Something in the girl's face goes stone still at the question. When she speaks again, her tone and cadence is nearly unchanged. Nearly. There's just the barest edge of artifice there, like maybe she's putting effort into being unaffected or unafraid. Or maybe not. Hard to say. Maybe it's just the product of her suspicion solidifying.

"We have two blue-class ships and four iron. Even stripped they would take only a fraction of the people here, but that is irrelevant. They cannot hold against the Confederate and we both know Bal would take them to pieces the moment they left atmosphere."

Her ships in this mess might also betray her. If she slipped free unseen and turned up alive elsewhere, it was a miracle of happenstance with no evidence to prove she'd been on the moon during its last hours at all. Hopefully. But if she was caught fleeing, she would be put up on charges for violating active Bal space. She would lose her standing in the House for it; further, the outer rings might not see the necessity of leaving her people to die, law be damned. A razor thin predicament. Which is worth more: the people here, or her hope to bar Bal, or Inivial, or both from those on countless other moons and planets?