Field Of Dishonor

gathering a superbly trained orchestra into her hands and driving its musicians to perform on a plateau they could never have reached without her. She was in her element, doing the one thing she'd been born to do and carrying the others with her as she fought her ship and her ship led the embattled task group.

The white-faced, sweating man in HMS Warlock's command chair was a nonentity beside Harrington, something so small, so trivial, it barely registered, but a corner of the JAG's eye watched Admiral Sarnow and his staff. Her intellect recognized the admiral's skill and a purpose at least as focused as Harrington's, his uncanny ability to carry the entire complex tactical situation in his head, the authority radiating from him, yet even he seemed strangely distant. Not diminished, but... pushed back, set at one remove beside the icy, brighter than life fire of Nike's captain. His was the task group's brain, Cordwainer thought, but Harrington was its soul, and something deep inside her was amazed by her own thoughts. Such dramatic metaphors were alien to her, clashed with all her jurist's cold, analytical training, yet they were the only ones that fit.

'We've lost Agamemnon, Skipper!' someone snapped from Nike's bridge, and Cordwainer bit her lip as another green icon vanished, but her eyes were fixed on Harrington's face, watching the slight tick at the right corner of her mouth as her ship's division mate died.

'Close us up on Intolerant. Tactical, tie into her missile defense net.'

Acknowledgments rattled back, but her eyes were fixed on the com screen linking her to Admiral Sarnow's flag bridge, and there was something else in those eyes. A bitter something, raw as poison, as her admiral looked back at her. The price the task group was paying was too high for a mere diversion from a base it couldn't save, and both of them knew it. Their ships were dying for nothing, and Sarnow opened his mouth to order them to scatter.

But he never gave that order. A shout from his staff jerked him around, and new green light codes pocked the holo tank's system and tactical displays. Forty—fifty!—new ships appeared on the hyper limit, Manticoran ships led by ten dreadnoughts, and Sarnow watched tautly as they swept around onto an intercept course and began to accelerate.

He turned back to his link to Captain Harrington, his eyes bright... and in that instant Nike heaved and twisted like a mad thing as x-ray lasers smashed through her armor and gouged deep into her hull. Displays flashed and died on her bridge as her combat information center was blown apart, but her flag bridge was a holocaust.

Cordwainer rocked back in her seat, hands clenching in fists of shock, as the flag bridge's after bulkhead exploded with an ear-shattering roar. White-hot chunks of battle steel screamed across it, smashing through computers, displays, command consoles, and flesh with gory abandon while a hurricane of outraged atmosphere screamed through the rents in Nike's hull. The JAG had never seen combat. She was an imaginative, keenly intelligent woman, yet nothing less than reality could have prepared her for the horror and chaos of that moment, for the appalling fragility of humans they commanded, and her stomach heaved as Admiral Sarnow was blown out of his command chair, legs horribly mutilated, skinsuit soaked in sudden blood.

She ripped her eyes from the smoke and the wail of alarms, the shouts of the survivors and the screams of the dying, and saw the shock in Honor Harrington's face. The awareness of what had happened to her admiral and her ship. Cordwainer saw it all in that moment—the recognition of what it meant and the instant, instinctive decision that went with it. No inkling of it shadowed Honor's voice as she acknowledged the torrent of damage reports, but the JAG knew. Harrington was Sarnow's flag captain, his tactical exec, but authority passed with the admiral. She had no legal choice but to inform the next senior officer he was in command, yet she made herself lean back in her command chair as the damage reports ended... and said nothing.

The task group raced onward, flailed with fire, and hit after hit screamed in on HMS Nike. Whether the Peeps had realized she was the flagship or simply that she was the largest and most powerful of their enemies was immaterial; their missiles ripped at her like a whirlwind of flame, and Nike writhed at its heart. The heavy cruisers Merlin and Sorcerer clung to her flanks, joining their defensive fire with hers and Intolerant's, but they couldn't stop it all, and the holo of Harrington's command deck shuddered and jerked again and again and again as the hits got through. Her ship twisted in agony, but a new icon glowed ahead of the task group in the display, a brilliant crosshair that even Cordwainer recognized: the point at which it would become mathematically impossible for the pursuing Peeps to evade the freshly arrived Manticoran dreadnoughts still beyond their own onboard detection range.

Minutes oozed past, slow and terrible, written in thunder and the death of human beings, twisting the hushed audience's nerves in pincers of steel, and the bleeding survivors of TG H-001 swept toward that crosshair, paying in blood and courage to lure their enemies to their doom. Debris and atmosphere streamed from Nike's wounded hull as the enemy battered her slowly toward destruction, and Cordwainer crouched in her chair, watching the blazing purpose in Harrington's eyes, seeing the anguish as her people died, and urged her silently on, straining with her to reach her objective.

And then it happened.

A single missile targeted HMS Warlock. It evaded the so far unwounded heavy cruisers point defense, racing in to attack range. It detonated, and two lasers slashed into the ship. The damage was sudden and shocking, if minuscule compared to what other ships had suffered, but a shrill, terrified tenor voice wrenched all eyes from Nike's command deck to Captain Lord Pavel Young.

'Squadron orders! All ships scatter! Repeat, all ships scatter!'

Cordwainer snapped her gaze back to the tactical display, watching in horror as Heavy Cruiser Squadron Seventeen obeyed its orders. Its units arced away from the main formation—all but HMS Merlin , who clung grimly to Nike's flanks, fighting desperately to beat aside the fire screaming in upon her flagship—and chaos struck the fine-meshed, interlocking network of the task group's missile defenses. The light cruiser Arethusa blew apart under a direct hit, more hits battered the suddenly exposed target of HMS Cassandra, lacerating the battlecruiser's hull, knocking out her entire port sidewall and leaving her naked and vulnerable, and Honor Harrington's voice rose through the chaos like a cold, clear trumpet.

'Contact Warlock! Get those ships back in position!' Cordwainer's head turned back to Warlock's bridge in automatic reflex as Harrington's com officer relayed her orders... and Pavel Young said nothing. He only stared at his com officer, unable—or unwilling—to respond, and his executive officer's face hardened in disbelief.

'Orders, Sir?' the exec asked harshly, and Young wrenched his wild eyes back to his own display, face white and stark with terror, and watched the Peeps savage the ships his desertion had exposed to their fire.

'Orders, Sir?!' the exec half-shouted, and the muscles of Captain Lord Pavel Young's face ridged as he clamped his jaw and hunkered down in his command chair and stared at his display in silence.

'No response from Warlock, Ma'am.' Stunned surprise echoed in the voice of Harrington's com officer as Nike quivered to yet another hit, and the captain's head whipped up.

The com officer flinched back from her, for her face was cold and focused no longer. Shock and fury and something more—something raw and ugly with hate—blazed in her eyes, and her voice was a lash.

'Give me a direct link to Captain Young!'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am.' Her com officer stabbed buttons, and a screen at Harrington's knees lit with Young's sweat-streaked face.

'Get back into formation, Captain!' Harrington snapped. Young only stared at her, his mouth working soundlessly, and Harrington's soprano was harsh with hatred and contempt.

'Get back into formation, damn you!' she barked... and the screen went dead as Young cut the circuit.

Harrington stared at the blank com for one shocked second, and even as she stared, her ship heaved and shuddered to fresh hits. Frantic damage reports crackled, and she wrenched her eyes from the screen to her com officer.

'General signal to all heavy cruisers. Return to formation at once. Repeat, return to formation at once!'