Honor’s wounded ship had taken four more hours just to decelerate to rest relative to Basilisk, but her people had used the time well. McKeon and Rierson had continued their repair activities, bringing more and more of the internal control systems back on line, and Lieutenant Montoya (and thank God she’d gotten rid of Suchon!) and his medical parties had labored beyond collapse, dragging the wounded out and laboring over their broken bodies in sickbay. Too many of Montoya’s patients had slipped away from him, far more than he would ever find it easy to live with, but it was thanks to him that people like Samuel Webster and Sally MacBride had lived.

And then there had been the long voyage home. The long, slow voyage that had seemed to crawl, for Fearless’s communications had been out. There was no way to tell Dame Estelle or the Admiralty what had happened, who had won, or the price her people had paid. Not until Fearless limped brokenly back into Medusa orbit thirteen hours after she’d left it and a white-faced Scotty Tremaine brought his pinnace alongside her air-bleeding wreck.

It had taken two months for the Fleet maintenance ships to make enough repairs for Honor even to bring her ship home through the Junction to Hephaestus at last. Two months during which the entire Home Fleet, summoned by her desperate Case Zulu, had conducted “unscheduled war games” in Basilisk—and greeted the three Havenite battle squadrons who’d arrived on a “routine visit” six days after Captain Papadapolous’s Marines and Barney Isvarian’s NPA had annihilated the rifle-armed Medusan nomads.

Honor’s grief for her own dead would never fade entirely, yet it had been worth every moment of heartbreaking labor, every instant of self-doubt and determination, to witness that. To hear the hidden consternation in the Havenite admiral’s voice as he acknowledged Admiral D’Orville’s courteous welcome. To watch the faces of the Havenite officers as they endured the remorseless barrage of courtesy visits D’Orville had arranged to make them comfortable—and to drive home the warning that Basilisk was Manticoran territory and would remain so—before they were finally allowed to depart once more with their tails figuratively between their legs.

And then, at last, there had been the voyage home, accompanied by an honor guard of an entire superdreadnought battle squadron while the Manticoran anthem played over every Navy transmitter in the system. Honor had thought her heart would burst when D’Orville’s stupendous King Roger flashed her running lights in the formal salute to a fleet flagship as Fearless entered the terminus to transit home, yet under her pride and bittersweet joy had been a fear she dared not admit. All the time the repair ships had labored upon her battered command, Honor had made herself believe Fearless might be returned to service, but the yard techs’ survey had killed that hope.

Fearless was too old. She was too small, and she’d taken too much. Given too much. Repair would require virtual rebuilding and cost as much as a newer, bigger ship, and so the decision had been made. Within the week, she would be towed out of her slip once more and delivered to the breakers at one of the orbital recovery stations, where she would be stripped, cut into jagged chunks of alloy by workers who could never truly understand all she had been and meant and done, and melted down for reclamation.