On Basilisk Station

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.

She deserved better, Honor thought, blinking on her tears once more, but at least she'd ended as a warrior. Ended in combat and then brought her surviving people home, not died in her sleep after decades in mothballs. And even when she was gone, something of her would remain, for HMS Fearless had been added to the RMN's List of Honor, the list of names kept perpetually in commission by new construction to preserve the battle honors they had earned.

She drew another deep breath and turned from the window, and her melancholy eased as she looked at the three men who stood with her. Alistair McKeon looked very different and yet utterly right, somehow, with the three gold cuff bands of a full commander and the white beret of a starship's captain, and the destroyer Troubadour lay waiting for him, already under orders for the new, heavily reinforced Basilisk Station picket. Not a single over-aged light cruiser, but a task force, covering the terminus while construction of its own network of forts got under way.

She smiled at him, and he smiled back. Then she turned her gaze to the other two officers standing with her. Lieutenant Commander Andreas Venizelos looked as dapper and darkly handsome as ever beside a Lieutenant (Senior Grade) Rafael Cardones, who no longer seemed quite so young. They wouldn't be leaving with McKeon. They had a new assignment to a new ship, just as Honor did. It would be another few months before she exchanged her black beret for a white one once more, but when she did, Venizelos would be with her as her executive officer, with Cardones at Tactical. Honor had insisted on that, despite Cardones's lack of seniority, and no one at BuPers had dared argue with her.

'Well, Alistair,' she held out her hand, 'I'll miss you. But Troubadour is lucky to have you—and the Fleet will need an old Basilisk hand to keep them straight. Make sure Admiral Stag stays on his toes.'

'I will, Ma'am.' McKeon's smile became a grin, and he squeezed her hand, then frowned quickly as his wrist com beeped. 'That's my boarding shuttle, Ma'am. I've got to run.'

'I know. Good luck, Captain McKeon.'

'The same to you, Captain Harrington.' McKeon stepped back, saluted sharply, and vanished down the passage, and Honor smiled after him. Then she turned back to Venizelos.

'Did you get that crew list glitch straightened out, Andreas?'

'Yes, Skipper. You were right—it was a snafu at BuPers. They promised to have it corrected by tomorrow morning.'

'Good.' She cocked her head in thought for a moment, then shrugged. 'I suppose you'd better get back to the slip, then. These yard dogs need a real officer keeping an eye on them.'

'Yes, Ma'am.' Venizelos grinned and beckoned to Cardones, and the two of them trotted off towards the building slip at the far end of Hephaestus where Honor's new command, the Star Knight—class heavy cruiser HMS Fearless, was nearing completion. She watched them go, then turned back to the old Fearless with another sigh.

Taken all in all, it had ended well, she thought a bit sadly. Too many good people had died to undo the mistakes and greed and stupidity of others, but they'd done it. The Hauptman Cartel had been cleared of knowing collusion in Basilisk, but the Queen's Bench had decided they ought to have known what their employees were doing and slapped them rather firmly on the wrist with several million dollars worth of fines. And the Court of Admiralty had condemned Mondragon as a legitimate prize for smuggling—a decision which had, just incidentally, made Captain Honor Harrington a millionaire. Most importantly of all, Haven's attempt to grab off Medusa and the Junction terminus had galvanized the political situation. Fear that Haven might try again had turned the Conservative rank and file against Janacek's long fight to downgrade Basilisk Station, and the Liberals and Progressives had been driven into full retreat. In fact, the Act of Annexation had been amended in ways that neither Countess Marisa nor Baron High Ridge had ever imagined in their worst nightmares.

And then there was Pavel Young.

Honor allowed herself a rare, gloating smile as she considered Young, and Nimitz echoed it with a purr. His family and political connections had saved him from a court martial or even a court of inquiry, but nothing could save him from the judgment of his peers. There wasn't an officer in uniform who didn't realize exactly what he'd tried to do to Honor, and surprisingly few of them, given his family's power, bothered to hide their opinion of him. Bad enough that he'd used his rank to knife a junior in the back, but it was also Lord Pavel Young who had completely ignored the situation on Medusa itself. It was Lord Pavel Young who had never bothered to board Sirius, never even suspected she was armed, and personally certified the Q-ship's false engineering report and cleared her to remain indefinitely in Medusa orbit. And no one seemed to have the least doubt what the outcome of Haven's plans would have been had Lord Pavel Young remained the senior officer on Basilisk Station.

He and Warlock had been banished to escort duty, poking along through hyper to guard tramp freighters plying back and forth to the Silesian Confederacy. Not even First Lord Janacek or his father had been able to save him from that. He was lucky they'd been able to keep him on active duty at all.

As for the People's Republic of Haven, Queen Elizabeth's Government and Navy weren't yet strong enough to embrace open war, especially not when the battered Opposition could still point out—accurately—that all evidence linking Haven to the mekoha and rifles on Medusa was circumstantial. It was highly suspicious to find a member of the Havenite Consulate's staff (and a full colonel in the Republic's army, no less), supplying the shaman's army, but he was dead, and the Republic had insisted—and produced the splendidly official documentation to 'prove'—that Colonel Westerfeldt had been discharged from his consular position for peculation weeks before the unfortunate incident. No doubt he had been involved even then with the Manticoran criminals who had really supplied the natives. The criminals in question, captured by Papadapolous's Marines, hadn't been able to prove Haven had been their paymaster, nor would they ever be able to prove anything again. The last of them had faced the firing squad over a month ago.

Not that anyone who mattered doubted Haven's involvement. The Opposition parties might claim that they did in their determination to avoid the war they dreaded, but they knew the truth as well as Honor did. Nor would