 Students of Honor
The Star Kingdom of Manticore is once again at war with
the Republic of Haven after a stunning sneak attack. The graduating
class from Saganami Island, the Royal Manticoran Navy's academy, are
going straight from the classroom to the blazing reality of all-out war.
Except for the midshipmen assigned to the heavy cruiser
HMS Hexapuma, that is. They're being assigned to the
Talbott Cluster, an out of the way backwater, far from the battle
front. The most they can look forward to is the capture of the
occasional pirate cruiser and the boring duty of supporting the
Cluster's peaceful integration with the Star Kingdom at the freely
expressed will of eighty percent of the Cluster's citizens. With a
captain who may have seen too much of war and a station commander who
isn't precisely noted for his brilliant and insightful command style,
it isn't exactly what the students of Honor Harrington, the
"Salamander," expected.
But things aren't as simple -- or tranquil -- as they
appear. The "pirates" they encounter aren't what they seem, and the
"peaceful integration" they expected turns into something very
different. A powerful alliance of corrupt Solarian League bureaucrats
and ruthless interstellar corporations is determined to prevent the
Cluster's annexation by the Star Kingdom . . . by any means necessary.
Pirates, terrorists, genetic slavers, smuggled weapons, long-standing
personal hatreds, and a vicious alliance of corporate greed,
bureaucratic arrogance, and a corrupt local star nation with a powerful
fleet, are all coming together, and only Hexapuma, her
war-weary captain, and Honor Harrington's students stand in the path.
They have only one thing to support and guide them: the
tradition of Saganami. The tradition that sometimes a Queen's officer's
duty is to face impossible odds . . . and die fighting.
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