“I hadn’t thought about the shuttles, Fritz,” McKeon admitted, and pursed his lips with a faraway look.

“You’re right about the Longstops,” he went on. “They’re way too slow to be used as anything we’d consider a true assault transport, but they are configured to carry all of their embarked troops’ equipment as well as just the personnel. If we dump all the other hardware out of their vehicle holds, we could probably pack three or four dozen shuttles and pinnaces into each of them. For that matter, they’ve probably got around that many of their own already stowed in their boat bays, and if we’ve got ’em, we could even park a lot of them on the hull exteriors. Remember that Peeps go in for a lot more small craft docking ports than we do.”

“You’re thinking about putting people aboard them instead of the transports?” Ramirez asked.

“No, I was thinking more of connecting all of them to the ships’ internal environmental systems as sort of secondary plants, or maybe booster stages.”

“But even without that, Fritz’s numbers would get us up to over two hundred and eighty-five thousand,” Honor said, looking up from where she’d been scribbling numbers on an old-fashioned scratchpad.

“It would,” Cynthia Gonsalves agreed. “But I don’t like it. Even assuming Alistair’s notion about using the shuttles and pinnaces works, it’ll be a fragile, jury-rigged piece of work. And if we go with no safety margin, we create a situation in which if any part of the environmental plant does go down, people die.” She sounded troubled, and Honor opened her mouth to reply, but Jesus Ramirez spoke up before she could.

“You’re right,” he agreed soberly. “On the other hand, if the plant holds, we get them all out. And if we don’t get them out somehow, they die eventually anyway. Unless anyone in this room thinks we can hold this planet indefinitely against StateSec… or maybe even the regular Peep Navy, if we prove too tough for the Black Legs to handle on their own.”

“Of course we can’t,” Gonsalves acknowledged. “And I know it. I just hate stressing the plants to the max with no reserve at all.”

“I agree,” Gaston Simmons said. “But to be honest, I’m more worried about the hundred thousand plus we still won’t be able to cram aboard them.” Eyes turned to him from all around the table, and he shrugged. “I think Dame Honor is right to expect that we can take all of the ships we know Shilo is sending this way. We have to figure we can, at any rate, or else we might as well go ahead and give up right now. But even assuming we pack every soul we possibly can aboard those ships, what do we do with the people we can’t stuff on board? Leave them behind?”

“No,” Honor said so flatly that every eye snapped to her. “We’re not abandoning a single person who’s told us he or she wants off this rock.”