They were permanently assigned equipment, and modifying one to fit someone else was a daunting task even for a fully equipped maintenance and service depot. But Hell didn't have an M&S depot for skinsuits, because it had never needed one. Her available techs had done the best they could, but they'd been able to fit no more than thirty-five percent of her crewmen; the remainder wore only their uniforms. If one of the Peep ships took a hit and lost pressure in a compartment, the people in it who survived the initial hit would survive the pressure loss; if one of her ships took a hit and lost pressure, two-thirds of the people in the compartment would die... messily.

And frantically though Alistair McKeon, Andrew LaFollet, and Horace Harkness had searched, they had not turned up a single Peep skinsuit designed for a one-armed woman a hundred and eighty-eight centimeters tall.

Despite her friends' anxiety, Honor was almost relieved that they'd failed. It was irrational, no doubt, but she preferred to share the risks of the people under her command, and she would have felt unbearably guilty if she'd been suited and they hadn't. And there was another point, as well—one she had chosen not to look too closely at even in the privacy of her own mind. Nimitz's custom-designed suit had been confiscated by StateSec and lost with Tepes, and he had no emergency life-support module. If pressure was lost, the 'cat would die, and the part of her mind Honor had decided not to examine shied like a frightened animal from the thought of not dying with him.

Nimitz made a small, soft sound, crooning to her as he sensed the darker tide buried deep in her emotions. He might not understand its cause—in fact, she hoped he didn't—but he tasted it in her and snuggled his muzzle more firmly into her tunic while his love flowed into her.

"We'll be coming up on our firing point in five minutes, Sir," Citizen Rear Admiral Yearman reported. "Do you wish to offer them a chance to surrender, or should I simply open fire?"

Chernock cocked his head and smiled at the Navy officer. Yearman had clearly accepted his own conclusions about what had happened on Hades, even if neither of them had the slightest idea of how the prisoners had pulled it off. And he'd become increasingly, if quietly, bloodthirsty as his ships headed in and the people on the ground kept lying to him.

"I believe Citizen Secretary Saint-Just and the Treasury would probably appreciate it if we could talk them into surrendering, Citizen Admiral," the SS general said wryly. "I doubt that they will, though. And if they don't, you can go ahead and blast holes in their defenses to your heart's content, and the Treasury will just have to live with its unhappiness over replacing the destroyed equipment."

"With all due respect, Citizen General, my heart bleeds for the Treasury," Yearman said. It was a daring remark to make to a StateSec general, even for a flag officer, but Chernock only laughed. Then he sobered, and his expression turned grim.

"Between you and me, Citizen Admiral, I agree completely," he said, and his space-black eyes were cold.

"Radar hits from the main body are approaching the detection threshold, Ma'am."

"Understood." The tension on Farnese's bridge was a physical thing now, coiled about them like some hungry beast, and Honor made her voice come out calm, almost gentle, soothing the beast. Her command chair's drive motors whined softly as she turned it, sweeping her gaze across the bridge. With the loss of her left eye, she didn't trust herself to look over her shoulder as she normally would have, and she'd lost some of the peripheral ability to watch the nest of repeater displays wreathed about her chair, as well. But the battle board glowed a reassuring crimson at Tactical—for Farnese's port broadside, at least—and her helmsman sat tautly poised and ready at his station. The impeller board beside him burned the steady amber that indicated nodes at standby, ready to bring up instantly, and Honor inhaled deeply. The oxygen burned in her lungs like fiery wine, and she glanced at Warner Caslet.

"Firing solutions?"

"Locked and updating steadily, Ma'am," he replied, and like Honor herself, there was something profoundly unnatural about how calm he sounded.

She nodded and returned her attention to her plot, watching the icons on it creep steadily closer to one another. Unlike her ships, the Peeps' impeller wedges made them glaring beacons of gravitic energy. Honor's active sensors were off-line—instantly ready, but locked down tight to prevent any betraying emission—but Tactical had run a constantly updated firing plot on passive for over half an hour. The Peeps were dialed in to a fare-thee-well, she thought grimly, and she was about to accomplish something no Manticoran officer had ever managed to pull off. She was about to pass directly between two components of a superior enemy force in a position to rake both of them... and do it from within effective energy range.

"Two minutes to course intersect," Caslet said, his voice flat with trained, professional calm.

"Stand by to engage," Honor Harrington said softly.

"What the—?" Citizen Lieutenant Henry DesCours straightened abruptly on PNS Subutai's bridge as a single icon blinked into abrupt existence on his display. Then a second appeared with it. And a third!

"Citizen Captain!"

"What?" Citizen Captain Jayne Preston twisted around in her chair, frowning her disapproval for the undisciplined shout from her tactical section.

"Bogies, Ma'am!" DesCours' fingers flew across his console as he brought the powerful emitters of his electronically-steered fire control radar to bear on the suspect blips. It had a much narrower field of view than his search radar, but it was also much more powerful, and his face went white as more points of light blinked to life on his display. "Three—no, ten of them! Bearing three-five-niner by oh-oh-five, range... seven hundred and thirty thousand klicks!"

Raw disbelief twisted his voice as the range numbers blinked up at him, and for just one instant, Jayne Preston's mind froze. Less than a million kilometers? Preposterous! But then the bearing registered, as well, and panic harsh as poison exploded deep inside her. They were in front of her. Whatever the hell they were, they were directly ahead of her! That meant there was no sidewall, and with no sidewall to interdict them, the effective range of modern, grav-lens energy weapons was—! "Helm! Hard skew turn p—"

"Fire!" Honor Harrington snapped.

The main Peep force lay fifty degrees off the starboard bow for most of her units as they crossed its course, but Farnese was inverted relative to the others. The Peeps lay off her port bow, and all down her left side, heavy graser and laser mounts fired with lethal accuracy. Her impellers and sidewalls came up in the same instant, but Honor hardly noticed. Short as the range was by the normal standards of space combat, it was still over two and a half light-seconds. The massive beams lashed out across the kilometers, and they were light-speed weapons. Despite the range, despite the nerve-racking wait for the people who had fired them, the ships they had been fired at never saw them coming. They were already on the way before Jayne Preston even opened her mouth to order a course change... and they arrived before she finished giving it.

The range was long, but it had never as much as crossed Paul Yearman's mind that he might actually face mobile units, as well as the fixed defenses. And even if he had, surely they would have been picked up before they could get into energy range! He'd detached Rapier to watch his back, but the decision had been strictly pro forma, taken out of reflex professionalism rather than any genuine sense of danger. And because he'd seen no sign of hostile mobile units, the ships of his command had held an absolutely unswerving course for over six hours... and Honor's fire control teams had plotted their positions with excruciating precision. Ninety-three percent of her energy weapons scored direct hits, and there were no sidewalls to deflect them as they slashed straight down the wide-open throats of the Peeps' wedges.

The consequences were unimaginable, even for Honor—or perhaps especially for Honor. She was the one who had planned the maneuver, the one who had conceived it and carried it through, but deep down inside, she'd never quite let herself believe she would get away with it. And surely she wouldn't get her first broadsides in utterly undetected and unopposed!

But she had. It wasn't really Yearman's fault. No one had ever attempted an ambush like it, and so no one had any kind of meterstick to estimate the carnage such an attack might wreak. But the dimensions of the disaster became appallingly clear as Honor's fire smashed over his ships like a Sphinx tidal bore.

The battlecruisers Ivan IV,Subutai, and Yavuz lurched madly as grasers and lasers crashed into their bows. Ivan IV's entire forward impeller ring went down, all of her forward chase armament was destroyed, and the ship staggered bodily sideways as hull plating shattered and the demonic beams ripped straight down her long axis. They could not possibly have come in from a more deadly bearing, and damage alarms shrieked as compartments blew open to space and electronics spiked madly. Molycircs exploded like prespace firecrackers, massive bus bars and superconductor capacitors blew apart like ball lightning, trapped within the hollow confines of a warship, and almost half her crew was killed or wounded in the space of less than four seconds.

But Ivan IV was the lucky one; her forward fusion plants went into emergency shutdown in time. Subutai's and Yavuz's didn't, and the two of them vanished into blinding balls of plasma with every man and woman of their crews.

Nor did they die alone. Their sisters Boyar and Cassander went with them; the heavy cruisers Morrigan,Yama, and Excalibur blew up almost as spectacularly as Subutai ; and every surviving ship was savagely damaged. The battlecruisers Modred,Pappenheim,Tammerlane,Roxana, and Cheetah lived through the initial carnage, but like Ivan IV, they were crippled and lamed, and the cruiser Broadsword was at least as badly hurt. Durandel, the only other heavy cruiser of the main force, reeled out of formation, her forward half smashed like a rotten stick while life pods erupted from her hull, and chaos reigned as the crews of maimed and broken ships fought their damage and rescue parties charged into gutted compartments in frantic search for wounded and trapped survivors. Yet chaotic as the shouts and confusion over the internal com systems were, the intership circuits were even worse, for one of ENS Huan-Ti's grasers had scored a direct hit on Tammerlane's flag bridge.

Citizen Rear Admiral Yearman was dead. Citizen General Chernock had died with him, and neither of them had ever even known their task group was under attack. The grasers' light-speed death had claimed both too quickly, and with their deaths, command devolved upon Citizen Captain Isler, in Modred. But the StateSec officer had no idea at all what to do. In fairness, it was unlikely any officer— even a modern day Edward Saganami—would have been able to react effectively to such a devastating surprise. But Isler was no Saganami, and the sharp, high note of panic in his voice as he gabbled incoherent orders over the command net finished any hint of cohesiveness in his shattered force. It came apart at the seams, each surviving captain realizing that his or her only chance of survival lay in independent action.

A few missiles got off, and Pappenheim actually managed to turn and fire her entire surviving starboard broadside at Wallenstein, but it was a pitifully inadequate response to what Honor's ships had done to them. Wallenstein's sidewall shrugged Pappenheim's energy fire aside with contemptuous ease, and despite the short range, point defense crews picked off the handful of Peep missiles which actually launched.

And then Honor's entire squadron fired a second time, and there was no more incoming fire. Five of the enemy hulks remained sufficiently intact that someone might technically describe them as ships; all the rest were spreading patterns of wreckage, dotted here and there with the transponder signals of life pods or a handful of people in skinsuits.

"Cease fire!" she snapped before her gunners could wipe out all of the cripples, as well. And, almost to her surprise, they obeyed. She felt a distant amazement at their compliance, for she knew how dreadfully most of them had hungered for revenge. But perhaps they were as stunned by the sheer magnitude of their success as she was.

She supposed it would go into the history books as the Battle of Cerberus, but it shouldn't. She felt an appalled sense of horror at the totality—as unanticipated on her part as on Paul Yearman's— of what she had accomplished. She had killed more people than this at the Fourth Battle of Yeltsin, but the sheer, blazing speed of it all stunned her. "Massacre of Cerberus" would be more accurate, she thought numbly. It had been like pushing Terran chicks into deep water filled with hungry Sphinx sabrepike. For the first time she could recall, she had fought a battle in which not one single person under her own command had been so much as injured, much less killed!

She glanced at her plot again. The transports had swerved wildly, turning to lumber uselessly towards the hyper limit, but they wouldn't get far. Already Scotty Tremaine was taking Krashnark in pursuit of one of them while Geraldine Metcalf went after the other in Barbarosa. There would be no one to oppose either of them, for the single Peep heavy cruiser had been the target of the port broadsides of every one of her ships except for Farnese herself. The failure of her fusion bottles hadn't blown PNS Rapier apart; they'd simply illuminated the splintered fragments of her hull in the instant that they consumed them along with her entire crew.

Honor sat a moment longer, staring at her plot, and then she shook herself, drew a deep, deep breath, and pressed the stud that connected her to the all-ships circuit.

"Well done, people—all of you. Thank you. You did us proud. Now do us even prouder by rescuing every survivor out there, People's Navy or State Security. I—"

She looked up without closing the circuit as Warner Caslet unlocked his shock frame and climbed out of his own chair. He turned to face her and came to attention, and her eyebrows rose as his hand snapped up in a parade ground salute. She started to say something, but then she saw other people standing, turning away from their consoles, looking at her. The storm of their exultation raged at her as, for the first time, they fully realized what their victory—and the capture of the transports—might mean, and she felt the entire universe hold its breath for just an instant.

Then the instant shattered as her flag bridge exploded in cheers. She tried to speak, tried to hush them, but it was impossible. And then someone opened the ship's intercom, and the thunder of voices redoubled as the cheers echoing through every compartment of her flagship rolled out of the speakers. The same deep, braying triumph came at her over the com from the other ships of the squadron, powerful enough to shake a galaxy, and Lady Dame Honor Harrington sat frozen at its heart while the wild tide of her people's emotions ripped through her with all the binding, cleansing fury of a nova.

They'd done it, the tiny corner of her brain which could still work realized. These were the people who had done the impossible—who had conquered Hell itself for her—and she couldn't think now, could no longer plan or anticipate. And it didn't matter that she'd led them, or that the odds had been unbeatable, or that no one could possibly have done what they had. None of that mattered at all.

She was taking them home, and they were taking her home, and that was all in the universe that mattered.