But all his listeners really needed to know was that he was talking about a period seventy or so T-days in the future.

"How long for them to work up to combat readiness?" Grantville hadn't been the brother of one of the Royal Navy's more senior officers for so long without learning a few hard-won realities along the way.

"That's more debatable," Caparelli acknowledged. "The Andies and Graysons should have finished working up by the time they get here, so we don't need to worry about that. And most of the new construction's going to be out of the yards by the end of January, so they'll be at least a couple of weeks into their training cycles by the time the Andies and Graysons show up. But I'd be lying if I didn't say that it's going to take longer for us to get our own people up to speed than anyone is going to like. We took a really heavy hit when the Havenites took out Home Fleet and Third Fleet. We already had cadres assigned to almost all of the new construction, and we had pretty close to complete crews assigned to the sixty or seventy ships closest to completion. All of those are out of the yard by now, and beginning to work up in Trevor's Star. Unfortunately, an awful lot of them are having the same 'teething problems' we've been seeing in the lighter units. We got them through the construction process in record time, but not without hitting more glitches than we'd like. Still, none of the problems we've identified so far are really critical, and I expect to have most of them ready for service within another thirty T-days. Call it the middle of January.

"After that, things get more difficult. We were expecting to find a lot of the personnel we're going to need from the old-style wallers assigned to Home Fleet. Obviously, that's not going to happen now."

His jaw tightened briefly and involuntarily as he remembered the carnage of the Battle of Manticore. Then his nostrils flared briefly, and he continued.

"As I say, that's not going to happen, but despite that, Lucian and BuPers have managed to come up with most of the warm bodies we need. A lot of them are short on training and experience, of course, and that hits us hardest when it comes to officers and senior enlisted. We're looking at accelerating a lot of noncoms' promotions to fill the gaps there, and we're planning on cutting the current class at the Academy six months short and sending the midshipmen straight off to the fleet, without the traditional snotty cruise. We're probably looking at accelerating the next class the same way, and we've been forced to pull back on our LAC program simply because we need the officers we would have been sending off to command LACs. That's also why we're setting up quickie OCS courses—expanding on the ones we've always had outside the Academy for 'mustangs.' We expect a substantial return on that, as well, although it's going to cost us more of those senior enlisted when we 'suggest' that they become officers, instead. A couple of years down the road, we should be pretty much past this particular bottleneck. For that matter, once we've had a chance to run them through the appropriate remedial education, I imagine we'll be able to find a lot of enlisted and officers coming out of the Talbott Quadrant. That's going to take a while, though, and in the meantime, I have no doubt that any skipper unfortunate enough to go in for extensive yard work or overhaul is going to find his command structure picked clean by Lucian's vultures.

"By robbing Peter and Paul, though, Lucian's actually managing to fill most of the slots aboard most of the new ships as they come out of the yards. Frankly, I don't have any idea how he's doing it, and I'm afraid to ask. I also don't know how long he's going to be able to go on doing it, although the first flight of mass recalls of reservists from the merchant marine should be offering us at least some relief in the next couple of months. Even that has its downside, though. It's going to take time to run them through the necessary refresher courses, especially to update them on the new hardware. And just as bad, maybe, the merchant fleet needs them, too, and we need the merchant fleet to maintain our revenue flows."

Grantville nodded, and Caparelli shrugged.

"The bottom line is that with the lower manpower requirements of the new designs, there's no reason we shouldn't be able to support the manning requirements for the fleet we're talking about. Unfortunately, that's what we were doing when Tourville came along and destroyed something like half the entire Navy. It's going to take us time to recruit and recover from the huge hole that made, so I don't think we're going to be manning any more enormous expansion waves any time soon. In the shorter run, it means we've got the bodies we need—barely—but working up periods are simply going to have to be expanded. The prewar rule of thumb was that it took three to four months for a brand new waller's crew to shake down to a satisfactory, combat-ready level. During the First Havenite War, with experienced officers who'd been there and done that, we got it down to somewhere around two and half months. But with the situation we're in now, frankly, I'll be surprised if we can do it in less than four, and I won't be surprised if it takes as much as five months, given the fact that we're going to be correcting so many minor construction faults along the way. So for the immediate future, you'd better count on basically what Honor has now—here in Home Fleet and working up in Trevor's Star—plus, say, another sixty Apollo-capable podnoughts still in the yards. And the Andies' new construction and refits, of course . . . except for the fact that we don't know if Gustav will be willing to back us if we go up against the League."

"Is that going to be enough to stop whatever the Sollies can do to us during that same time period, Hamish?"

"Probably . . . if we could aim it all at them," Grantville's brother replied. He glanced at Caparelli, one eyebrow raised, and the First Space Lord nodded in agreement with his assessment.

"To be brutally honest," White Haven continued, "and at the risk of sounding a little complacent, the main problem we're probably going to face in any early engagements against the Sollies is going to be our ammunition supply. But for at least five or six months, assuming either that we fight close to home and our industrial base or that we have a decent logistics train to keep us supplied with missiles, we should be able to hold anything they can throw at us with that many podnoughts, even without the Andies. Unfortunately, we've still got that minor problem of the war with Haven to worry about."

"Maybe yes, and maybe no," Grantville said grimly, and swiveled his eyes to Langtry. "Her Majesty and I already discussed this briefly a couple of days ago, Tony," he said, "but we were only brainstorming at the time. Now it looks like we may have to put our brainstorm into practice."

"Why does that fill me with a sudden feeling of dread?" Langtry murmured.

"Experience, probably," Grantville replied with a brief, tight smile. The smile vanished as quickly as it had come, and the Prime Minister leaned intently towards the Foreign Minister.

"Given the strength estimate Sir Thomas has just presented, we probably have the capacity to punch out the Haven System itself," he said flatly. "To do to them what they tried to do to us. But we've got Apollo, and they don't, which means we don't have to enter their effective range at all. And that we could go right on doing it to every one of their systems with a single naval shipyard. We could pound every major developed system of the Republic back to the Stone Age."

It was very quiet around the conference table once more, and this time the quiet was tense, almost brittle.

"To be perfectly honest," Grantville continued, "that's precisely what I'd like to do, and I doubt I'm exactly alone in that sentiment. There's probably not a single family here in the home system who didn't lose someone in the Battle of Manticore, and that doesn't even consider all the deaths that came before that. So, yes, there's a part of me that would love to hammer the Peeps into rubble.