“The prisoners aboard Krashnark, Ma’am,” Metcalf told her. “They’re all military POWs, not politicals, and fifteen of them are from the Zanzibaran Navy.”

“Zanzibaran?” Honor’s eyebrows furrowed. The Caliphate’s navy didn’t have anything bigger than a heavy cruiser, and its units were assigned almost exclusively to the defense of their own home system, so how—

“Zanzibaran,” Metcalf confirmed harshly, and her nostrils flared. “Milady, according to the prisoners, the Peeps hit Zanzibar hard two T-months ago.” Alistair McKeon muttered a disbelieving imprecation behind Honor, but she couldn’t look away from Metcalf’s face. “They rolled right over it—sucked the picket into a head-on pass, blew it out with missile pods, and then went on and took out every industrial platform in the system.”

Ramirez and Benson looked perplexed. They’d been on Hell too long, and they were too unfamiliar with the members and dynamics—not to mention the astrography—of the Manticoran Alliance to realize how far into the Allies’ rear the Peeps had gone to strike at Zanzibar. But Honor and McKeon knew.

“My God, Gerry,” the commodore said. “Are you sure?”

“Whether I am nor not, the prisoners are, Skipper,” Metcalf told him, her expression grim. “But that’s not the worst of it. Commander Ainspan?”

The dark-faced, whippet-thin commander stepped forward, and Honor shook herself.

“Excuse me, Commander,” she said. “It was rude of us to ignore you.”

“Don’t worry about that, Milady,” Ainspan said, and Honor’s eyebrows flipped back up as she truly concentrated on him for the first time and the boiling confusion of his emotions reached out to her. His eyes were fixed on her ravaged face, and they positively glowed with some deep reaction she couldn’t even begin to sort out. Whatever it was, it wasn’t the same as Metcalf’s—which was reasonable enough. Gerry’s news was no surprise to him, after all. But even so, he radiated a sense of shock almost as great as the lieutenant commander’s. It was just a different kind of shock. One that was almost… reverent, and he seemed unable to go on after his first short sentence.

“Are you all right, Commander?” Honor asked after a few seconds of silence, and the liberated prisoner flushed darkly.

“I— Yes, Milady. I’m fine,” he said. “It’s just that… well, we all thought you were dead.”

“Dead?” Honor frowned for a moment, then nodded. “So they admitted what happened to Tepes? I didn’t think they would.”

“Tepes?” Ainspan blinked at her. “No, Milady. They never said anything about anyone named Tepes.”

“It wasn’t an ‘anyone,’ ” Honor explained. “It was a ship—Cordelia Ransom’s ship.” This was insane, she thought. The fact that the Peeps had hit Zanzibar was incomparably more important than discussing the names of blown up StateSec battlecruisers, yet Ainspan seemed almost more concerned about her than he was about the fact that he himself had just been rescued from Peep custody!

“It was—?” the commander began, then stopped and shook himself. “INS didn’t give the name of her ship, Milady. But how did you know it? It only happened nine months ago.”