Fewer than fifty interstellar warships, most of them outdated vessels that had long since been withdrawn from the front-line fleet. They were also short on large capital ships capable of standing their ground. More importantly, nearly all of them were battered remnants that had fled from the New Asia front all the way to Earth. Never mind the crews' morale—the ships themselves were nowhere near fully repaired. Just how much fighting power they had left was anyone's guess.
Next came twenty intra-system gunboats. They had decent firepower, but were all thin-skinned, heavily armed vessels with poor mobility. Without the protection of planetary bases, they could even become prey for assault ships.
The only ship posing even a little threat was the Cook. But the Imperial Army had never considered a looted, greenskin-style fire-spitting ship to be a dreadnought.
Outside extreme combat conditions, greenskin warships like the looters' were never a match for Imperial warships of the same class.
These shrimp and crabs were all the mobile forces available to defend the Solar System—the entire strength of the so-called third-greatest military power in the galaxy, the Blue Star Commonwealth.
It sounded less merely shabby than downright tragic.
If they had met in the vastness of space, this handful of battered survivors wouldn't have lasted five minutes against Lieutenant General Maimidal's vanguard fleet.
Of course, it would be another matter if they dug in behind the fortresses and bases of the Earth-Moon system. The two fortresses in Earth orbit weren't particularly large and had neither shipyards nor barracks capable of housing large assault forces. But they were equipped with positron fortress cannons, and their orbits allowed them to form a mutually supporting position with the lunar base.
By the standards of interstellar warfare, that could at least be called a defensive line.