She shrugged, and Alistair McKeon nodded. He looked like a man sucking sour persimmons, but he wasn’t alone in that. No one at the conference table looked particularly cheerful… except, perhaps, Honor.

I really do feel cheerful, too, she thought with some surprise. Because I’m as confident as I try to pretend? Or is it because I’m just grateful to have the other shoe drop at last?

Of course, she reminded herself, it wasn’t really “the” other shoe. It was simply the first shoe—or the third, if she wanted to count Krashnark and Bacchante as the first two—and there were likely to be others before this was all over.

“On a brighter note,” she went on, “look at all the personnel lift we get our hands on if we manage to pull this off.” She nodded at the data on the five Longstop-class transports the warships would be escorting. “They’re providing enough lift for a full seventy thousand slave laborers, assuming Tresca could find that many in so short a time, plus another forty-one thousand technicians and supervisory personnel and twenty-four thousand SS ground troops—and that doesn’t even count the additional eight thousand SS support personnel attached to the intervention battalions. That’s over a hundred and forty thousand total, and according to the readouts, these ships are actually designed to provide life support for forty thousand people each, exclusive of their own crews, so StateSec is planning on running them light.”

“Was there anything in the message about why they’re running so light?” Benson asked.

“No,” Honor replied. “My best guess is that they expect to pick up some more warm bodies further down the line to Seabring. But what matters most to us right now is that we can grab off the personnel lift for two hundred thousand of our people aboard the transports alone. Then each of the battlecruisers has a normal complement of twenty-two hundred, so that’s another forty-four hundred, plus a thousand each in the heavy cruisers—counting Krashnark and the three we know are coming, that’s another four thousand. So we’re looking at enough life support for—what? Two hundred and eight thousand of our people?”

“Which still leaves us a hundred and eighty-six thousand short of the numbers we need,” McKeon pointed out in the tones of a man who hated being the voice of cold reason.

“Looking at the numbers from The Book, you’re right, Sir,” Fritz Montoya said. Honor had called the doctor in for the meeting expressly to address the life support question, and now he turned to look at all of them. “But the transports were designed around a lot of reserve environmental capacity. We could increase a Longstop’s load from forty thousand to about fifty without stretching its life support dangerously. In a pinch, I’d be willing to call it fifty-six or maybe even fifty-seven. I wouldn’t want to go much over that unless it was for a very short hop, but the enviro plants should carry the atmospheric load for that many as far as we need. The worst problem will be physical overcrowding, because that many people need a lot of cubage, and the ships’ other waste processing systems will be heavily strained. But these are military transports. They’re also designed to carry heavy combat equipment, and we could probably beef up the reclamation equipment by cannibalizing all the shuttles and pinnaces sitting here on Styx and adding their enviro plants as strap-on backups in their cargo spaces. It wouldn’t be pretty or elegant, but there ought to be enough air to go around when we finish.”