The Manties, however, could get there more quickly. While their Sixth Fleet had been busy taking Trevor's Star, other Allied task forces had taken advantage of the People's Navy's distraction and snapped up the forward bases of Treadway, Solway, and Mathias. They'd captured the naval facilities in Treadway virtually intact, which was bad enough, but they'd also broken through the arc of bases which had guarded Barnett's southeastern flank... and that didn't even consider what the loss of Trevor's Star implied. With the capture of that system, the Royal Manticoran Navy had attained control of every terminus of the Manticore Wormhole Junction, and that meant convoys—and task forces—could move directly from the Manticore Binary System to Trevor's Star and come down on Barnett from the north.

For all practical purposes, then, Barnett was doomed, yet the Manties had taken their own pounding to capture Trevor's Star. They'd need at least a little time to reorganize and catch their breath, and once they were ready to move again, Barnett was almost certain to attract their immediate attention away from the Republic's core and back out towards the frontier. That made holding the system as long as possible, even if only as a diversionary measure, critically important, which, in turn, required the services of a competent system CO.

"From the way you've been talking, I assume you don't intend for him to ride the base down in flames, though," Ransom observed after a moment, and Pierre nodded. "In that case, I think I should take a little trip down to Barnett to form a personal impression of him," she said. "After all, Public Information's going to have to deal with whatever finally happens there, and if he looks too politically unreliable, we might want to leave him there... and write a truly epic piece about his gallant but doomed battle to fend off the attacking Manticoran hordes. Sort of a Theisman's Last Stand."