"Hard a port!" he barked. "All batteries, fire as you bear!"

"Sweet Jesus, they're Peeps!" Bellerophon's junior tactical officer whispered. The Book didn't like enemy reports like that, but Lieutenant Commander Avshari felt no inclination to criticize. After all, The Book didn't envision this lunatic sort of situation, either.

The lieutenant commander watched his status boards' green lights turn amber and red and wished to hell the Captain would get here. Or the Exec. Or anybody senior to him, because he didn't have a clue and he knew it. This was supposed to be a milk run, a good opportunity for junior watch keepers to get a little bridge time on their logs, but he was a communications officer, for God's sake—and one whose Academy tactical scores had been a disaster, to boot! What the hell was he supposed to do next?

"Sidewalls active! Starboard energy batteries closed up on computer override, Sir!" the youthful lieutenant at Tactical said, and Avshari nodded in relief. That decided which way to turn, anyway.

"Bring us hard to port, Helm."

"Aye, aye, Sir. Coming hard to port."

The dreadnought began her turn, and fresh alarms whooped even as she swung.

"Incoming fire!" the tac officer snapped, and lasers and grasers ripped at Bellerophon's suddenly interposed sidewall. Most of them achieved absolutely nothing as the sidewall bent and degraded them, but red lights bloomed on Avshari's damage control display as half a dozen minor hits splattered her massive armor, and this time he knew exactly what to do.

"Ms. Wolversham, you are authorized to return fire!" Bellerophon's com officer barked the order straight from The Book, and Lieutenant Arlene Wolversham punched the button.

Admiral Pierre swallowed a groan as the dreadnought snapped around and her sidewall swatted his broadsides contemptuously aside. He'd never seen a ship that size maneuver so rapidly and confidently. She'd taken barely ten seconds to bring her sidewall up and get around—her captain must have the instincts and reactions of a cat!

He could see his intended prey's impeller signature in his display now, millions of kilometers astern of the dreadnought, and realized intuitively what had happened. His intelligence had been perfect, but he'd blundered into an unscheduled departure. A stupid, routine transit there'd been no way to predict. And now there was no way to evade the consequences.

"All units, roll ship!" he barked, but even as he snapped out the order, he knew it was futile this deep into the enemy's missile envelope. Even if his ships rolled up behind their wedges in time to evade the dreadnought's beams, it would only delay the inevitable, require her to kill them with laser heads, instead....

And then he realized they weren't going to manage even that much.

HMS Bellerophon's broadside opened fire, and enough energy to shatter a small moon flashed through the "gunports" in her starboard sidewall.

A quarter-second later, Battlecruiser Divisions 141 and 142 of the Peoples Navy ceased to exist.

Honor smiled a sleepy little smile into the darkness, listening to the slow, even breathing behind her, and her hand crept up to caress the wrist and forearm draped over her ribs. It was a shy caress, almost an incredulous one, and amusement at her own sense of wonder deepened her smile.

A soft noise came out of the dark, and her eyes turned unerringly to its source. The sleeping cabin's hatch had been closed when she dozed off. Now it stood ajar, and a thin edge of light leaked through it. It was dim, barely lightening the blackness, but it was enough. Two green eyes sparkled at her from the bedside desk, and she felt the deep, gentle approval behind them.

She touched the wrist again, smile trembling with mingled echoes of present joy and remembered pain as old memories stabbed, and, for the first time in years, she let herself face the things she'd chosen to suppress for so long.

Being Allison Harrington's daughter had been hard for a girl who knew she was ugly. Honor loved her mother and knew her mother loved her. Despite a career at least as demanding as a naval officer's, Allison had never been "too busy" to give her daughter warmth and love and support... but she'd also been petite and beautiful. And there Honor had been, knowing she would never match her beauty, that she would always be the out-sized freak, and secretly loathing the part of herself that couldn't quite forgive her mother for making her feel her plain-faced gawkiness.

And then there'd been Pavel Young.

Her smile disappeared as she bared her teeth in automatic reflex. Pavel Young, who'd done his hateful best to destroy what little illusion of attractiveness she'd somehow nourished and turn her wistful dreams of what might have been into something ugly and disgusting. But at least she'd known he was the enemy, known his attack had been born of hate and outraged ego, not something she'd somehow deserved. He'd left her feeling dirtied and defiled, but he hadn't quite finished her off. No, that had been left to a "friend."

The remembered sorrow and crushing shame of a long-ago afternoon poured through her. It had been an agonizing thing, the most deeply hidden secret of an often desperately unhappy adolescence, for she hadn't realized until it was too late why Nimitz had taken such a dislike to Cal Panokulous. Not until she'd come smilingly, without knocking, into the dorm room of someone she thought loved her... and overheard the man who'd washed away the foulness of Young's touch chuckling over the com with an Academy classmate who knew them both over how "clumsy" she was.

She closed her eyes against the flood of long-denied anguish. Even after all these years, she'd never been able to admit how savagely that had wounded her. Not just the betrayal, but the terrible, cutting blow to a teen-aged girl who'd already been shamed by a would-be rapist. A girl whose mother was beautiful and who knew she was ugly. Who'd been so desperate for someone to prove she wasn't that she'd ignored Nimitz's warning only to discover how horribly one human being could wound another.

Never again. She'd sworn to herself that it would never happen again, just as she would never let him know she'd overheard. She'd simply fled, for if she'd confronted him, he would either have lied and denied it or laughed and admitted it... and in either case, she would have killed him with her bare hands. Yet, in a way, she'd been almost grateful. He'd warned her what could happen, shown her that no man would ever have more than a crude and casual interest in bedding someone as clumsy and ugly as she, and so she'd put any thought of its ever happening out of her mind.

She touched that warm, gentle hand again, pressing it to her ribs, absorbing its warmth like some pagan charm against devils, and her eyes closed tighter. She'd always known most men were decent. No one could be adopted by a 'cat and not know that, but she'd built her walls anyway. She'd hidden not just a part of herself but the reason she hid that part, even from the best of them, for she'd had to. Friends, yes; friends she would die with or for, but never lovers. Never. She'd cut herself off from that risk—cut herself off so completely she'd actually been content, never consciously realizing what she'd done—because she couldn't let anyone, especially herself, know how deeply the shamed girl still hiding within the determined naval officer had been wounded. Because she couldn't let anyone guess that one thing, at least, in the universe hurt so much, frightened her so completely, that she dared not confront it.

And so she'd gone her own way, cool and disengaged, faintly amused by the romantic entanglements she saw about her but totally untouched by them. She'd known it worried her mother, but her mother was the last person she could ever have discussed it with, and Allison Harrington didn't know what had happened to her daughter at Saganami Island. Without that knowledge and with a set of cultural baggage so different from that of a typical Sphinxian, there was no way she could have guessed what Honor chose not to admit even to herself, and Honor had been glad it was so. She'd actually been content, in a wistful sort of way, for she'd had Nimitz, and she'd accepted that she would never have—or need, or even truly want—anyone else.