“Very well, Captain Gonsalves,” she said just as formally. “You’re cleared to depart.” Then her voice softened. “Godspeed, Cynthia,” she finished quietly.

“Thank you.” Gonsalves managed a smile. “We’ll see you at Trevor’s Star, Ma’am. Don’t be late!”

She cut the circuit, and Honor turned to the display on her new flag deck and watched the transports accelerate ponderously out of Hades orbit towards the hyper limit with their single escort. They’d managed to cram just over two hundred and eighty-six thousand people—her people now, however they’d become that—aboard those ships. That was a little better even than Montoya had estimated, and the troop decks were packed claustrophobically full. But crowded as they were, their life support—buttressed by the scores of small craft which had been added to their systems—should suffice to see their passengers safely home.

Even now, Honor could hardly believe they’d actually managed to get this far, and she felt a fierce pride as the Longstops headed outward.

She deeply regretted the spectacular destruction of Attila and (for all intents and purposes) Hachiman and Seahorse, and not simply because of the loss of life. The explosion had cost her ships she’d needed badly, and it would have been entirely avoidable if that idiot Thornegrave had taken the opportunity she’d given him to surrender without violence. But he hadn’t, and she hadn’t dared give him more time. For all she’d known, he’d simply been stalling while he used untappable whisker lasers of his own to send messages to the other convoy escorts. It had been unlikely that he could have accomplished anything through active resistance, but he might have made the attempt anyway, in which case she could have been forced to destroy all of his ships. A more likely, and almost equally devastating ploy, would have been for him to have ordered his units to purge their computers before she ordered them not to. In that case she would have taken them intact but lobotomized, which would have made the battlecruisers useless to her as warships. She could have copied the basic astrogation and ship service files and AIs over to them from Krashnark’s master data banks, but for all her size and firepower, Krashnark was simply too small to require all the computer support a Warlord-class battlecruiser needed. She could have stripped them down and used them as transports, but she could never have used them in combat.

All of that was true, yet a tiny part of her insisted upon wondering whether she’d really thought all that through before she fired or whether she’d acted before she had to, striking out to exact a horrible vengeance she need not have taken. She supposed she would never know, and the truth was that it didn’t really matter. What mattered in the cold, cruel calculus of war was the outcome, and that had been to so terrify the personnel of the surviving ships that they’d almost begged the boarding parties to take them into custody and get them planetside before Honor decided to kill them, as well.