Honor finishes what she started. The Solar League fleet numbers thousands of super-dreadnoughts. Even its own government doesn't know how huge its economy really is. And for hundreds of years, the League carried the banner of human civilization, was the ideal to which humanity aspired after settling throughout the galaxy. But the bureaucrats known as "Mandarins" who rule the League today are not the same men and women who founded it in ancient times. They are corrupt, corrupt, accountable to no one... and they have decided that the upstart Star Kingdom of Manticore must be destroyed. Honor Harrington wore the uniform of the Star Kingdom for half a century and served her monarch and her people well. Over the years, the woman whom journalists call Salamander has risen from a tactically brilliant but politically naive junior officer to a figure in the high command of the Fleet and in the highest military and political circles of the Grand Alliance. Few people know war like Honor Harrington. Very few people have lost so many men and women, so many friends, so many relatives as she has. And yet, despite this, there is caution in her voice. She knows that the Mandarins and the Solar League Fleet are becoming increasingly desperate as the truth of their technological inferiority reaches home, but she also knows how vast the League is. And she knows how her citizens will react if the Grand Alliance comes to war with the League, attacks her star systems, destroys her infrastructure... kills her civilians. Today's victory, bought on these terms, can only guarantee a future war against the resurgent Solar League and its Fleet. Honor knows that the Grand Alliance must achieve a victory that does not require incursions deep into Solarian space, nor leave behind a legacy of bottomless hatred, and the strategy she espouses is working. The League slides toward inglorious defeat as it steadily loses ground in the Protectorates and on Outskirts. As its central government teeters on the brink of bankruptcy, and even some of the Core systems choose to secede from the corrupt Mandarins. As the Solarian Fleet finally realizes that it cannot face the Alliance Battle Fleet and win. But the Mandarins, in desperation, came up with a new strategy, and in pursuit of that strategy, the FSL committed atrocities the likes of which the galaxy had not seen in a thousand years. The League broke their own Eridanian Edict prohibiting mass civilian casualties, violated the Deneb Accords' ban on war crimes. And in the end, they killed too many of the people Honor Harrington loved. She is no longer the voice of caution and compromise, and the galaxy is... Now he will see something he never imagined. Salamander goes to the Solar League, and hell is on her heels.