White Haven’s surprise turned into alarm as the remote charged after her with—literally—inhuman speed. But she hit the mat rolling, came up on her knees in one, fluid motion, and her own hands were waiting by the time the remote reached her. She reached up, seized the front of its gi, and rolled backwards, as if to pull it down atop herself. But even as she rolled and her shoulders touched the mat, her knees came up into the remote’s belly. They lifted powerfully, her legs straightened, and suddenly it was the remote which went hurtling through the air.

It hit the mat with an earthquake shock, and promptly started to come upright, but Honor had continued her own motion through a backwards somersault. Before the remote could regain its balance and come to its feet, she was upon it from behind. Her right arm snaked forward, locking itself around the remote’s neck, squeezing its throat in the crook of her elbow, and then the heel of her other hand smashed into the back of its head like a sledgehammer.

White Haven winced in sympathetic anguish. For all its savage power, that ferocious, left-handed blow was delivered with lethal precision, and the fact that it was her left hand made its precision even more remarkable, because that hand was no longer human. He suspected that no one, outside her therapists (and probably Andrew LaFollet), would ever know how hard she’d had to work to master the replacement for the arm she’d lost on Cerberus. But he knew few people ever learned how to use a powered prosthesis as naturally as the organic limb it had replaced or to regain the true full range of motion, and the process took many years for those who did manage it.

Honor had done it in little more than three… and done it well enough to not merely regain her old form at coup de vitesse, but to actually attain the next rank of mastery.

Of course, the prosthesis did provide a few unusual advantages. For one thing, it was several times more powerful than natural flesh and bone. There were limits to what she could do with that strength, because her shoulder had been undamaged when she lost her arm, and the natural limitations of that joint dictated how much stress she could exert. But the fact that “her” left arm was far stronger than any arm had any business being was dramatically—one might almost have said gruesomely—evident when the back of the training remote’s “skull” deformed under the force of her blow and the entire head flopped forward in a disturbingly realistic representation of a snapped neck.

The remote collapsed onto its front, and Honor slumped across it, her breathing harsh and ragged in the suddenly silent gym. No one moved, and White Haven glanced across to where Andrew LaFollet and Simon Mattingly had stood watching their Steadholder.

Their expressions were not reassuring. Remotes like Honor’s were rare. That was primarily due to their expense, but it also reflected the fact that they could be dangerous. In fact, they could be deadly. Like Honor’s prosthetic arm, their maximum strength was far greater than that of any human, even a genetically-modified heavy-worlder like Honor Harrington, and their reflexes were much faster. Any training remote came equipped with governors and software inhibitors intended to protect the user, but it was ultimately the responsibility of the person training against one of them to determine its actual settings. More than one human being had been seriously injured, or even killed, as a consequence. No remote had ever “gone berserk,” but they performed precisely as their owners instructed them to, and sometimes those owners made mistakes when they specified performance levels.