate hard to follow this woman’s mushy accent. She’d never heard one quite like it, and she wondered what the other’s native tongue was. But she couldn’t let it distract her, and so she drew herself up to her full height and nodded to them.

“My name is Harrington,” she told them calmly. “Commodore Harrington, Royal Manticoran Navy.”

“Royal Manticoran Navy?” This time the woman’s voice was sharp, and Honor felt a fresh stab of anger—and scorn—as the blonde’s eyes dropped to the black StateSec trousers Honor wore. “Sure you are,” she said after a moment, gray eyes hard.

“Yes, I am,” Honor replied in the same calm tones. “And whatever you may be thinking, clothes don’t necessarily make the woman. I’m afraid we’ve had to make do for uniforms with what we could, ah, liberate, as it were.”

The other woman looked at her in hard-eyed silence for several more seconds, and then, suddenly, her eyebrows rose in an expression of shock.

“Wait. You said ‘Harrington.’ Are you Honor Harrington?” she demanded harshly, and it was Honor’s turn to blink in consternation.

“I was the last time I looked,” she said cautiously. She looked past the newcomers at Mayhew, one eyebrow quirked, but the Grayson lieutenant only shook his head.

“My God,” the woman muttered, then turned back to the man. He returned her stare without comment, then shrugged and raised both hands palm uppermost.

“May I ask how you happen to know my first name?” Honor asked after a moment, and the woman wheeled back around to face her.

“A couple of dozen Manty prisoners got dumped in my last camp just before the Black Legs sent me to Inferno,” she said slowly, narrow eyes locked on Honor’s face. “They had a lot to say about you—if you’re really the Honor Harrington they were talking about. Said you took out a Peep battlecruiser with a heavy cruiser before the war even started, then ripped hell out of a Peep task force at someplace called Hancock. And they said—” her eyes darted to Nimitz “—that you had some strange kind of pet.” She stopped and cocked her head aggressively. “That you?”