His thoughts chopped off in a harsh, strangled gasp as another face appeared on his display. Other people might not have recognized it with the hair which framed it reduced to a short, feathery mass of curls and one side paralyzed, but Hamish Alexander had seen that same face in exactly that same condition once before, and his heart seemed to stop beating.

It can’t be, he thought numbly. It can’t be! She’s dead! She’s—

His thoughts disintegrated into chaos and incoherence as the shock roared through him, and then the woman on his display spoke.

“Trevor System Command, this is Admiral Honor Harrington.” Her voice sounded calm and absolutely professional—or would have, to someone who didn’t know her. But White Haven saw the emotion burning in her good eye, heard it hovering in the slurred soprano. “I’m sure no one in the Alliance expected to see me again, but I assure you that the rumors of my recent death have been exaggerated. I am accompanied by approximately one hundred and six thousand liberated inmates of the prison planet Hades, and I expect the arrival of another quarter million or so within the next eleven days—our transports have military hyper generators and we made a faster passage than they will. I regret any confusion or alarm we may have caused by turning up in Peep ships, but they were the only ones we could… appropriate for the voyage.”

The right side of her mouth smiled from the display, but her voice went husky and wavered for a moment, and she stopped to clear her throat. White Haven reached out, his fingers trembling, and touched her face on the com as gently as he might have touched a terrified bird, yet the terror was his, and he knew it.

“We will remain where we are, with our drives, sidewalls, weapons, and active sensors down until you’ve had time to check us out and establish our bona fides,” she went on after a moment, struggling to maintain her professional tone, “but I’d appreciate it if you could expedite. We were forced to pack these ships to the deckheads to get all our people aboard, and our life support could be in better shape. We—”

She broke off, blinking hard, and Hamish Alexander’s heart was an impossible weight in his chest—heavy as a neutron star and yet soaring and thundering with emotions so powerful they terrified him—as he stared at her face. He was afraid to so much as breathe lest the oxygen wake him and destroy this impossible dream, and he realized he was weeping only when his display shimmered. And then she spoke again, and this time everyone heard the catch in her breath, the proud tears she refused to shed hanging in her soft voice.

“We’re home, System Command,” she said. “It took us a while, but we’re home.”

DAVID WEBER (USA, 1952) is a science fiction and fantasy writer born in Cleveland, Ohio. Previously he owned a small advertising and public relation agency, but now writes fiction full time. The author of sixty-three works of fiction since 1990. His work ranges from epic fantasy to alternate history to space opera and military science fiction. He is a New York Times bestseller, the winner of the Phoenix Award, and has been nominated for Locus Awards.