Honor gazed at him in dismay, and he shrugged.

“It’s not all doom and gloom, Honor,” he told her. “First of all, thank God for Grayson! Not only did they save our asses at Trevor’s Star and help bail you out at Sidemore, but they constitute the only true strategic reserve the Alliance has. Especially now that Erewhon has effectively gone over to the Peeps.” He glowered again. “Erewhon didn’t have the full Ghost Rider tech package, or the beta-squared nodes, or the LAC fission plants, but they had just about everything else… including the newest compensator version and the latest grav-pulse transmitters. When Foraker gets her hands on that and starts reverse-engineering it, we’re going to be in an even worse mess than we are now.

“Maybe even worse than that, though, Pat has been engaged in a massive reevaluation of ONI’s files, cross-indexed with information Greg Paxton has made available, and she’s come up with some possible ballpark figures for what the Peeps may still have in reserve. I’m inclined to think that she’s probably overestimating their capabilities, which would be a natural enough reaction to how badly we were surprised by what they hit us with. On the other hand, I’ve seen her basic analysis, and it certainly doesn’t seem to me that she’s being alarmist in the way she approaches it. So it may be that she’s right. But if she is, then the Peeps have a minimum of another three hundred of the wall currently under construction. A minimum, Honor. That’s at a time when Grayson has just under a hundred SD(P)s, and we’re all the way up to seventy-three. Since we seem to have observed damned close to two hundred of them in action exclusive of the ones they sent to Sidemore, we’re looking at what might conservatively be called an unfavorable balance of forces.”

Honor had felt her face become stiff and drawn as the figures rolled over her. She’d already had first-hand experience of how effectively the Republic was using its new ships and hardware. Now she had a sense for the sheer size and mass of the juggernaut which had been assembled to smash the Alliance.

“We’re not dead yet, Honor,” Hamish told her almost gently, and she shook her head as if she could physically banish her sense of doom.

“What do you mean?” she asked after a moment.

“First of all, what you managed to accomplish at Sidemore seems to have had a profound impact on their thinking. Obviously, they don’t know exactly what happened yet—it’s going to take their commander on the spot a lot longer to get home, since he can’t use the Junction. But they know they got reamed, if only from news reports of what we’ve already announced. Willie and I have discussed it with Elizabeth, and we’re going to go ahead and announce their loss figures officially tomorrow morning, as well. I doubt that we’re going to really astonish anyone, after the rumors have already been flying for so long. But when we confirm that you managed to destroy well over half of their attack force and damage most of the rest of it, I think it will give them even more pause. Not to mention what it’s already done for our own civilian—hell, not just civilian!—for our civilian and military morale. What you pulled off out there is the only really bright spot in this entire disaster.”