“You may be right, Ham,” William said, “but there’s only so much blood in the turnip. Whatever we’d like, we simply don’t have the ships to send you right now. We’re trying, but we’re tapped out.”

“But—” White Haven began, only to stop as Caparelli raised a hand.

“I know what you’re going to say, My Lord, but Lord Alexander is right. We simply don’t have them. Or, rather, we have too many other commitments and we ran our maintenance cycles too far into the red in the push to get as deep into Peep territory as we are now.”

“I see.” White Haven sat back, drumming his fingers on the desk in narrow-eyed thought. As a fleet commander, he lacked access to the comprehensive, Navy-wide kind of data Caparelli saw regularly, but the availability numbers must be even worse than he’d thought.

“How bad is it?” he asked after a moment.

“Not good,” Caparelli admitted. “As the officer who took Trevor’s Star, you must have been aware of how we were deferring regular overhauls on the ships under your command to let you maintain the numbers to capture the system.”

He paused, and White Haven nodded. Almost twenty percent of the ships he’d taken into the final engagement had been long overdue for regular maintenance refits… and it had shown in their readiness states.

“It hasn’t gotten any better,” the First Space Lord told him. “In fact, for your private information, we’ve had no choice but to pull in just over a quarter of our total ships of the wall.”

“A quarter?” Despite himself, White Haven’s surprise showed, and Caparelli nodded grimly. That was seventy-five percent higher than the fifteen percent of Fleet strength which was supposed to be down for refit at any given time.

“A quarter,” Caparelli confirmed. “And if we could, I’d have made it thirty percent. We worked the Fleet too hard to get to where we are now, My Lord. We’ve got to take the battle fleet in hand—and not just for routine repairs, either. We’ve been refitting the new systems and weapons and compensators on an ad hoc basis since the war started, but over half our wall of battle units are at least two years behind the technology curve. That’s seriously hurting our ability to make full use of the new hardware, especially the compensators, since our squadrons are no longer homogenous. It doesn’t do us a lot of good to have three ships in a squadron capable of accelerating at five hundred and eighty gravities if the other five can only pull five-ten! We’ve got to get all the current upgrades into a higher percentage of the total wall.”

“Um.” White Haven played with his empty wineglass while his mind raced. The numbers were worse than he’d feared, yet he understood Caparelli’s logic. And the First Space Lord was right. But he was also wrong. Or, rather, he was running dangerously low on “right” options.

“We’re building up our fleet strength as quickly as we can, Ham,” William told him, then grimaced. “Of course, that’s not as quickly as I’d like. We’re beginning to stress the economy pretty hard. I’ve even got permanent secretaries and undersecretaries in my department talking about a progressive income tax.”