The display went blank.

  The Mandarins sat staring at one another in silence.

  HMS Imperator

  Sol System

  It was almost time.

  Honor sat quietly in her observation dome on Imperator’s spine, watching the time display in the corner of her artificial eye’s field of vision tick steadily downward.

  Winston Kingsford had complied with her demands. All of them. Quite a few of the civilians evacuated from the deep-space infrastructure of the most heavily industrialized star system in the galaxy had found temporary homes aboard the orbital habitats. No doubt they were straining the reserve life-support capacity, but that was fine. One thing habitats had was plenty of redundant life-support. And the fact that Kingsford had used those habitats as emergency staging points said quite a lot about whether or not he trusted her to keep her word.

  Of course, it also said he hadn’t had much choice about it. Not given the millions upon millions of people he had to move. In fact, she’d granted a twelve-hour extension.

  She should have felt elated, victorious; what she actually felt was dead inside. She sat there with the ghosts of her dead, felt them there, knew they were glad she hadn’t given in to the darkness. She knew that…and she still felt dead, empty…drained.

  She wondered if she would feel that way for the rest of her life.

  She would complete her mission, do her job, despite that inner deadness, because it was her job. Her mission. All she had left. But what would she do afterward? How could she find the strength to heal, to be the mother Raoul and Katherine needed? How would Nimitz find the strength to go on without Samantha? And how could she go on if she lost him, too, to his grief?

  The two of them sat there, with Nimitz in her lap, her hands moving slowly and steadily, automatically, on his silken coat while he buried his muzzle against her. She could feel him willing himself towards dissolution, on one hand, even as he clung to her on the other. He was balanced on a knife-edge, waiting—like her—to complete their final mission. But what about after that? She was afraid—so afraid—he would choose to die and leave her even more alone. The thought terrified what was left of her soul, yet she loved him too much to fight his decision, because unlike any other human, she knew how deep his pain was. How wounded he’d been.

  And because part of her wanted to do exactly the same thing.

  And she might. That was what truly ground her soul to dust. She might choose to die herself, even knowing how that would add to her parents’ pain, abandon Raoul and Katherine. After all, Allison and Alfred would have the children, and the children would have them. Why shouldn’t she lay down the hateful burden her own life had become?

  She’d given the orders. Grand Fleet would begin Operation Nemesis in two hours. Nuclear charges—multiple charges, in many cases—had been planted on every major platform outside Mars orbit, and most of Kingsford’s ships had already been blown up. Two dozen superdreadnoughts still plied back and forth between Mars orbit’s industrial platforms and the surfaces of Mars and Old Earth, but they would complete their missions and scuttle within the next ninety minutes or so.

  Even as she sat here, additional charges were being planted on the inner-system platforms which had been evacuated. Shoals of LACs had been deployed to deal with any dangerous piece of de-orbiting wreckage. Others had been deployed to take care of platforms which weren’t being fitted with charges. According to Andrea Jaruwalski’s ops plan, everything would be ready within the next thirty minutes. And then, one hour and thirty minutes after that, Honor would order the simultaneous, synchronized demolition of the entire system’s industrial infrastructure. She would order the greatest single act of destruction in human history, turn the entire star system of humanity’s birth into a funeral pyre for Hamish and Emily. For Samantha. For her Uncle Jacques. And for Pat Givens, Michael Mayhew, Judah Yanakov, Lucien Cortez…all her dead.

  And it wouldn’t bring a single one of them back to life.

  Nimitz pressed harder against her as the tears flowed down her cheeks at last. She felt him fighting to reach beyond his own bleak despair, trying to be there for her, and the greatest military triumph in human history was ashes in her mouth as they faced the dark void of their future. It was—

  The com pinged.

  She twitched, jerked up out of her thoughts, and it pinged again. Her mouth tightened into a thin, furious line and she reached out, stabbed the acceptance key viciously.

  “What?” she snapped.

  “I know you left orders not to disturb you, Your Grace,” Mercedes Brigham said. “But I’m afraid there’s been…a status change.”

  “Is it Kingsford? Is he trying to ask for more time?” Honor’s voice was tight and harsh with anger. “Because, if it is—”

  “No, Your Grace,” Brigham interrupted. “It’s not from the Sollies. The Duke of Cromarty just made her alpha translation about a light-minute out from the limit.”

  A fresh spasm of pain went through Honor as she remembered teasing Hamish about using the Duke for transportation to Beowulf. But even more than the pain, she wondered what could possibly have brought Duke of Cromarty here. What was Queen Elizabeth’s personal yacht doing in the heart of the Sol System, when her skipper couldn’t have known before he arrived what he’d find waiting when he did?

  Of course, the Duke wasn’t like most “yachts,” was she? She was an Agamemnon-class BC(P), fitted with Keyhole-Two and cutting-edge defensive and electronic warfare systems. For all intents and purposes, the Navy had taken a front-line battlecruiser, turned a quarter of its magazine space into luxurious accommodations for the Empress and up to a hundred and fifty or so guests, provided it with a picked crew of combat veterans, and called it a “yacht.”

  But for all the potency of her armament, she wasn’t really a warship, so what was she doing here now, of all times?

  She looked back out at the stars, and debated telling Mercedes to handle whatever it was that Duke of Cromarty thought was so desperately important. But she couldn’t.

  “A light-minute out?” she repeated.

  “Yes, Your Grace. But it was a crash translation; she’s still carrying a velocity of over sixteen thousand KPS.”

  Honor winced. For Duke of Cromarty to reenter n-space with that much velocity she must have hit her downward alpha translation at maximum velocity. Honor had done the same thing herself, upon occasion, and so she knew what that must have done to the stomachs of every man and woman aboard her.

  “Captain Firestine hit it almost perfectly,” Brigham continued. “She’s decelerating straight for us at five and a half kilometers per second. She’ll rendezvous with us in just over fifty-one minutes, and Captain Firestine requests permission to come aboard with urgent dispatches as soon as she does.”

  Honor frowned. Firestine wanted to hand-deliver a dispatch? Why? It made no sense. Then again, nothing else made sense, did it? And—she checked the time again—Firestine would reach Imperator fifty-seven minutes before she had to execute Nemesis. No doubt she could deal with whatever brought him here before the deadline. And perhaps she could use the diversion. Maybe it was even a good thing.

  Unless Firestine’s “dispatch” had been sent because Elizabeth and Willie had changed their minds.

  Her mouth tightened dangerously as she considered that possibility. But then she shrugged again. It was unlikely Elizabeth Winton, of all people, could have changed her mind. And if she had—

  Cross that bridge when you get to it, she told herself.

  “All right, Mercedes,” she finally sighed. “Please meet Captain Firestine when he comes aboard. Escort him to my observation dome.” She smiled wanly. “Tell him I apologize for not meeting him personally.”

  “Of course, Your Grace. I’m sure he’ll understand.”

  “In that case, I’ll see you—both of you—then,” Honor said.

  She killed the connection, gathered Nimitz back into her arms, and sat gazing out at the stars once more.

  The admittance signal chimed, and Honor stood, Nimitz cradled in her arms, and turned to face the hatch as she waited for Spencer Hawke to escort her visitor in. But when the hatch opened, it wasn’t Hawke who stepped through it, and she froze.

  He was as tall as she was, although he leaned heavily on a cane at the moment. His right leg seemed thick and swollen under his uniform trousers. Because it was in a cast or a splint, a corner of her brain realized. His hair was dark, dramatically silver at the temples, and his face was lined with fatigue, pain, worry, and grief. His eyes were bluer than a Sphinx sky, a treecat rode his shoulder…and he couldn’t be there.

  He couldn’t.

  She stared at him, heart thundering, unable to speak—unable to breathe. Not a muscle moved, but then her mouth quivered suddenly, and Nimitz reared upright in her arms, green eyes blazing, his mind-glow a forest fire as he, too, tasted their mind-glows. Tasted the fire neither of them had ever expected to taste again, drawing them up, up, out of the dark valley where the two of them had been so cold and alone so long. So focused on one another that they’d never even sensed it coming down the passage towards them.

  “Honor,” the newcomer said softly, so softly.

  She tried to reply. She tried, and she couldn’t. She just…couldn’t.

  The silence stretched out as he stood there, braced on the cane, staring at her. And then—

  She never remembered moving, but suddenly she was in his arms, her vision spangled by tears, her face buried against the side of his neck, feeling the firmness of him, tasting the glory of the mind-glow she’d known she would never taste again, and the wonder, and the disbelief, and the sheer, searing joy of it smashed over her like the sea.

  “But…but how?” she asked a lifetime later.

  They sat on one of the observation dome’s couches, arms still about one another. Nimitz and Samantha were curled so tightly together across their laps that it was impossible to know where one ’cat began and the other one ended. But perhaps that was actually the point, because there wasn’t a spot where one of them began and the other one ended…any more than there was a spot where Hamish began and she ended.

  “We were lucky,” he said softly. “We never actually made it to the conference. When the Sollies turned up, traffic control diverted us to the nearest docking point, way the hell and gone out in the boonies. Jacques figured it would take us forty-five minutes or an hour just to get to the hub, but then we hit a freight shaft that was down. So we were stuck in a supervisor’s module on one of the industrial booms.”

  His eyes darkened in memory…and with the awareness of what would have happened if that freight shaft hadn’t gone down.

  “We had some warning after Gamma blew,” he continued. “Fortunately, Tobias was even more paranoid than I was, and Jacques was a lot more familiar than me with Beowulfan platform design and SOP. Tobias found the emergency suit locker even before Beta went up—the damned thing wasn’t properly marked and he had to smash open half a dozen before he found the right one—and they were gumbies.”

  Honor nodded against his shoulder. No one knew where the term “gumby suit” had come from, but it had been applied since pre-diaspora times to the loosely fitting emergency vacsuits designed to accommodate the broadest possible range of human shapes and sizes. They were uncomfortable, and it was far harder to move in a gumby than in a skinsuit, but they weren’t designed to be comfortable. They were designed to keep someone alive, at least long enough for someone to rescue her. But—

  “They were loose enough we could fit Sam and BCB inside with us—especially Jacques and BCB. The two of them had a lot of room.” Hamish twitched a brief smile. “It wasn’t comfortable, especially for the ’cats, but it worked, and all three of us two-legs managed to suit up before the big one.”

  His smile vanished and his blue eyes went dark and haunted.

  “We knew what it was, of course. According to Captain Neitz, whose people pulled us out, we were less than five hundred meters beyond the total destruction zone. The truth is, we shouldn’t have made it, Honor. We really shouldn’t have.”

  Her arms tightened fiercely, and he made himself smile as he hugged her back.

  “A gumby only has about twelve hours of endurance,” he said, “and all of us got banged up pretty badly by the concussion. Jacques and BCB got hurt worse than Tobias or Sam and me, but I came out of it with a broken leg. You don’t want to know about the bruises on my back, either, but at least I took the impact with the bulkhead there, which protected Sam.

  “We were all out for a while. I came to first, which was probably a good thing. Jacques’s suit had micro tears in three places, and it took Tobias and me a while to find the repair kit and seal them. By then, he’d lost half his air, but he’d also come round, and he was the one who steered us to the access point for the liquid oxygen storage system.”

  He paused and shook his head, then actually smiled crookedly.

  “We umbilicaled to the LOX and the emergency power reserve. That gave us plenty of oxygen and enough juice to keep the suits up, but we wouldn’t have made it anyway, without Neitz and CPO Lochen. And it was even worse for the ’cats, in a lot of ways. They didn’t have helmets or any way to see a damned thing, and by the time all four of us had been suited up for six damned days, things got pretty…fragrant. Gumbies aren’t set up for recycling the way skinsuits are, so waste disposal was a problem and all of us were badly dehydrated by the time they finally found us. Jacques’s gumby was out of painkillers by then, too, so it was probably a good thing he was only semiconscious. They’ve got him in a hospital in Columbia right now and BCB’s with him. Both of them will be there for a while, Honor, but they made it. They’re going to be fine, and Tobias is out in the passage with Spencer right this minute.

  “In the meantime, I…really wanted to see you as soon as I could, so I grabbed the Duke and headed after you.”

  You mean you wanted to catch me, let me know you were alive, before I committed my very own Eridani violation, she thought, tasting his mind-glow, knowing how well he knew her. That’s what you were afraid of. And you were right, love. So right! But if you’d known the rest, If you knew what I’ve already done…

  “I’m glad you did,” she half-whispered. “So glad. But, Hamish, Emily—”

  “Shhhhh.” He held her close. “I know. They told me.”

  “But what they didn’t tell you,” she said drearily, “is that I killed her. I killed her, Hamish. I went to tell her you were gone, and I killed her. She died in my arms, and I’m the reason she did.”

  The tears broke loose as she admitted it. As she said the words to someone else. She felt the sudden, instant rejection in his mind-glow, but he didn’t know. He hadn’t been there. He hadn’t seen it happen. He—

  “That’s enough of that!” he snapped so suddenly, his voice so hard, she tried to jerk away from him. But he wouldn’t let her do that. He held her, and she slumped back, hiding her face against his shoulder.

  “Honor,” he said far more softly, and she heard the pain in his voice, tasted its reality in his emotions, “you didn’t kill her. She was already dying. I knew that. She knew that. She just…she just hadn’t wanted to tell you.”

  She stiffened, and he stroked her hair.

  “Honor—love—Emily was on borrowed time from the day of that air car crash. We always knew that. Without her life-support chair, she would’ve—”

  His voice broke and he had to stop, inhale deeply.

  “We always knew it could happen any time,” he said finally. “We always knew. And then there was you. Sweetheart, you never knew her before. I don’t think you could have any possible idea, even with that empathic sense of yours, what a difference you truly made over the last couple of years. You brought her so much joy, and Raoul, and you and your mother brought her Katherine. You know how much she loved the kids. You know that better than anyone else in the universe, and without you we—she—would never have had them. Without you—”

  His voice broke again. Then he drew another of those deep, shuddery breaths.

  “You went to tell her yourself, before she heard it from anyone else, and that’s exactly what I would have expected you to do. To be there for her instead of letting her hear it over a newscast, see it on one of the boards. To be there with her when she found out. I wasn’t there, but I didn’t have to be because you were. You say she died in your arms? Then you gave her the greatest gift of all, and I know it hurt, and I know it will always hurt, but I envy you because you were there when she needed you most, and I can never thank you enough for me, not just for her. So don’t you ever tell me you killed her! Whoever planted those bombs killed her, just as surely as they killed Tom Caparelli, Pat, Francine and Tony, and Michael Mayhew and all the others.”

  She trembled, still unable—or perhaps unwilling—to relinquish her guilt, yet deep inside, she knew he was right. She had been there, and she remembered the incredible power, the final splendor, of Emily’s mind-glow. And as she remembered, she admitted to herself at last that the pain in that mind-glow had been grief—Emily’s awareness that she was leaving Honor alone—not fear of death.

  Never fear. Not in that dauntless, blazing mind-glow of the woman she’d loved.

  And even as she thought that, she realized Hamish was right about who’d really killed her.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said, withdrawing from his embrace, rising to her feet while Nimitz and Samantha moved to Hamish’s lap. She looked down at the three people she loved most in all the universe and she nodded.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she repeated. “And whether or not you are, we have a message to deliver.”

  “I know.” He met her eyes, and his were almost as cold, almost as focused, as hers as he saw the Salamander looking back at him. “I know,” he said. “So I suppose there’s only one thing left to say.” She arched an eyebrow, and he gave her a treecat’s smile.