“Less than a month until the first shuttle lands,” Herzer noted. “We’ll know soon enough.”

“In the meantime,” Edmund said, “we keep planning for victory and keeping one eye on failure. Which means we have to have the tenth legion. Even that is not enough. Sixty thousand legionnaires, less than half of them fully trained and the majority with no combat experience, against an estimated two hundred thousand Changed.”

“Ten thousand bowmen,” Galbreath reminded him. “Six thousand cavalry. And the dragon corps.”

“Three thousand actually bowmen,” Edmund said, shaking his head.

“And the private regiments,” Galbreath pointed out and then winced.

“Damn the private regiments,” Edmund said, almost shaking in anger. “If we put that money where it should be we wouldn’t be scraping and scrabbling for another legion!”

“Some of them are good,” Herzer said, trying to mollify his boss. Under the constitutional strictures that Edmund himself had supported, the de facto existence of small private armies was fully legal. But it had been a huge political firestorm when it had been suggested that they become associated with the regular army and in the end the compromise had been the worst of all worlds. The regiments were to be supported by the army if called to field duty while the army had little or no control over their training, equipment, doctrine or leadership unless they were on field duty.

The training and equipment of the regiments was highly diverse, from local militias founded around pikes to battalions of heavy horse with everything in between.

“And the dragons were decimated in the Atlantis battles,” Edmund grumped, apparently willing to forget that the private regiments existed for the time. “Less than a hundred of them are left and all but two are wyverns.”