And if they do, they'll almost have to kill all of them this time, he thought much less cheerfully. After officially "executing" Lady Harrington just to avoid admitting what really happened, there's no way they'd let any witnesses that inconvenient live.

He regretted that, but he'd done all he could for them. His conscience was as clear as anyone's could be in today's PRH, and he tucked those thoughts and memories away in a safe place while he considered his present situation.

He supposed some people would consider his promotion to vice admiral a fitting reward for winning the PRH's most crushing victory of the war. Personally, Tourville suspected it was more of a bribe— a tacit payoff for having kept him on ice for so long—and he would much rather have remained a rear admiral. Vice admirals were too senior, too likely to catch the blame if things went wrong for the forces under their command, and for the last eight or nine years, officers who caught that sort of blame had also tended to catch firing squads. That was why he'd devoted so much effort to avoiding promotion, but it had caught up with him at last, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Still, he reflected as the lift reached the boat bay and its doors slid silently open, with Esther McQueen as Secretary of War, the Committee's promise to halt the practice of shooting losing admirals might actually be worth believing. That was the good news. The bad news was that it was Esther McQueen who had chosen Tourville for his current assignment and personally bitched loudly enough at Oscar Saint-Just to get Tourville and Count Tilly sprung for the operation. So if she turned out to be up to something ambitious, the fact that he hardly even knew the woman would mean absolutely nothing to StateSec. Whether he liked it or not, he had just been publicly identified as a member of "her" faction... which might just turn his release from ship arrest into a case of out of the frying pan.

Another set of lift doors opened, revealing his broad-shouldered chief of staff and his ops officer. Citizen Captain Bogdanovich nodded to Tourville and Honeker with something very like a normal smile, but Shannon Foraker's long, narrow face wore no expression whatsoever. Under normal circumstances, Foraker was rather attractive, in an understated sort of way, but now her features were an icily controlled mask, and Tourville felt a fresh stab of worry. Something inside Foraker had changed after Honor Harrington's capture, and especially during their long confinement, and he was no longer certain what was going on inside her head. She was the only other person who knew any of the Manties had escaped Tepes' destruction, and he was confident she would do nothing to jeopardize that secret, but her entire personality seemed to have shifted. She was no longer the cheerful, quintessential techno-nerd, all but oblivious to the interpersonal relationships about her or the political tides sweeping through the Navy. Now she watched everything that happened around her, choosing her words as carefully as she had ever laid out an operations plan and never, ever forgetting the proper modes of address.

For anyone who knew Foraker, that last was far worse than merely ominous. It meant the first-class brain which had made her so dangerous to the Manties was now considering other threats and options... other enemies.

It was unlikely a mere citizen commander could pose much threat to the Committee of Public Safety, but Shannon Foraker was no ordinary citizen commander. If she decided to do something about the way Cordelia Ransom and StateSec had treated Honor Harrington, the consequences were almost certain to be drastic. It was unlikely she herself would survive, but it was equally unlikely she would go down without inflicting some extreme damage of her own. Intellectually speaking, Lester Tourville no longer had any problem with any damage anyone managed to inflict on StateSec and the Committee. In fact, the more damage someone could do, the better. What he would object to would be the loss of Shannon Foraker, who was worth any hundred Committee members he could think of right off hand. And, of course, to the probability that other people in her vicinity—like one Lester Tourville, for example—would go down with her.

All things considered, he mused as he tossed his cigar down a waste disposal slot and led the way towards the pinnace personnel tube, this assignment looks like being a lot more... interesting than I'd really prefer. Ah, well. It beats the alternative, I suppose.

Tourville sat gazing out the armorplast port as the pinnace maneuvered towards rendezvous with Salamis. The view was certainly impressive, he admitted. He hadn't seen this much tonnage in one spot since before the war began. In fact, he wasn't certain he'd ever actually seen this heavy a weight of metal.

It was unusual for someone to actually be able to see more than a handful of warships simultaneously with the naked eye. Men-of-war were big, especially ships of the wall, with impeller wedges whose width was measured in hundreds of kilometers. That imposed a certain dispersal upon them underway, and they tended to stay far enough apart to clear their impeller perimeters even in parking orbit. If they didn't, then they had to maneuver clear of one another on reaction thrusters before they could bring their wedges up, and that was costly in terms of both reaction mass and time.

In point of fact, the ships he was seeing now were probably sufficiently dispersed to light off their drives; there were simply so many of them that it didn't look that way. The feeble light of the M2 star known as Secour-C reflected from their white hulls as the units of Twelfth Fleet drifted in orbit around a gas giant almost as massive as its star. A dark haze of upper atmosphere ice crystals provided a bleak, dim background for the assembled fleet, and it looked from here as if he could have walked around the planet by stepping from ship to ship.

Thirty-six super dreadnoughts, sixteen dreadnoughts, eighty-one battleships, twenty-four battlecruisers, and forty heavy cruisers, he thought wonderingly, and no one even knows they're here.

That was hard to wrap his mind around, even for a spacer as experienced as Tourville, for Secour was an inhabited system. Of course, everyone in it lived on or near Marienbad, the habitable planet which orbited Secour-A, the F9 star which was the trinary system's primary component. Secour-B was home to a small industrial presence, but Secour-C never approached to within less than thirty-six light-hours of Secour-A even at periastron, and there was nothing of sufficient value to bring anyone here. Which made it a logical place to assemble Javier Giscard's force without anyone's seeing a thing.

And McQueen's done Giscard proud, he mused. The screen's light— only twenty-three destroyers and light cruisers, all told—but that's still over eight hundred million tons, and that doesn't even count the supply ships and tenders. Pile it all up in one heap, and it's got to come to more than a billion tons. In sheer tonnage terms, this has got to be the Navy's biggest concentration in fifteen or twenty years.

He wondered—again—how McQueen had possibly talked her political masters into letting her assemble a force like this. It had needed doing for years, but she had to have stripped the majority of the PRH's rear area systems to the bone to scare up this much firepower. Even with the new construction beginning to come forward, she had concentrated ten percent of the PN's super-dreadnoughts, fifty percent of its new-build dreadnoughts, and over a third of its surviving battleships into a single fleet. And in doing so, she had created a potentially decisive offensive weapon for the first time since the Third Battle of Yeltsin.

And she'd damned well better produce something with it. If she doesn't—or if this ends up like another Fourth Yeltsin—after Pierre let her take the risk of reducing rear area security, her head is certain to roll. And ours, of course... although in our case the Manties will probably make that a moot point if we screw up.