But helpful as it might have been in that regard, there was no way the damage to Farnese could be seen as anything other than a serious setback. Her port broadside was intact and fully operational, and Honor’s people had managed to clear the hatches on about two-thirds of her starboard weapons (mostly by cutting the jammed hatch covers loose and jettisoning them), but Cerberus simply didn’t have the facilities for the repairs she needed. Her starboard sensors were useless and her starboard sidewall would be available at no more than fifteen percent of designed strength. For all practical purposes, she could fight only one of her broadsides, and if anyone got a clear shot at her crippled flank…

Still, damaged or not she was a battlecruiser, and with her sisters Wallenstein, MacArthur, Barbarosa, and Kutuzov, she brought Honor’s strength in that class up to five. In addition, she had the heavy cruisers Krashnark, Huan-Ti, Ares, and Ishtar, and she’d hung onto Bacchante, as well. The damaged Sabine had been sent off with a skeleton crew as Cynthia Gonsalves’ flagship and to play scout for the Longstops, but even without her, Ramirez’s “Elysian Space Navy” was assuming formidable proportions. Indeed, Honor had been hard-pressed to find crews for all of them.

To be completely honest, she mused, still watching the transports and their single escort accelerate away, I don’t suppose I really did find crews for all of them.

She smiled crookedly at the thought. Given the fact that half of Farnese’s weapons were useless anyway, she’d reduced the battlecruiser’s new company from Caslet’s estimated requirement of thirteen hundred to just seven hundred, which had given her (barely) the trained and retrained personnel to man all of the heavy cruisers and put the required thirteen hundred each aboard the other battlecruisers. They’d managed it only by stripping Charon down to naked bone—Charon Control had only a single full-strength watch crew, with just enough other people to make sure there was always a sensor and com watch—and accepting a rather flexible definition of “trained.” But none of her subordinates had argued about any of those decisions; they’d reserved their protests for her decision to choose Farnese as her flagship.

McKeon had been the first to weigh in, but only because Andrew LaFollet had been a bit slower to realize what she intended. Neither of them wanted her in space at all if it came to a mobile battle, much less on a half-crippled ship! But she’d overridden them both—and also Ramirez, Benson, and Simmons—and despite LaFollet’s dark suspicions, it wasn’t because of any death wish on her part.

The problem was experience. Harriet Benson’s command and tactical skills had come back to her with amazing speed, but she was the only one of Hell’s long-term prisoners Honor could really regard as up to commanding a starship in action. Several others were fit, in her opinion, to serve as department heads, stand their watches, and carry out a CO’s orders, but they simply hadn’t had time to develop the confidence and polish a warship’s captain required. Nor had she been able to come up with the required skippers out of more recently captured Allied personnel. With the exceptions of Commander Ainspan and Lieutenant Commander Roberta Ellis, none of them had command experience with anything heavier than a LAC. Ainspan had captained the light cruiser HMS Adonai and Ellis had at least captained HMS Plain Song, a destroyer, so Honor had assigned Ainspan to Ares and tapped Ellis to take over Bacchante from Benson.