“And what do we do with any other warships they send along?” Benson asked. Everyone turned to look at her, and she grinned. “I mean, while we’re sitting here being so confident, let’s assume they increase the escort and we get all of it intact. If we manage to pull that off, I’d purely hate not making maximum use of everything we can grab.”

“I doubt we could come up with the people to fight more ships effectively,” Simmons put in. “Oh, give us another three or four months, and we could probably change that. Most of our people were trained military personnel before they were sent here, so we know they could handle the load. Assuming we had time to bring them up to speed on modern hardware and put them all through refresher training… which we don’t. For that matter, even a fair percentage of those Allied POWs you mentioned are going to need at least a quick refresher before we commit them to action, Dame Honor.”

“True,” Honor agreed. “But we probably can come up with enough people to run the power plants and actually man the cons on anything else we can grab—we wouldn’t need more than forty or fifty people per ship for that. And that would let us pack still more evacuees into their crew quarters.”

“And don’t forget that warships always have more reserve life support than anything else in space, even military transports,” Montoya pointed out. “The RMN’s designers always assume warships are going to take damage, for example, so they build as much redundancy as they can into the core survival systems. We could increase nominal crew sizes by at least fifty percent and still have some reserve. In fact, we’d probably run out of places to put people well before we maxed out their enviro.”

“So that would let us get at least another four or five thousand out,” Ramirez mused. He gazed into the distance for several seconds, the nodded. “I like it,” he said crisply.

“I wouldn’t go quite that far in my own case,” Benson said with a small smile. “But I don’t think I see any alternative I’d like better—or as well, for that matter. But assuming this all works, where do we send the transports once we capture them?”

“Trevor’s Star,” McKeon suggested. “We know our people aren’t going to take any chances with that system’s security—not after how much it cost us to capture it in the first place—so we can be fairly confident it’s still in friendly hands. Or, at least, if things have gotten so bad that it isn’t, we might as well stay here in the first place, because the Alliance is screwed.”

“I don’t know, Alistair.” Honor leaned back and rubbed the tip of her nose. “I agree with your logic, but don’t forget that we’ll be sending in Peep military transports, possibly with Peep warships as escorts. Trigger fingers are going to be awfully itchy at someplace like Trevor’s Star after what happened at Basilisk.”