“That’s an awfully impressive sight, High Admiral,” Caparelli said. “And I don’t mean just that you’ve gotten the new design into actual series production while we were still arguing about whether or not to build the thing at all! I’m talking about the sheer activity level out there.” He gestured at the view port. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen that many people working on a single ship at once.”

“We almost have to do it that way, Sir Thomas,” Matthews replied. “We don’t have all the mechanical support you have back in the Star Kingdom, but we do have lots of trained deep space construction crews. In fact, the old-fashioned nature of our pre-Alliance industry actually gives us more trained personnel than we might have had otherwise.”

“Oh?” Caparelli turned to raise an eyebrow at White Have. “Lucien Cortez said something like that to me last week, while I was getting ready to come out here, but I didn’t have time to ask him what he meant,” the First Space Lord admitted.

“It’s simple enough, really,” Matthews told him. “Even before the Alliance, we had an enormous commitment to our orbital farms, asteroid extraction industries, and the military presence we needed against those fanatics on Masada. It may not have been all that impressive on the Manticoran scale, but it was certainly more extensive than you’d find in most star systems out this way. But the important point was that we’d put that all together with an industrial base which was maybe twenty percent as efficient as yours. Which meant we needed four or five times the manpower to accomplish the same amount of work. But now we’re almost up to Manticoran standards, and it’s actually easier to train—or retrain—people to use your hardware than it was to teach them to use ours in the first place. So we took all those people who used to do things the old-fashioned way, trained them to do them the new way, gave them the tools they needed to do it with, and then got out of their way.” The High Admiral shrugged. “They took it from there.”

“Somehow I don’t think it was quite that simple, High Admiral,” William Alexander said. “I’ve certainly had enough experience of the sort of financial strain this level of activity—” he waved a hand at the armorplast “—would entail back home. You’ve got—what? Three hundred billion Manticoran dollars worth of warships?—building out there, Sir, and this is only one of your yards.” He shook his head. “I would dearly love to know how you manage that.”

“Actually, we’ve got closer to seven hundred billion dollars worth of tonnage under construction,” Matthews said with quiet pride, “and that doesn’t even count our ongoing investment in upgrading our orbital forts and expanding our yard facilities and other infrastructure. By the time you put it all together, we probably have something well over a couple of trillion of your dollars worth of construction underway right now, and the new budget just authorized expenditures which should increase that by about fifty percent in the next three T-years.”