She blinked angrily, drew a deep breath, and straightened her spine, and her mind went back—back to the numbed moment when she and her surviving crew had realized they’d won while the terrible fury of Sirius’s destruction lingered in the visual display like a curse. Judging by the Q-ship’s performance and the weaponry she’d revealed, Sirius must have had a crew of at least fifteen hundred, and there had been no survivors. Even now, Honor could close her eyes and resummon that cauldron of light and energy in every hideous detail and feel the same sick revulsion at the work of her own hands and mind… and the vaulting exultation and triumph.

But triumph at such cost. She bit her lip again, feeling the pain. One hundred and seven of her crew, more than a third of those aboard at the start of that terrible pursuit and slaughter, had died. Another fifty-eight were wounded, though the medics and base hospital teams would probably return most of them to duty in the next few months.

The cost in blood and pain had been terrible enough, but that had been fifty-nine percent of her total crew, even before detachments, including Dominica Santos and two of her three commissioned assistant engineers. She’d had barely a hundred and twenty uninjured people left for her repair parties, and Fearless had been a shambles. Her forward impeller nodes had failed completely within seconds of Sirius’s destruction, and this time there had been no way to repair them. Worse, her after impeller ring had gone for over forty-five minutes, as well—three-quarters of an hour in which she had coasted another ninety-four million kilometers outward while damage reports flooded in to her airless bridge.

For a time, Honor had believed her crew would follow Sirius’s into death. Most of Fearless’s life support was down, three-quarters of her computer support was inoperable, the grav lance had shorted out three of her after beta nodes, the inertial compensator was off line, and seventy percent of her normal engineering and damage control personnel were casualties. Crewmen, many of them wounded, had been trapped in airless compartments all over the ship. Her own quarters had taken a direct hit that left them without pressure for over six hours. Only Nimitz’s shielded life-support module had saved him, and her sailplane plaque was heat-warped and twisted, one corner blown completely away. It had been that close for Nimitz, and she reached up to touch the treecat yet again, reassuring herself of his survival.

But Alistair McKeon and Ilona Rierson, Dominica Santos’s sole surviving lieutenant, had labored like Trojans amid the wreckage, and Petty Officer Harkness and his missile-loading party had been in Missile One’s magazine when Missile Two was wiped away. They’d survived, and Harkness had needed no orders to begin working his way aft to meet McKeon and Rierson. Between them, they’d not only gotten the compensator back up but even managed to get two of the damaged after nodes back on line, giving her a deceleration capability of over two and a half KPS².