Oh Manticore, the Peeps, the Peeps Are Calling is a filk parody of Danny Boy (sung to the traditional Londonderry Air, with words by Frederic Weatherly). It follows the career of Honor Harrington, the protagonist of David Weber’s Honorverse, from a treecat rescue centuries before her own birth through to the alliance that finally unites her two nations against a hidden common enemy. Verses run in in-universe chronological order, not publication order.
It draws mainly on the main Honor Harrington sequence — On Basilisk Station, The Honor of the Queen, The Short Victorious War, Field of Dishonor, Flag in Exile, Honor Among Enemies, In Enemy Hands, Echoes of Honor, Ashes of Victory, War of Honor, At All Costs, Storm From the Shadows, Torch of Freedom, Mission of Honor, and Uncompromising Honor — plus several shorter pieces set in the same era: “A Beautiful Friendship” and “Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington” (in the anthologies More Than Honor and Changer of Worlds respectively), “What Price Dreams?” and “Queen’s Gambit” (in Worlds of Honor), and “Nightfall” (also in Changer of Worlds).
Verse is the frame, built on On Basilisk Station. “Peep,” the verse’s slang for a Havenite, is short for the People’s Republic of Haven, still run at this point by the hereditary Legislaturalists; no coup has yet remade the government. A Q-ship is a type of civilian freighter. Debris jettisoned mid-chase by the Havenite PMSS Sirius, an Astra-class freighter, leads Honor to guess it’s hull plating, hidden over a deadly cargo of weapons, and she calls Sirius a “disguised merchant raider,” like the ones Haven used against Trevor’s Star and Sheldon. Sirius isn’t the invasion; she’s the trigger. Honor then works out that Sirius is running to rendezvous with a Havenite battle squadron waiting beyond the system, to guide it in and seize the wormhole terminus before Home Fleet can reinforce it. Honor’s own battered, half-gutted light cruiser Fearless, hiding a secret of her own (the untested grav lance), has to catch and destroy Sirius before she reaches that rendezvous. The last line is a deliberate triple pun: literally, Honor preserves her Queen’s honor; by name, Honor is the one doing it; and as a title, it’s the second novel in the series.
Verse , from the novella “A Beautiful Friendship,” is deep background, centuries before Honor’s own birth. Climbs Quickly, a young scout of the Bright Water clan, has been raiding Sphinx’s greenhouses for weeks, drawn by the taste of celery (“cluster stalk” to the treecats) — the first, comic trace of him in the story. Eleven-year-old Stephanie Harrington, bored and forbidden by her father to explore alone, sets out to catch the mysterious thief and finally corners him one night in a thunderstorm; neither of them understands it yet, but the two feel a sudden, deep psychic connection. Each can now sense the other’s presence and direction, and while ostensibly out practicing her hang glider, Stephanie goes looking for him; to keep her from finding his clan’s nesting grounds, Climbs Quickly leads her away into the wilderness, and, misjudging the wind, she crash-lands in the picket wood. He comes to her aid, but a hexapuma, a native predator, attacks them both. Climbs Quickly defends her first, mainly by distracting the hexapuma, and is gravely injured for it. She desperately wants him to save himself and flee, and he feels her urging as clearly as his own terror, but the bond makes desertion impossible for him: he could no more abandon her than abandon one of his own clan’s kittens. Then Stephanie, despite a badly broken arm, drives the beast off with her own knife and stands over him until his clan’s scouts and hunters arrive — the incident that proves humans and treecats can bond at all. Bright Water Clan names her Death Fang’s Bane afterward; treecats are still calling her that in stories set generations later.
Verse : memory singers are their clans’ living archive, always female, passing down history and judgment as song across generations and even between clans — too vital to risk in danger, which is why a memory singer leading warriors into battle is unthinkable. Sings Truly, Climbs Quickly’s sister and Bright Water Clan’s second singer, does exactly that: she personally leads every adult male of the clan to his rescue, breaking with all precedent for her brother’s sake.
Verse states the thesis: treecats look small and harmless, but the same claws that killed a hexapuma have taught generations of Sphinxians real respect.
Verse , from “What Price Dreams?,” is the historical origin of full treecat legal rights. Crown Princess Adrienne, long estranged from her father King Roger II since her mother’s death, visits the Sphinx Forestry Service against his wishes and his opposition to the Treecat Rights Bill. Treecats sense an assassin’s hostile intent and swarm him before he can detonate his hidden explosives; Adrienne survives with only a concussion, from her own bodyguard’s tackle. Adopted by one of the treecats afterward, she reconciles with her father, who drops his opposition to the Bill on the spot.
Verse , from “Queen’s Gambit,” is the last piece of background before Honor’s own story begins. King Roger III dies in what looks like a grav-skiing accident but is actually sabotage; his daughter becomes Queen on the spot and quietly has the murder investigated. Once she has proof, she neither tries nor executes the conspirators: she forces each into resignation, exile to a remote posting, and lasting surveillance — punished, but contained rather than exposed in open trial.
Verse , from On Basilisk Station, states the treecat bond directly: a treecat chooses exactly one human, once, for life, and the bond is empathic. Nimitz chose Honor in her own childhood (“The Best Laid Plans”), long before the Academy, when a young Honor rescued him and his brother, badly hurt, from a pair of peak bears. His brother Sharp Nose crashes through a rotten, bark-borer-riddled branch onto the bears’ ground while scouting with Nimitz (then unbonded, and known only as Laughs Brightly); Laughs Brightly hurls himself onto the nearer bear’s back in a near-suicidal attack meant only to buy his brother time, breaking his own ribs and a forelimb before he’s battered clear. Honor, who had sensed something was wrong and come running, then shoots both bears dead with her rifle, saving them both. The bond itself comes afterward: cradling the injured Laughs Brightly while she calls in a ranger and a ‘cat-certified vet, she looks down into his eyes and feels him reaching back to her for the first time.
Verse , recovered from Honor’s own flashback in On Basilisk Station and independently confirmed in “Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington,”: as midshipmen at the Naval Academy, Pavel Young attacks Honor in the showers. She beats him badly and, choosing mercy over a formal complaint, declines to press charges — a choice his family later treats as license rather than kindness.
Verse , from “Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington,” is Honor’s snotty cruise aboard HMS War Maiden. Her hostile senior officer Santino, planted through North Hollow influence as payback, freezes at a sensor contact and then panics, unmasking the ship as a warship and letting the target flee. Captain Bachfisch removes him from the ship and promotes Midshipwoman Harrington in his place.
Verse , same story: with Santino gone, the real ambush springs. A privateer devastates the bridge, killing several officers and wounding Bachfisch; command falls to twenty-year-old Harrington by default. She dives her damaged ship beneath the enemy to dodge a killing shot, then raked her stern to destroy her outright — Honor’s first combat command, and her first battlefield promotion.
Verse , from The Honor of the Queen. Reginald Houseman, a Manticoran diplomat with no command authority over her, orders Honor to abandon her post on Grayson; she slaps him for cowardice dressed as diplomacy rather than obey.
Verse , same book: with Houseman gone and her own forces heavily outnumbered, Honor’s people commit to finishing the fight regardless.
Verse : calling a treecat “cute and helpless” is an outrageous joke. This is a creature that has already fought off a hexapuma and a pair of peak bears, and sensed an assassination plot in time to give warning of it.
Verse , from The Honor of the Queen, chs. 20–21: assassins strike during a state dinner at Protector Benjamin Mayhew IX’s own table. Nimitz senses the danger and kills the impostor guard standing closest to Honor before a shot is fired, and the two of them then hold the doorway against the rest while she — badly hurt herself, in the fight that costs her the eye — survives.
Verse , same book: Grayson is fighting not only the hostile theocracy of Masada but a Havenite-backed invasion at the same time. Honor commits to defending it regardless of the odds.
Verse , the climax of The Honor of the Queen. With her ship’s missiles nearly spent and an escort destroyed, Honor closes to point-blank energy range as a deliberate last resort to keep the enemy battlecruiser off Grayson.
Verse , same climax: a relief fleet under Admiral White Haven arrives too late to help directly, but a near-hopeless long-range volley forces the enemy to turn, exposing its weak bow just as the two ships close — Honor’s broadside finishes her, saving the planet.
Verse : despite having struck a superior officer, Honor is vindicated for defending Grayson against the odds, and is made both a Manticoran peer (Countess Harrington) and a Grayson steadholder.
Verse opens The Short Victorious War. Haven’s ruling cabinet, facing riots and unrest at home, calculates — cynically and explicitly — that a war against Manticore would distract the public rather than being strategically necessary. The prologue’s own closing line supplies the book’s title as the plan.
Verse , same book: recalled to active duty after a long, incomplete recovery from her Grayson injuries, Honor is given HMS Nike, the Fleet’s most prestigious battlecruiser.
Verse : at the Battle of Hancock, a splinter tears through Admiral Mark Sarnow’s command chair, and he gasps “Don’t scatter!” twice before losing consciousness; his staff can’t make out the words. Command legally passes to a captain on another ship who has no idea what Sarnow intended; Honor, who knows exactly what he meant to order, says nothing about the change of command and simply holds her own course.
Verse , same battle: Pavel Young orders his own squadron to scatter out of panic, exposing the battlecruisers; Honor countermands him directly. Most of his ships return, but Young’s own keeps fleeing and refuses to answer her hail.
Verse : relief dreadnoughts arrive unseen and close on the pursuing Havenite fleet under Rear Admiral Genevieve Chin, who realizes too late she’s trapped and breaks off, letting the battered task group escape.
Verse : Vice Admiral Parks endorses Honor’s decision to hold the line without formal authority, and orders Young relieved and sent home to face court-martial for cowardice and desertion.
Verse , from the climax of The Short Victorious War: a false-flag shuttle strike kills Haven’s hereditary President Sidney Harris and his cabinet. Speaker Rob Pierre blames Navy “traitors” and maneuvers the legislature into granting himself and Oscar Saint-Just emergency power as a “Committee of Public Safety.” Honor doesn’t learn of this yet — it’s told here as omniscient background.
Verse , same book: the professional duelist Denver Summervale kills Paul Tankersley, Honor’s lover — not the real target. His death is bait, meant to draw Honor herself into a duel where Summervale’s been paid to kill her too. She checks out a pistol and trains obsessively, resolved to kill him herself instead.
Verse : under extralegal interrogation, Summervale confesses he was hired to kill them both, Paul first, specifically to hurt Honor before she too was meant to die — and names Pavel Young’s father, the Earl of North Hollow, as the one who paid for it.
Verse : Honor deliberately provokes Summervale into challenging her, which lets her set the terms — the lethal protocol rather than the tamer one he’d planned to manipulate her into. Her own reflexes let her draw and fire first; none of his shots land.
Verse : using her privilege as a peer, Honor forces an early maiden speech and publicly accuses the Earl of North Hollow of murder, attempted murder, cowardice, attempted rape, and abuse of power before the full House of Lords, daring him to answer for it.
Verse is the book’s own title made literal. Under the Dreyfus Protocol’s walking paces, North Hollow breaks completely and whirls to empty his pistol into Honor’s back before the turn is even called; a shouted warning from her armsman saves her life, but one round still shatters her shoulder as she dives for the ground. She comes up firing from her knees and puts three rounds through his heart.
Verse , from Flag in Exile: Honor’s Sky Domes venture, bankrolled with her own money and Manticoran technology, has roofed Harrington City in crystoplast so people can walk its streets without breath masks. The same technology is about to be extended to farming, which would feed Grayson for a fraction of what its orbital farms cost and remove the pressure behind its historic population controls.
Verse , from Flag in Exile: at a public ceremony, a Grayson clergyman, Edmond Marchant, denounces Honor as a heretic from the crowd. She answers him by citing his own church’s text back at him; when the crowd turns on him, she orders her Guard to intervene and appeals for calm over the microphone, and they pull him out badly beaten but alive. Independently, the Church itself strips him of his own pulpit.
Verse , same book: a middle school built under Honor’s own economic initiative collapses, killing dozens of children. The conspiracy behind it — Steadholders Burdette and Mueller and Marchant’s own cousin — calls it “God’s will” to discredit Honor’s reforms, while Mueller privately manipulates the others into using his own steading as the site so he can pose as the grieving victim rather than a conspirator.
Verse , same conspiracy: a missile shoots down Honor’s pinnace, killing the project’s chief engineer, Adam Gerrick, and ninety-five others. Honor survives the crash, only to be found alone and wounded by two follow-up assassins.
Verse : Nimitz attacks Austin Taylor, mistaking him for the shooter and mauling him to death, which leaves the second assassin, Edward Martin, free to level his pistol at Honor’s chest. Reverend Julius Hanks, First Elder of Grayson’s church, throws himself between them and takes the fatal rounds himself; Honor survives only because her armored vest and Hanks’ own body absorbed enough of the impact.
Verse : Protector Benjamin IX publicly exposes the full conspiracy before Grayson’s assembled Conclave of steadholders, and Honor formally names Steadholder Burdette as the plot’s mastermind.
Verse : cornered, Burdette invokes an ancient right to trial by combat rather than accept execution, forcing Honor — still wounded from the crash and gunfight — to face him personally with swords. She kills him in two strokes.
Verse , the Fourth Battle of Yeltsin: only hours after surviving the assassination attempt, Honor disguises her superdreadnoughts inside a deliberately weak-looking formation to convince an overconfident enemy fleet they face only light units. When the trap springs, her hidden dreadnoughts annihilate them almost entirely — a victory so lopsided she feels “like a cold-blooded murderer” rather than a hero.
Verse , same battle: with her own squadron shattered, Honor still commits to a second engagement to protect the system, then bluffs a distant, out-of-range squadron into broadcasting false sensor signatures mimicking a fresh dreadnought fleet. The enemy commander withdraws rather than risk it; the bluff is never tested.
Verse : Grayson’s Conclave of Steadholders unanimously awards Honor its rare Crossed Swords honor. Steadholder Mueller, the conspiracy’s true, still-unpunished mastermind, personally proposes the honor and leads the applause.
Verse , from Honor Among Enemies: Honor’s Q-ship Wayfarer, disguised among a fleeing civilian convoy, deliberately draws off a pursuing Peep battlecruiser to let the convoy escape. Both ships close to point-blank range and unleash full broadsides simultaneously; the enemy is destroyed, and Wayfarer is left a gutted, drifting hulk with hundreds of her own crew dead, though her survivors are rescued days later.
Verse , from In Enemy Hands: Haven’s Secretary of Public Information, Cordelia Ransom, revives an old, fabricated murder charge against Honor to strip her prisoner-of-war status and send her to a prison planet for hanging. Before that can happen, her own people fight their way to her aboard the ship transporting her, at heavy cost, and destroy it from the inside with Ransom still aboard.
Verse , from Echoes of Honor: over roughly two years on the prison planet, Honor turns escaped prisoners of war into a disciplined force, seizes the planet’s orbital defenses, ambushes a relief fleet sent to investigate, and sails nearly 300,000 liberated prisoners home to Alliance space.
Verse , from “Nightfall,” corroborated in Ashes of Victory: while Honor is en route home, Citizen Admiral Esther McQueen launches a coup against Haven’s ruling Committee, killing its Chairman — but Oscar Saint-Just survives with a hidden demolition charge, destroying his own capital’s military headquarters and buying back his regime with fire.
Verse , from Ashes of Victory: Nimitz’s treecat “mind voice,” long silenced, is replaced by a working sign language that lets any treecat communicate with any human, not only its own bonded person. Nimitz and a fellow signer demonstrate it for Queen Elizabeth and her own treecat Ariel at a ball.
Verse , same book: a Grayson steadholder, blackmailed by a hostile underground movement, is coerced into presenting bugged memory stones to Queen Elizabeth and her Prime Minister during a state visit. When drone-missiles home in on the beacons, Honor detects them and flies her own runabout into the path of one, shielding the Queen; the other missile is not intercepted, and the Prime Minister dies with his entire party — a political shock that costs the government its majority.
Verse , same book: believing a cease-fire has bought him time, Saint-Just orders a loyal fleet commander’s command team home for “consideration.” Thomas Theisman springs his own counter-coup instead, personally leads the assault on Saint-Just’s headquarters, and executes him on the spot rather than stage a show trial.
Verse , from War of Honor: in a private, unguarded moment, Hamish Alexander’s own unspoken love for Honor reaches his treecat’s mate, Samantha, for the first time. She leaps to bond with him — the first time any mated pair of treecats had both bonded to humans while remaining mated themselves.
Verse , same book: a gossip columnist, Solomon Hayes, insinuates that Honor and Hamish have been lovers for years, timed to cripple their political credibility. The charge is false, but devastating because both privately do love each other — until Hamish’s wife, Lady Emily Alexander, breaks decades of seclusion to publicly vouch for Honor’s honesty, and public opinion reverses.
Verse , same book: a single unprovoked attack on a Manticoran cruiser by an Andermani warship, with no surviving explanation, turns simmering tension with a third power into open, undeclared war.
Verse , same book: Haven’s own Secretary of State secretly and unilaterally alters a single word in a diplomatic note before sending it to Manticore, making his own government’s position sound harsher than intended. Neither side ever learns what he did; the war both sides blame on the other has a hidden, undiscovered cause.
Verse , same book: with war against a third power looking unavoidable, Honor personally flies to the enemy flagship and shares intelligence about a hidden common threat, unasked and without authorization — and is believed, defusing the crisis.
Verse , from At All Costs: with Manticore’s own government refusing to reinforce a threatened system, Grayson’s Protector Benjamin acts alone, invoking his nation’s treaty right of passage through Manticore’s own wormhole junction to send a powerful squadron through over official objections — and the system is saved without a shot fired.
Verse , same book: Honor springs a trap she’s kept hidden even from her own officers — a powerful Grayson squadron disguised as a routine training cruise — catching an attacking Havenite fleet between two fires and breaking it.
Verse , same book: returning home, Honor senses Hamish’s own unfiltered emotional presence directly for the first time, without either treecat as an intermediary — an unprecedented bond between two “mind-blind” humans, now confirmed beyond denial though nothing outward changes.
Verse , same book: a records error silently lapses Honor’s contraceptive implant, and she discovers she’s pregnant with Hamish’s child weeks before a deployment that makes a normal pregnancy impossible. Rather than terminate or give the child up, she has the embryo transferred to an artificial womb so she, Hamish, and his wife can raise their child jointly.
Verse , same book: the pregnancy becomes public scandal. On Grayson, Steadholder Mueller argues the unmarried, unborn child would be barred from inheriting Honor’s own steading; Grayson’s senior clergyman produces centuries of legal precedent and flatly rules the child will not be illegitimate.
Verse , same book: Grayson and Manticoran church authorities together invoke a rarely used doctrine letting long-standing marriage vows be modified with full consent. Ambushed with the proposal by her own parents, Hamish, and his wife together, Honor accepts, and all three are married within the hour.
Verse , same book: aboard her flagship, Honor’s own trusted flag lieutenant, Timothy Meares, abruptly and inexplicably turns a stolen pulser on her armsman and then on Honor herself. Her empathic sense confirms he’s fighting the compulsion with everything he has; she kills him a fraction of a second before he can fire. Neither Honor nor anyone else in the book ever learns why.
Verse , same book, the Battle of Solon: scouting reports of only light defenses turn out to be exactly the trap the enemy intended, with three hidden fleets appearing on every side. Honor fights clear with heavy losses, but is forced to leave her oldest friend’s crippled ship behind to save the rest of her task force, not knowing whether she lives or dies.
Verse , same book: weeks later, Honor’s son is delivered from the artificial womb before the assembled family, and she formally gives his life into the keeping of her personal armsman, who swears the same ancient oath he once swore to her.
Verse , same book, the Battle of Lovat: newly equipped with two untested long-range weapons, Honor mousetraps the enemy fleet exactly as she herself was mousetrapped at Solon, wiping out its dreadnoughts, destroying the system’s shipyards, and killing its commander.
Verse , same book, the Battle of Manticore: unable to negotiate the peace Haven’s own president genuinely wanted, Haven commits nearly its entire modern battle fleet to a single all-or-nothing strike at Manticore’s home system. Home Fleet meets the charge head-on and is annihilated; a second relieving fleet is caught between the attackers and a hidden reserve, and Honor’s own flag captain from her earliest command dies with virtually his entire squadron.
Verse , same battle’s conclusion: Honor’s own fleet finally reaches the home system in the fight’s last minutes and fires a ballistic salvo from far beyond any range the enemy believes possible, annihilating most of his remaining dreadnoughts in a single exchange. Out of ammunition and options, he surrenders his fleet.
Verse , from Storm From the Shadows, ch. 52: with Elizabeth enraged over an atrocity committed by a third power and wanting to strike Haven pre-emptively, Honor contradicts her own Queen directly, naming a different, hidden actor — Mesa — as the real threat. Elizabeth concedes the immediate policy point, though nothing about her fury otherwise changes; the narration marks this as the moment Honor becomes the closest thing to a true peer Elizabeth has ever had.
Verse , from Mission of Honor, chs. 28–39: the Mesan Alignment’s hidden fleet strikes all three Manticoran orbital shipyards and Grayson’s Blackbird yard at once, and falling debris erases the city of Yawata Crossing on Sphinx. Honor learns from Hamish that most of her family died there, and that her longest-serving Grayson armsman, Andrew LaFollet, died getting her mother and infant son clear. Hamish realizes he has “finally met the monster” in her as she vows to find whoever did it.
Verse , from Mission of Honor, ch. 43, the book’s own final chapter: Haven’s President Pritchart flies to Manticore in secret and confesses that the war’s original cause was a forgery by her own government’s Secretary of State, fully exonerating Haven, and reveals the Mesan Alignment as the hidden enemy behind both wars. Both leaders lean on Honor’s own empathic sense to verify each other’s honesty; the book’s last image is the two of them shaking hands.
Verse , from Uncompromising Honor (August 1922): Operation Buccaneer, the League’s commerce-raiding plan against the Alliance and any star system judged complicit, in which a task force gives a deadline to evacuate orbital infrastructure and then destroys it. Vice Admiral Hajdu Győző, at Hypatia, which had voted to secede and seek union with Beowulf, gives thirty-six hours. President Vangelis protests that he would be killing millions of civilians, and Hajdu answers that he will execute his orders at the time he has given. (At Cachalot, Admiral Capriotti gave seventy-two hours.) The evacuation cannot be done in the time.
Verse , from Uncompromising Honor: Rear Admiral Jan Kotouč’s four Manticoran ships (Task Group 110.2, about 1,900 personnel) meet the League’s thirteen battlecruiser squadrons, destroy at least twenty-seven battlecruisers (with 78,000 men and women aboard) and kill Hajdu, and are almost all lost. Honor later says that ninety percent of the squadron’s personnel paid with their lives.
Verse , from Uncompromising Honor: Rear Admiral Martin Gogunov takes over from Hajdu and insists on proceeding (“It’s why we came!”). Commander Megan Petersen’s Arngrim, the last Manticoran ship left, destroys one chosen battlecruiser with nine laserheads and gives Rear Admiral Yountz ten minutes to leave. In Honor’s words at Bassingford, the squadron “saved at least six million lives.”
Verse is a divider: the Peeps call again, and Haven and Manticore are joined. “Genocide” refers back to Hypatia and the League’s attempt to kill millions in the Verge, and the “laws” are the ones the League broke by attacking. The verse is set as the Alliance fleet goes to Sol in January 1923.
Verse , from Uncompromising Honor (January 1923): the League verse. The Erinyes (the Furies) come to teach the League “to sing another tune”. The League’s ships are removed and, in Operation Nemesis (named for the Greek goddess of retribution), every artificial structure in a sphere eleven light-hours across, two thousand T-years of construction, is destroyed, except the major orbital habitats and the power satellites; no civilians are killed. “Mother Earth” is Old Earth, the League’s capital.
Verse , from Uncompromising Honor: Honor after Beowulf and Emily’s death. She hands her son to the nurse because he bursts into sobs whenever she is near; her mother Allison thinks “give me back my daughter and take away this stranger”; Honor says “this has to end… once and for all.” Aboard Imperator she has “nothing in her except a vast, singing emptiness” and “the single unwavering purpose.” Alecto is the Erinys of unceasing vengeance.
Verse , from Uncompromising Honor: the hours before Nemesis. Honor sits in her observation dome “dead inside”, fearing that Nimitz will choose to die and that she may too, and plans to turn the star system of humanity’s birth “into a funeral pyre for Hamish and Emily.” She promises no civilian will be killed, and thinks that if the League gave her an excuse she would take it, and that she must not. The Hebrew is Judges 16:30, Samson at Gaza, “let my soul die with the Philistines”; the pillars are the infrastructure she is about to bring down.
Verse , from Uncompromising Honor: the arrival in Sol. Honor’s fleet finds Rear Admiral Bethany Ning-ju’s eight heavy cruisers; Honor, “a terrifying stranger” to her flag captain, says “Take them out,” and over five hundred missiles launch. The cruisers strike their wedges (surrender) and Honor says nothing. Mercedes Brigham says they have surrendered, grips her shoulders and shakes her. Honor says “Yes, they have, damn them,” and orders Captain Cardones to abort the engagement; the missiles self-destruct with about ten seconds to go.
Verse , from Uncompromising Honor: the League’s leaders after the arrival and the Ganymede surrender. Abruzzi threatens to have Admiral Kingsford shot for cowardice if he does not go out and fight. Kingsford refuses (“I have no intention of seeing them butchered for absolutely nothing”) and evacuates the deep-space infrastructure instead; Honor grants a twelve-hour extension. Kolokoltsov thinks she wants them to reject her terms, “to give her an excuse.”
Verse , from Uncompromising Honor: Honor’s terms after Nemesis, broadcast to some ten or twelve billion viewers through eight Hermes buoys: a month to summon a constitutional convention with authority in elected officials; a right of secession by three-quarters vote; the Protectorates and the Office of Frontier Security dissolved; property returned to the systems; no Alliance forces on Old Earth or League worlds; and four more of the wealthiest systems each month if refused. She cites Hypatia, Crandall, Filareta, Ganymede and the Yawata Strike, which she attributes to the Alignment.
Verse , from Uncompromising Honor: the Mandarins still say “fight on”, and Brigadier Simeon Gaddis, with Kingsford, Okiku and Tarkovsky, arrests Kolokoltsov and the Mandarins (“Sign me up, Brigadier”), after an Alignment agent, Caswell Gweon, is found dead in Kingsford’s office. Kingsford goes aboard Imperator to formally accept the Grand Alliance’s terms. Honor’s terms had promised that no Alliance force would take the Mandarins into custody; the League’s own officers remove them. The Assembly honors Kingsford’s acceptance, and the Constitutional Convention is seated on the last day of February 1923.
Verse , the closing recap: the Peeps come calling again, but this time as allies. The common foe is the slave-trading power behind the Mesan conspiracy, whose plots Haven and Manticore now move against together. The last line is another pun on The Honor of the Queen, now naming Haven alongside it.