And well they should be impressed, White Haven thought, standing behind his brother and listening to Matthews’ description of the enormous activity going on here in Yeltsin’s Star’s Blackbird Yard.

Of course, they haven’t seen the specs for the class yet, so they don’t really know how impressed they ought to be, he reminded himself wryly. I wonder how Caparelli will react when he does find out?

The thought came and went, flickering through his brain almost like an automatic reflex without ever diverting his attention from the scene beyond the view port. He’d been here often over the last several months, yet the sights and energy of the place never failed to fascinate him, for Blackbird Yard was totally unlike the Star Kingdom’s huge space stations.

For all the relative primitivism of its technology, Grayson had maintained a large-scale space presence for more than half a millennium. Not that it had been anything to boast about in the beginning. They’d had the capability—barely—to exile the losing side of their Civil War to the neighboring system of Endicott, but that was a hop of less than four light-years. Even to accomplish that much had required them to reinvent a cruder form of the Pineau cryogenic process and virtually beggar the war-torn planet just to get less than ten thousand “colonists” across the interstellar divide. The strain of it had been almost intolerable for the Civil War’s survivors, and it had probably set Grayson’s efforts to exploit its own star system back by at least fifty years. Yet it had also been the only way to get the defeated Faithful (and their “doomsday bomb”) off the planet, and so Benjamin IV and his government had somehow made it all work.

But that had been six hundred years ago. Since then, and despite ups and downs—and one eighty-year period when the Conclave of Steadholders had been forced to fight bitterly against three Protectors in a row who, with a dogmatism truly worthy of their Neo-Luddite ancestors, had preferred to concentrate on “practical” planet-side solutions to problems and turn their backs on the limitless possibilities of space—the Graysons’ off-planet presence had grown prodigiously. By the time their world joined the Manticoran Alliance, the Grayson deep-space infrastructure, while almost all sublight and vastly more primitive than the Star Kingdom’s, had actually been almost the size of Manticore-A’s, with a far larger work force (almost inevitably, given their manpower-intensive technology base), and they had their own notions about how things should be done.

“Excuse me, High Admiral,” Caparelli asked in a suddenly very intense tone, “but is that—?” He was leaning forward, his nose almost pressed against the armorplast, as he pointed at the all but finished hull, and Matthews nodded.

“She’s our equivalent of your Medusa-class,” he confirmed with the broad smile of a proud father.

“But how the devil did you get the design into production this quickly?” Caparelli demanded.

“Well, some of our Office of Shipbuilding people were in the Star Kingdom working on the new compensator and LAC projects when the Medusa was first contemplated,” Matthews said. “Your BuShips involved a couple of them—including Protector Benjamin’s brother, Lord Mayhew—in the planning process when they started roughing out the power-to-mass numbers for her impellers and compensator, and they just sort of stayed involved. So we had the plans by the same time your people did, and, well—” He shrugged.