He drew a deep breath, as if stealing himself. Then—

"They hit Basilisk, too, Milady," he said quietly. "They killed Admiral Markham and destroyed the inner-system picket, then went on and wrecked everything in Medusa orbit."

"Basilisk?" McKeon sounded strangled. "They hit Basilisk, too?!"

"Yes, Sir," Ainspan looked as if he wanted nothing in the universe more than to give McKeon a different answer, but he couldn't. "I don't have anything like official numbers, Milady," he went on, turning back to Honor, "but I know we got hurt and hurt bad. According to the Peeps, we've lost sixty-one of the wall, plus most of their screening units. I think that has to be an exaggeration, but I've personally met prisoners who can confirm the attacks on Zanzibar, Alizon, and Seaford Nine. I think—" He drew another deep breath. "I think this time they're actually telling the truth, Milady—at least about the systems they hit."

Honor felt Ramirez and Benson flinch at last as the number sixty-one hit them. They might not be sufficiently familiar with the Alliance's astrography to know where Zanzibar was or what the significance of an attack on it might be, but they thought they knew how hard the Alliance had been hit if the Peeps' claims about Allied ship losses were anywhere near accurate.

Only they were wrong, she thought, and her brain was so numb she felt almost calm. The ship losses and loss of life were serious enough—even assuming the Peeps had inflated them by thirty or forty percent, they were still the worst the Royal Manticoran Navy had suffered in its entire four hundred-year history—but the impact of that paled beside the sheer audacity of the Peep attack.

It must have hit the Admiralty like a thunderbolt, she thought. After all this time, no one could have anticipated the possibility that the Peeps might try something like this. I certainly never would have! But if they've really punched out Zanzibar and Alizon and hit Basilisk, then—

She closed her eyes, and despite the insulation of her shock, her thoughts raced. Even the total destruction of all industry in Zanzibar and Alizon would be a relatively minor blow to the industrial base of the Alliance as a whole, and the civilian loss of life wouldn't have been too bad—not if Ainspan was right about who'd commanded the raids. Lester Tourville would have done everything humanly possible to hold down the noncombatant death count. And from an industrial viewpoint, the RMN satellite yard at Grendelsbane Station alone had more capacity than Zanzibar and Alizon combined. All of which meant the Alliance could take up the slack without dangerously overstraining itself.

But that hardly mattered, for the political and diplomatic consequences of a successful strike of this magnitude upon two allies of the Star Kingdom must have been devastating. And the destruction of the Basilisk support structure must have been even worse. Basilisk was Manticoran territory, and no one had dared to attack the Star Kingdom's home space in three hundred and seventy years. The economic cost alone had to have been catastrophic, at least as bad as the Zanzibaran and Alizonian losses combined, but the other consequences of such an attack must have cut deeper than any financial loss. And—

"We're on our own," she said softly, not even aware she'd spoken aloud.

"What did you say?" It was McKeon. He sounded far more abrupt than usual, but at least he was beginning to fight sufficiently clear of his own shock to think again, and she looked at him.

"I beg your pardon?" she said.

"You said 'we're on our own,'" he told her. She looked at him blankly for a moment, then nodded. "So what did you mean?" he asked.

"I meant that we can't whistle up a rescue expedition after all," she told him bleakly. He cocked his head as if to invite fuller explanation. The beginnings of understanding already showed in his eyes, but she went on anyway, looking up at Ainspan while she explained it to him, as if using the words to hammer home her own acceptance of them.

"We thought we could send a ship like Krashnark back to Alliance space if we could ever take her in the first place," she said. "Then all we'd have to do would be sit tight while the Admiralty organized a convoy and escorts and came to get us out. But if the Peeps have hit us that hard back home, the Alliance couldn't possibly justify sending a force big enough to lift us all out of here. Even if the Admiralty were willing to, the Government would never authorize it—not when every voter in the Star Kingdom and every member government of the Alliance has to be screaming for ships of the wall to reinforce their picket forces!"

McKeon's gaze met hers. He started to open his mouth, but she'd read the thought behind his eyes and gave a sharp, tiny shake of her head. His mouth closed again, and she looked away, watching her non-Manticoran officers grapple with the news. It didn't seem to have occurred to any of them that the Allies certainly would send a ship to pick up Steadholder Harrington if they knew she was alive, and Honor hoped it never did occur to them. Sending a single fast ship to collect one person—or even a few dozen people—was one thing. Sending enough personnel lift to take everyone else off Hell as well was something else entirely.

"But if we can't call for help," Harriet Benson said at last, speaking very quietly, "then we're screwed, aren't we? We needed that support, Honor. What the hell do we do if we can't get it?"

"Do, Harry?" Honor turned to look at her, and the living side of her mouth turned up in a grim, cold smile. "We do what we have to do," she said in a voice that matched the smile perfectly. "And if we can't do it the easy way, then we do it the hard way. But I'll tell you this now—all of you. There aren't enough Peeps in this galaxy to keep me from taking my people home, and I am not going to leave a single person I promised to get off this planet behind me when we go!"

Chapter Forty-Two

"So that's what I intend to do," Honor told the officers around the conference table. "I know it's risky, but given Commander Ainspan's news—" she nodded her head courteously at the Commander, who sat at the foot of the table, where he'd just finished briefing her senior officers "—I don't see that we have any choice."

"Risky? That plan isn't 'risky'—it's insane!" Rear Admiral Styles' voice was flat and hard. No doubt he meant for it to sound firm, decisive and determined, but she heard the naked terror behind it only too clearly. And when she glanced around the conference table at the expressions of her other senior officers, she knew that impression was neither her imagination nor solely due to her link to Nimitz.

"Keeping Krashnark here in the Cerberus System is the worst thing we could possibly do," he went on, turning slightly away from her to address her other officers as if lecturing a crowd of school children. "I've never heard a senior officer suggest anything so reckless and ill-considered! I remind you all that she is the only means of communication with the Alliance we have! If we don't use her to send for help, no one can have the least possible idea that we're even here awaiting rescue!"

"I'm aware of the risks, Admiral." Honor managed—somehow—to keep her voice level and wondered if she were being wise to do so. Speaking around a senior officer to her subordinates, especially when criticizing that senior officer's plan in such immoderate language, constituted a serious offense by RMN standards. At the very least it was insubordinate; at worst, it was an attempt to undermine the chain of command, and she knew she ought to bring the hammer down. But Styles remained the second-ranking Allied officer on Hell and this was no time for divisiveness, and so she gritted mental teeth and made herself speak to him as reasonably as if he had a functioning brain and a desire to use it.