ThinksMarkedly wrote:There's also been an explanation by RFC (which someone with better memory than I can report) that Fearless wasn't supposed to be sent to Basilisk at all. CL-56 was old at the time: she was supposed to be decommissioned and sent to the breakers. She was saved from that fate before the exercises specifically so they could install the grav lance on her. But once the exercises were done, she wasn't supposed to be sent anywhere. But somehow the embarrassment that TWTSNBN created was the reason Fearless was quickly shuffled aside.
I cannot find anything in On Basilisk Station to indicate that Fearless was headed for the breakers. Obviously that would have been the eventual fate due to technology changes in the war. But chapter 32 states the following:
All the time the repair ships had labored upon her battered command, Honor had made herself believe Fearless might be returned to service, but the yard techs' survey had killed that hope.
Fearless was too old. She was too small, and she'd taken too much. Given too much. Repair would require virtual rebuilding and cost as much as a newer, bigger ship, and so the decision had been made. Within the week, she would be towed out of her slip once more and delivered to the breakers at one of the orbital recovery stations, where she would be stripped, cut into jagged chunks of alloy by workers who could never truly understand all she had been and meant and done, and melted down for reclamation.
She deserved better, Honor thought, blinking on her tears once more, but at least she'd ended as a warrior. Ended in combat and then brought her surviving people home, not died in her sleep after decades in mothballs. And even when she was gone, something of her would remain, for HMS Fearless had been added to the RMN's List of Honor, the list of names kept perpetually in commission by new construction to preserve the battle honors they had earned.