"Unfortunately, we're more and more badly pressed for experienced officers. Ragnarok—" his mouth twisted as if the word tasted physically sour "—is sucking off over half our total combat capability for offensive operations. Most of the rest is committed to trying to stop—or slow down, at least—the Melconian advance in this sector and over in the Palmer and Long Stop Sectors. It ... isn't going well."

Maneka said nothing. It was a statement, not a question, and she hadn't needed him to tell her, anyway. After all, she'd been at Chartres.

"No, Captain," Sedgewood said, turning back to face her fully. "Not well at all. What I'm about to tell you is classified Top-Secret: Violet-Alpha. It is not to be discussed outside this office with anyone not expressly cleared for the information. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir," she said more crisply, sitting very straight in the comfortable chair while a vibrating butterfly hovered somewhere in her middle.

"Good," Sedgewood said, then inhaled deeply. "Captain," he said in an iron-ribbed voice, "we're losing."

Maneka sat very, very still. It wasn't a surprise. Not really. Military censorship was one thing, but there was no way to hide the magnitude of the tsunami sweeping across human-occupied space. Not when entire worlds, whole solar systems, blazed like funeral pyres against the endless depths of space.

She'd realized long ago, even before the holocaust on Chartres, that the only hope either side still retained for victory was that it could complete the utter destruction of its enemies while some pathetic handful of its own planets still survived. But no one had ever told her just how large the Melconian Empire really was. She didn't know if anyone even truly knew. She'd suspected—feared—that it was larger than the most pessimistic estimates she'd ever heard, yet this was the first time any of her superiors, far less one as senior as Sedgewood, had ever officially suggested to her that the Concordiat was losing.