But as Andrew always says, "close" only counts with horseshoes, hand grenades, and tactical nukes , she reminded herself.

Which was true enough, but hadn't prevented the Battle of Manticore from killing better than two million human beings. Nor did it change the fact that Honor had demanded the surrender of his intact databases as the price for sparing his surviving superdreadnoughts. She'd been within her rights to stipulate whatever terms she chose, under the rules of war, yet she'd known when she issued the demand that she was stepping beyond the customary usages of war. It was traditional—and generally expected—that any officer who surrendered his command would purge his computers first. And, she was forced to concede, she'd had Alistair McKeon do just that with his own data when she'd ordered him to surrender his ship to Tourville.

I suppose if I'd been going to be "honorable" about it, I should have extended the same privilege to him . He certainly thought I should have, at any rate.

Her lips twitched ever so slightly as she remembered the seething fury which had raged behind his outwardly composed demeanor when they'd finally met face-to-face after the battle. Nothing could have been more correct—or icier—during the "interview" which had formalized his surrender, but he hadn't known about Honor's ability to directly sense the emotions of those about her. He might as well have been bellowing furiously at her, as far as any real ability to conceal his feelings was concerned, and a part of her hadn't cared. No, actually, a part of her had taken its own savage satisfaction from his anger, from the way he his sense of failure burned so much more bitterly after how agonizingly close to total success he'd come.

She wasn't proud of the way she'd felt. Not now. But then the deaths of so many men and women she'd known for so long had been too fresh, wounds too recent for time to have stopped the bleeding. Alistair McKeon had been one of those dead men and women, along with every member of his staff. So had Sebastian D'Orville and literally hundreds of others with whom she had served, and the grief and pain of all those deaths had fueled her own rage, just as Tourville's dead had fanned his fury.