Epilogue

She woke slowly, and that was very unlike her. Thirty-five years of naval service had trained her to awaken quickly and cleanly, ready to face any emergency, but this time was different. It was hard to wake, and she didn't want to do it. There was too much pain and despair waiting for her, too much loss, and her sleeping brain cringed away from facing it.

But then something changed. A warm weight draped itself across her chest, vibrating with the strength of a deep, buzzing purr, gentle with love, that seemed to pluck at the very core of her.

"N-Nimitz?"

She scarcely recognized the wondering voice. It was cracked and hoarse, its enunciation slurred, yet it was hers, and her eyes fluttered open as a strong, wiry true-hand touched the right side of her face with infinite tenderness.

Her eyes widened, and she sucked in a shuddering breath as Nimitz leaned closer to touch his nose to hers. She stared at him with her one working eye, raising her right hand to caress his ears as if the simple act of touching him was the most precious gift in the universe. Her hand trembled, with weakness as much as emotion, and the 'cat folded down on her chest to rest his cheek against hers while the depth of his love rumbled into her bones with his purr.

"Oh, Nimitz!" she whispered into his soft fur, and all the remembered anguish, all the fear and despair she would have died before admitting to an enemy was in that whisper, for this was the other half of her own being, the beloved she had known she would never see again. Tears spilled over her gaunt cheeks, and she reached up to hug him close... and froze.

Her right arm moved naturally to clasp him tight, but her left...

Her head snapped over, her working eye wide, and her nostrils flared as shock punched her in the belly, for she had no left arm.

She stared at the bandaged stump, and disbelief was a strange sort of anesthesia. There was no pain, and her mind insisted she could feel the fingers on the hand she no longer had, that they still obeyed her, clenching into a fist when she willed them to. But those sensations were lies, and she lay frozen in that moment of stunned awareness while Nimitz pressed still harder against her and his purr burned still deeper and stronger.

"I'm sorry, Ma'am." Her head turned the other way, and she looked up into Fritz Montoya’s face. The surgeons eyes were shadowed, and she felt his mingled regret and sense of guilt as he sat beside her. "There was nothing else I could do," he told her. "There was too much damage, too much..." He stopped and inhaled, then looked her squarely in the eyes. "I didn't have the tools to save it, Ma'am, and if I hadn't amputated, we'd have lost you."

She stared at him, trapped between too many emotions for rational thought. Joy at her reunion with Nimitz, astonishment that she was alive at all, the shock of her mutilation, and behind all that the waking memories of friends who had died, who would never wake, as she, to find they had somehow survived after all, crushed down upon her, and she couldn't speak. She could only stare up into Montoya’s careworn face while her right arm held Nimitz tight and her soul clung even more tightly to his.

She didn't know how long it lasted, but finally the right corner of her mouth trembled in a fragile, almost-smile, and she freed her hand from Nimitz to hold it out to Montoya.

"Fritz," she said softly, wonderingly. He took her hand and squeezed it fiercely, and her too-thin fingers returned his clasp.

"I'm sorry," he repeated, and she shook her head on the pillow.

"Why?" she asked gently. "For saving my life, again?"

"He did that, My Lady," another voice said, and Honor gasped. She tried to sit up, but her right hand still held Montoya’s, and she hissed in sudden pain as she tried to rise on the left hand she no longer had and the bandaged stump pressed into the firm softness on which she lay.

Montoya started to stand, his face distressed, but someone else's arms reached out to support her. Nimitz spilled from her chest, lying beside her, and she pulled her right hand from Montoya’s. Her arm went out, and the pain still rippling through her meant nothing at all as she hugged Andrew LaFollet with all the fierce strength in her wasted frame.

Her armsman returned her embrace, and she felt the terrible power of his own emotions echo and reecho deep within her. She tasted his own relief at having survived, his grief for those who had not, and his fierce pride in them. But over and above everything else, she felt his devotion, his love, for her and his joy that she was alive, and she clung to him as she had to Nimitz.

Such moments were too intense to last, and at last she drew a deep, quivering breath and relaxed her embrace. LaFollet eased his, as well, and started to step back. But she shook her head quickly and reached across her body to pat the side of the bed. The expression on the live side of her face was almost pleading, and he hesitated for a moment, then shrugged and sat beside her. She gazed at him, then at Montoya, and a different sort of disbelief filled her as she looked beyond the doctor and recognized the bulkhead and low overhead of a pinnace or shuttle. It wasn't a design she was familiar with, and someone had rigged curtains to screen in the folded down row of seats which had been turned into her bed, but whatever it was, it definitely was not the brig of PNS Tepes, and she turned wonderingly back to LaFollet.

"How?" she asked simply, and he smiled. "We're still figuring that out ourselves, My Lady," he said wryly, "but we know who pulled it off."

He looked at Montoya, one eyebrow raised, and the doctor reached for Honors wrist. He felt her pulse for several seconds, then looked into her natural eye and nodded.

"I think she's up for it," he said. "But you tell the captain that when I kick you all out, you stay kicked out."

"Yes, Sir," LaFollet said with a grin, and stood once more. He patted Honor's shoulder, then turned and pushed through the curtains, and Honor began wiggling determinedly up the bed. Montoya started to speak sharply to her, but then he sighed, shook his head, and helped her into a sitting position and propped her with pillows.

She smiled her thanks, but her attention was back on Nimitz as the 'cat moved to lie across her lap. She'd felt the flash of his pain, and her good eye darkened as she absorbed the lurching limp which had replaced his usual smooth gracefulness. She eased him down, settling him as comfortably as possible, and her fingers trembled as she stroked his twisted midshoulder and midlimb. She looked back up at Montoya, and the doctor returned her gaze levelly.

"I did my best with what I had, Skipper," he said, "but the bastards wouldn't give me much. The good news is that aside from the bone and joint damage, he seems to be fine, and if we can get him back home, any good Sphinx veterinary surgeon can repair the bone damage. The bad news is that he'll be in constant low-grade pain, and he won't be climbing any trees until we do get him to a surgeon."

"You're wrong, Fritz," she said, resting her hand lightly on the 'cat's head. "The real good news is that he's alive, and I owe you and Shannon Foraker for that, don't I?"

"Foraker more than me," Montoya half disagreed. He opened his mouth to say something more, then shut it again as someone pulled the curtains back.

Honor turned her head, and her right eyebrow rose in fresh surprise as she recognized the hazel-eyed man in Peep uniform standing beside Alistair McKeon. Warner Caslet grinned crookedly at her and shrugged.

"I didn't expect to meet under conditions like these, Milady," he told her wryly. "Given the alternative, for both of us, however, I'm delighted to have the opportunity."

"Warner," she said wonderingly, then looked at McKeon. The broad-shouldered captain looked almost as worn as she felt, and there were gaps in his teeth when he smiled, but his eyes were bright as he took the hand she held out to him.

"Long way from Basilisk Station, isn't it?" he said, and Honor surprised herself with a chuckle.

"I suppose it is," she agreed, and looked past him at Horace Harkness. The senior chief looked almost bashful, as if he wanted to shuffle his feet while he stared down at his toes, and she looked back at McKeon and raised her eyebrow once more.

"I've got a feeling Sergeant-Major Babcock is going to be proud of her husband when we get him home," the captain said with a grin. "He's the one who got us all out."

"So I understand." Honor turned her gaze on Harkness once more, and this time the senior chief did look down at his toes.

"Yes, Ma'am. He sort of, um, convinced the Peeps he'd gone over to them, got access to one of their minicomputers, I'll let him give you the details later, and hacked into their main system. He set up the entire breakout... and just as an encore, he managed to arrange things so the Peeps think we're all dead."

"I don't..." Honor began, then stopped. There was too much going on here, and she wasn't in shape to assimilate all of it. That would have to come later, and she suspected it was going to take quite a while for them to tell her everything, but for now...

"I want to hear all about it when I'm in shape to understand it all," she told her subordinates. "But for now, what I really need is a status report."

"Yes, Ma'am," McKeon said, and rubbed his eyebrow for a moment, as if marshaling his thoughts. "Basically, Ma'am, we're on the surface of the planet Hades. Thanks to the fact that Harkness here is probably the most devious hacker outside a maximum security prison, excuse me; outside any other maximum security prison, we managed to get off Tepes once she was in planetary orbit. More than that, he blew the whole ship the hell up, and the Peeps think we went with her."

"He...?" Honor blinked, then looked at Harkness. "You blew the ship up, Senior Chief?" she asked very carefully.

"Uh, yes, Ma'am," Harkness mumbled, turning an alarming shade of red. "Actually, ah, I sort of, well..."

"He demonstrated what happens when a pinnace brings its wedge up inside a boat bay, Skipper," McKeon told her, and Honor blinked again, with a sort of appalled respect.

"I see," she said, and then the right side of her mouth twitched. "Remind me to never, ever get you angry at me, Horace."

Harkness went an even darker crimson as she used his first name for the first time in the eleven years they'd known one another. He started to mumble something, then stopped, looked at her, and shrugged helplessly.

"He also pulled a lot of information on Hades out of Tepes' database," McKeon went on, as much to save Harkness from more embarrassment as to bring Honor up to date. "I've been looking it over since we planeted, and I can see why the Peeps figure this is a pretty secure prison."

"Oh?" Honor returned her gaze to him with renewed attentiveness.

"Yes, Ma'am. Its simple enough: there's not a single thing on the entire planet which a human can metabolize." Honor's eye narrowed, and he nodded. "You've got it, Skipper. They don't need to lock anyone up; all they have to do is lock the prisoners out of the food depot. We don't have figures on the prisoner population, but if the rumors are true, they've been dumping military and political prisoners here for something like seventy years, and most of the people they've dumped had prolong. There have to be thousands of 'inmates' down here, but the Peeps have them spread out across the surface of an entire planet in relatively small packets, and they can't stray far from wherever they were dumped in the first place because that's where the Peeps deliver their rations."

"I see." Honors fingers stroked Nimitz's ears, and she frowned. "How big is the garrison?"

"Again, we don't have precise figures, but I'd estimate there're around a thousand or fifteen hundred of them. Their main facility is on an island in the middle of Hades' biggest ocean, it's covered by satellite reconnaissance, and according to Tepes' database, they've got light and medium anti-air defenses around the base. The only contact between there and the rest of the planet is by air, and once they've been shipped down to the surface, no prisoners are allowed on the island." McKeon shrugged. "Since they control the only food source, and the only means to get to that food source, and the orbital defenses around the planet, security's never been a real big concern for them."

"I see," Honor repeated, then flicked her hand at the bulkheads around them. "But now?" she suggested.

"Now that might just change," McKeon agreed with an unpleasant smile. "Thanks to Harkness here, we've got a pair of heavy assault shuttles with almost full loads of external ordnance, full small arms racks, and a fair amount of unpowered armor."

Honor felt both eyebrows rise and gave Harkness another respectful look.

"We're also pretty sure the Peeps don't know we're here," McKeon went on. "From what Harkness pulled out of Tepes' database, they've got a good satellite surveillance net, but it concentrates on covering their main facility, and we touched down on the far side of the planet. We made dead-stick approaches without using impeller drive, too, and we didn't cut in the countergrav until we were under a hundred meters. There's no way anyone saw us make reentry or land, and this place is covered in triple-canopy jungle, so camouflaging the shuttles once we had them down wasn't exactly hard. Besides, we've been down for over three local days now. If they had any suspicion we'd made it out when Tepes blew, we'd be neck deep in recon flights. Under the circumstances, StateSec would probably even have called in Count Tilly's small craft to look for us, and we've seen zip air traffic."

"All right," Honor said after a moment. "It sounds to me like you're right about that part of it, but where do we go from here?"

"That's up to you, Ma'am, and frankly, I'm just as happy it is," McKeon said candidly. "We're down and concealed for the moment, and we've got some hardware to work with and enough emergency rations to carry us for up to five months if we're careful. But there are only eighteen of us, twenty, if we count Warner and Nimitz..." he nodded to the Peep officer with a wryly apologetic grin "...and the bad guys have a hell of a lot more firepower than we do. Not to mention an established base, at least a dozen armed pinnaces of their own, and those damned satellites to watch their backs. Any way you look at it, Ma'am, we're pretty damned outnumbered!"

"Outnumbered, Alistair?" Honor leaned back, her thin fingers buried in Nimitz’s warm, soft fur. She looked more like a gaunt, half-starved wolf than ever, with her shaved hair, half-dead face, and amputated arm, but the feral gleam of a pack leader glittered in her remaining eye. She swept that eye over the men around her, and the right side of her upper lip curled back to bare her teeth.

"You people got us out of Tepes and down to this planet," she told them. "There were two or three thousand people on that ship, with guns and the combinations to our cells, but you still got us out, and we've got a lot more to work with now than you had then, now don't we?"

She held McKeon's eyes until he nodded, then swept her gaze over the others once more, and she could not have defined or described the wild, fierce flow of her emotions if her soul had depended upon it. But it didn't matter. She didn't need to define or describe anything, for she felt the same determination, the same defiance, echoing back at her from her officers. She didn't realize how much those emotions focused on her, had no true concept of the way they viewed her as their living victory totem, and that didn't matter either. What mattered was the moment, the sense of naked swords raised in the dawn and the roar of massed voices ready to defy the gods themselves behind her. And as she heard the inner echo of that defiance, she knew it didn't matter at all that she had less than twenty people and only two sublight shuttles on a planet a light-century and a half from the nearest friendly territory, for it was inconceivable that the Peeps could keep her people here. Not after all they'd already done.

"If anyone's outnumbered here," Lady Dame Honor Harrington told her friends softly, "it's the Peeps."