Echoes Of Honor

"So five-fifty plus three-twenty-five, then?" Honor asked, and he nodded. "All right, call it eight hundred and seventy-five, so the complements come down to thirteen hundred per ship."

"Thirteen hundred and twenty-five by my math," McKeon told her with a slow grin. "But, then, who's counting?"

"I am," she said, "and it's not polite to call attention to the problems I have with math."

"I didn't; you did," he said, and she chuckled. Her other officers looked puzzled, sensing a bit of byplay they hadn't known her long enough to understand, but she felt their moods lighten anyway.

"Yes, I suppose I did," she admitted after a moment, "but using your numbers, then, two Warlords would require a total crew strength of twenty-six hundred and fifty."

"I believe they would," McKeon agreed with a twinkle. She smiled back, then returned her attention to Caslet

"And how far could we cut the crews for the Mars-class ships, Warner?"

"About the same ratio, Ma'am. Call it roughly forty percent."

"So that drops them to around six hundred each," she murmured, scribbling on her pad again. "Which makes twenty-four hundred for the four of them. Twenty-four plus twenty-six..." She jotted a total and cocked her head to consider it. "Excluding Bacchante and this Seahorse, I make it five thousand and fifty warm bodies," she said. "Adding the two light cruisers at just under five hundred each, that brings the total to right on six thousand. Does that sound fair?"

"I don't like cutting their companies by that much," McKeon said with a frown, "but Warner's probably right that we could get by with that sort of stretch if we absolutely had to. Especially if we can manage to engage with only one broadside per ship." He rubbed his jaw, then shrugged. "All right, six thousand sounds reasonable... under the circumstances."

Ramirez and Benson nodded sharply, followed a little more slowly by Gonsalves and Simmons. Gonsalves looked less happy than any of the others about it, but her nod was firm.

"Well, we've got roughly five thousand Allied POWs whose training is still reasonably up to snuff, in light of how recently they were dumped here," Honor pointed out, "and we've got another eighteen hundred we've been retraining in Krashnark and Bacchante. By my count, that's sixty-eight hundred... which is eight hundred more than we'd need."

"And what do we do with any other warships they send along?" Benson asked. Everyone turned to look at her, and she gri

"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 perso

"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 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."

"I would very much like to go home," Jesus Ramirez said softly, the ache in his deep, rumbling voice reminding them all that San Martin was the planet of his birth, "but I believe you may have a point, Honor."

"That's probably true enough," McKeon acknowledged, "but it's also going to be true in just about any Allied system by now. At least Trevor's Star is the closest friendly port we know about, which means less time in transit and less opportunity for life support to fail."

"That's certainly a valid point," Gonsalves said. "And look at the compensators and hyper-generators on those transports. They're basically converted longhaul bulk freighters the Peeps have been using to transport work forces or haul peacekeeping troops to domestic hot spots for decades. That's probably why StateSec had them immediately available, but like Alistair said, they're a hell of a lot slower than anything a regular navy would consider using that close to a combat zone. They can't even climb as high as the top of the delta band, so their max apparent velocity isn't going to be any more than a thousand lights or so, and we're an awful long way from friendly territory. Even the voyage to Trevor's Star would take the next best thing to fifty days base time. The dilation effect will shrink that to about forty days subjective, but that's still over a full T-month for something to go wrong with their life support. If we send them still further to the rear—" She shrugged.

"I know." Honor frowned and rubbed her nose harder, then sighed. "I was hoping to send them clear to Manticore, or at least Grayson," she admitted, "but you and Alistair are right, Cynthia. The shorter the flight time the better. But in that case, they're going to have to be very careful how they approach the system perimeter."

"Careful I think we can manage," McKeon assured her. "I know abject, quivering terror tends to make me cautious as hell, anyway."

"All right, then." Honor looked around the table. "In that case, I want you and Fritz to take care of making the most careful estimates we can of our actual life-support capacity on a ship-by-ship basis, Cynthia. Gaston," she looked at Commodore Simmons, "you're in charge of drawing up the evac priority lists. I need three of them immediately: one of the people who should go in the first lift, assuming we use only the Longstops; one of the people best suited to crew any warships we take; and one that lists every soul who wants off this rock but who isn't on the first two. In addition, I want the last one organized to indicate the order in which they'll be moved out as extra lift becomes available. I don't want there to be any room for panic and fighting for places in the evac queue."