“My God,” Caparelli said quietly. He turned to stare back out the view port for several seconds, then shook his head in turn. “I’m even more impressed than I was a few moments ago, High Admiral. You’re talking a good chunk of the Royal Navy’s construction budget there.”

“I know,” Matthews agreed, “and I’m certainly not going to tell you that it’s easy, but we do have some offsetting advantages. For one thing, your civilian standard of living and the economic and industrial commitment required to sustain it are much higher than ours.” He waved a hand with a crooked smile. “I’m not saying your people are ‘softer,’ or that ours wouldn’t love to have the same standard of living yours do. But the fact is that we never had it before, and we don’t have it now. We’re working on bringing ours up, but our people understand about making sacrifices to defend themselves—we had enough practice against Masada—and we’ve deliberately chosen to expand our military capacity at several times the rate at which we’ve expanded our civilian capacity. Even at the rate of civilian expansion we’ve allowed, our people’s standard of living has gone up by something on the order of thirty percent—that’s a planet-wide average—in just the last six years, so we’re not hearing a lot of complaints.

“In the meantime,” he flashed a smile at Caparelli, “we’re actually showing a profit selling warships and components to the Star Kingdom!”

“You are?” Caparelli blinked, then looked sharply at Alexander, who shrugged.

“I haven’t looked at the figures lately, Sir Thomas. I do know that whether Grayson is showing a profit or not, we’re saving something like fifteen percent on the hardware we buy from them.”

“I’m sure you are, Lord Alexander,” Matthews said. “But when you crank our lower wages into the equation, our production costs are also much lower than yours. In fact, one of the reasons Lady Harrington was able to interest your Hauptman Cartel in investing in Blackbird was to get us more deeply involved in civilian construction, as well.” He nodded at the view port again. “You can’t see it from here, but over on the other side of the yard, we’re building half a dozen Argonaut-class freighters for Hauptman. We happen to be building them at cost—as the down payment on a process which will end up allowing Grayson and Sky Domes to buy out Hauptman’s share of the yard—but if it works out half as well as we expect it to, we should see orders start to come in from the other cartels over the next T-year or two.”

“You’re building all this and civilian ships too?” Caparelli demanded.

“Why not?” Matthews shrugged. “We’re close to the limit of what the government can afford on our current warship programs, but thanks to Hauptman’s initial investment—and Lady Harrington’s, of course—our total building capacity is considerably higher than that. So we divert some of our labor force to civilian construction and build the ships for about sixty percent of what it would cost to build them in the Star Kingdom—assuming that any of your major builders could find the free yard capacity for them—and then Hauptman gets brand new freighters from us for eighty percent of what they would have paid a Manticoran builder. The cartel’s actual out-of-pocket cost is only forty percent—the other forty percent goes towards retiring their investment in the yard—but that’s enough to cover Blackbird’s actual expenses, since the Sword has exempted the transaction from taxes in order to accelerate the buy-out. Meanwhile, the workers’ wages go into the system economy, and everyone’s happy.”