It all happened just as Max had predicted. The news went public and every single Alliance data stream went insane with people either looking to be somewhere safe, hire security, buy weapons, or place the blame on someone else for the predicament that the Alliance as a whole was in.
They had seen the release of the numbers of the Cathedral Ships fleet, and it was enough to attack dozens or even a hundred fully defended star systems at a time. If they attacked the weakly defended planets of the Alliance, the resistance wouldn't even last long enough to hold out until reinforcements could get there without using a Portal.
It was no secret that the government would be slow to act, paralyzed by bureaucracy and layers of agreements on the movement of troops, so they didn't expect the cavalry to arrive in anything less than a whole day, and one after another, the star systems were realizing that they weren't going to be able to hold out that long.