Rikolfr handed her a sheet of paper. “It’s too far for traditional scanners, but we’ve been able to send up a science ship to investigate, from a safe distance. The shipyard is there, and the scientists are optimistic. If it’s like the other one—and if we can protect it from the Krell—we could recover hundreds of acclivity rings.”

She nodded, reading the statistics.

“The orbit is decaying rapidly, sir,” Rikolfr noted. “The old shipyard seems to be suffering a severe power failure. Scientists guess the proximity guns will stop firing in a couple of days, right about the time it drops into the atmosphere. The Krell will undoubtedly try to get in and destroy it.”

“Then we’ll have to prevent that,” Judy said. “Anything else I need to know?”

“This many assembly leaders? It smells of an ambush, sir. Be prepared.”

She nodded, put on her political face, and strode into the small room, Rikolfr following. A collection of the most powerful people in the lower caverns waited for her, each of them wearing a military dress uniform and pins indicating their merits.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said. “I’m pleased to see you taking a direct interest in—”

“Dispense with the platitudes, Ironsides,” said Algernon Weight—young Jorgen’s father. The stiff, greying man sat at the head of the conference table, opposite Judy. “You lost more ships tonight.”

“We have successfully scared away a lifebuster, scoring a great victory over—”

“You’re driving the DDF into the ground,” Weight said.

“During your tenure,” Ukrit added, “our reserve of ships has fallen to historic lows. I hear that broken fighters are just sitting in hangars, lacking parts for repair.”

“Your pilot casualty rates are terrible,” Valda Mendez said. She was a petite woman with tan skin. Ironsides had flown with her, once upon a time. “We want to know what your plan is for ending the DDF’s spiral of failure.”

It would help. Judy thought, if you would stop taking our best pilots away. Valda herself seemed completely unashamed of stealing her son from the DDF to keep him out of battle.

But Judy couldn’t say that. She couldn’t explain how desperate the DDF was, now that the better admirals and commanders were dead. She couldn’t explain how she’d foreseen this years ago, and no amount of scraping and scrambling had been able to prevent the descent. She couldn’t explain that her people were overworked, and that their morale was crumbling beneath so many losses and pilot casualties.

She couldn’t say any of that because, although it was true, it was no excuse. Her job was to offer a solution. A miracle.

She held up one of the sheets Rikolfr had given her. “Lanchester’s Law,” she said. “Do you know it?”

“Equal armies of soldiers with equal skill will impose equivalent casualties upon each other,” Weight said. “But the larger the imbalance in troops, the more disproportionate the casualties. Essentially, the more you outnumber your enemy, the less damage you can expect each of their soldiers to impose.”