Echoes Of Honor hh-8

by David Weber

  The Graysons hadn’t bothered with formal slips, space docks, or any of dozens of other things Manticoran shipbuilders took for granted. They just floated the building materials out to the appropriate spot, which in this case was in easy commuting range of one of their huge asteroid mining central processing nodes. Then they built the minimal amount of scaffolding, to hold things together and give their workers something to anchor themselves to, and simply started putting the parts together. It was almost like something from back in the earliest days of the Diaspora, when the colony ships were built in Old Earth or Mars orbit, but it certainly worked.

  There were drawbacks, of course. The Graysons had saved an enormous amount on front-end investment, but their efficiency on a man-hour basis was only about eighty percent that of the Star Kingdom’s. That might not seem like a very big margin, but considering the billions upon billions of dollars of military construction involved, even small relative amounts added up into enormous totals. And their dispersed capacity was also far more vulnerable to the possibility of a quick Peep pounce on the system. The massive space stations of the Royal Manticoran Navy were at the heart of the Manticore Binary System’s fortifications and orbital defenses, with enormous amounts of firepower and—especially—anti-missile capability to protect them. The Blackbird Yard depended entirely upon the protection of the star system’s mobile forces, and the incomplete hulls would be hideously vulnerable to anyone who got into range to launch a missile spread in their direction. On the other hand, the Graysons and their allies had thus far successfully kept any Peeps from getting close enough to damage their yards, and the people of Yeltsin’s Star were willing to throw an incredible number of workers at the project, which more than compensated for their lower per-man-hour productivity.

  "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 Haven. "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."

  "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."<
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  "Except, perhaps, the Manticoran builders who aren’t building the ships," Alexander observed in slightly frosty tones.

  "My Lord, if you could find the free civilian building slips back home, then you might have a point," Matthews said without apology.

  "He’s got you there, Willie," White Haven observed with a smile. "Besides, isn’t it still Her Majesty’s Government’s policy to help ‘grow’ Grayson industrial capacity?"

  "Yes. Yes, it is," Alexander said after a moment. "If I sounded as if I meant otherwise, I apologize, High Admiral. You simply surprised me."

  "We know how much we owe the Star Kingdom, Lord Alexander," Matthews said seriously, "and we have no desire whatsoever to gouge you or suck your financial blood. But our economic starting point was so far behind yours that it provides us with opportunities we’d be fools not to exploit. And for the foreseeable future, it works in both of our favors. The volume of our interstellar trade has risen by several thousand percent in less than a decade, which has produced a boom economy for us despite the cost of the war effort. At the same time, and even allowing for all the loans and trade incentives your government extended to us at the time of the Alliance, you’re actually saving money by buying ships and components from us. And speaking strictly for the Grayson Navy," the high admiral’s grin bared even white teeth, "I’d like to think that our increased presence adds a little something to the military security of both our nations."

  "I’d say there’s not much doubt of that, at any rate," White Haven observed, and both Alexander and Caparelli nodded in grave agreement.

  And, the Earl thought, it doesn’t even mention things—like the new inertial compensators and the fission piles for the new LACs—which we would never have had without the Graysons. Or the way their habit of charging ahead with things like their own Medusas keep pushing us a little harder than we’d push ourselves. No, he folded his hands behind him and gazed at the enormous superdreadnought, now less than ten kilometers away, it doesn’t matter how much we’ve invested in Yeltsin’s Star. Whatever the final total, we’ve already gotten one hell of a lot more than our money’s worth back on it!

  * * *

  William Alexander had seen entirely too many formal dinners in his life. Unlike his older brother, he actually enjoyed social events, but formal dinners like this one were too much a part of his everyday political life even for him. Most of the time they were just business, about as exciting and enjoyable as a sprained ankle.

  But this one was different. It was the first Grayson state dinner he had ever attended, and he was one of the honored guests rather than one of the anxious hosts. That would have been an enormous relief all by itself, but the Graysons’ welcome was also genuine and heartfelt. And the dinner gave him a chance to sit here and think about all he’d seen and discovered over the last two days. There was more than enough new information to make his head spin, but he was devoutly grateful that he’d come, and not just to serve as the Prime Minister’s personal spokesman when it came to explaining the delay in building up Eighth Fleet. No, he’d learned things from this trip that he could never have learned sitting home on Manticore, and that would have been ample justification for the journey all by itself.

  It was odd, he reflected, how many of the Star Kingdom’s leaders—himself included, at times—tended to think of Grayson as an immature society still suffering from the barbarism of youth. His tour of the Blackbird Yard had begun undermining that perception in his own mind, but that had been only the start. The whirlwind tour of half a dozen Grayson ships High Admiral Matthews had arranged for Caparelli and himself, the tour of the brand new schools upon which Katherine Mayhew had conducted him, and his intensive conferences with Lord Prestwick and the rest of the Protector’s Council had hammered home the fact that whatever else these people were, they were neither crude nor unsophisticated. And here in the planetary capital of Austin, with its ancient stonework and narrow streets, the illusion of a "young" society was particularly hard to sustain.

  Unlike many colony worlds, the Star Kingdom had never experienced a neo-barbarian period. Its colonists had picked up exactly where they’d left off, as members of a technic society. Indeed, thanks to the farsighted investments of Roger Winton and the original leaders of the Manticoran expedition who’d set up the Manticore Colony Trust back on Old Earth, they’d actually found instructors waiting for them to bring them up to speed on all the advances humanity had made during the six hundred years of their cryogenic voyage. Not even the Plague of 1454 had seriously shaken their grip on technology—or their fundamental confidence that they were in control of their own destinies.

  But Grayson had experienced neo-barbarianism. It had been smashed back to its bedrock and begun all over again, and that experience had left its people a legacy of awareness. Unlike their Manticoran allies, the Graysons’ ancestors had been forced to confront and resolve the fundamental clash between what they had thought was true and what actually was true, and in the process they had developed a mindset in which the question genuinely was the answer. And that, Alexander told himself, was scarcely the mark of "youthful barbarism." The Grayson answers to the questions of how to build a society had been different from those of the Star Kingdom, yet unlike Manticorans, the Graysons, by and large, were willing to go on asking and examining, and Alexander found that a humbling thought. Manticorans seldom really questioned where they were going as a culture, or why. They might argue about their course—as, for example, in the endless, bitter ideological disputes between his own Centrists and Countess New Kiev’s Liberals—but that was because both sides were already confident they knew the answers... and each was convinced the other didn’t. There was a certain smugness (and shallowness) about that narrowly focused certainty and dismissal of any opposing viewpoint, and for all the caricatures some Manticorans drew of Graysons, few of Benjamin Mayhew’s subjects could ever be called "smug."

  That was even more surprising to Alexander when he reflected that the human civilization on this planet was twice as old as that of the Star Kingdom, and that age showed in the sense of antiquity which clung to the older portions of Benjamin’s capital. The narrow streets of the Old Quarter, built to accommodate animal-drawn carts and wagons, and the half-ruinous walls of fortifications built to resist black powder and battering rams still stood in mute testimony to the battle this planet had fought to claw its way back from the brink of extinction to where it now stood, and it had waged that epic struggle all alone. No one had even known its people were here to help—assuming anyone could have been bothered to help them anyway. No doubt that was largely what produced that impression of towering conservatism on casual observers who only skimmed the surface. This planet had found its own answers, developed its own highly distinctive identity without interacting with the interstellar template of the rest of humanity... and in a way that no one from the Star Kingdom would ever understand without coming here and seeing it, it was Grayson which was the elder partner in the Alliance.

  He sat back in his chair and sipped iced tea while he looked around the huge formal setting of the Old Palace’s Great Hall. Iced tea was uncommon in the Star Kingdom, where the beverage was usually served hot, but it was a Grayson staple, and he found the flavor added by the sugar and twist of lemon intriguing. It had serious potential as a summer drink back home, he decided, and made a mental note to introduce it at his next political dinner.

  But the note was an absent one, and he felt the antiquity of Grayson yet again as he let his eyes wander up the banners hanging from the ceiling. The Great Hall lay at the very heart of the Old Palace, a sprawling stone structure dating from just after the Civil War, built for a warrior king named Benjamin IV. The Civil War had been fought with the weapons of an industrial age, however crude and primitive the tanks and napalm and first-generation nukes of the time might seem by modern standards, but the Old Palace had followed the architectural traditions of an earlier age. In no small part, Alexander suspected, that had stemmed from Ben
jamin the Great’s determination to drive home the lesson that the Sword now ruled—and no longer as first among equals. Like his new Constitution, his palace had been intended to make the Sword’s primacy crystal clear, and so he had built a huge, brooding pile of stone whose grim face reflected the iron power of his rule and whose sheer size overwhelmed anything a "mere" steadholder might call home.

  He’d overdone it just a bit, Alexander mused. In fairness, expecting a man who had already demonstrated his genius as a warrior, a strategist, a politician, a theologian, and a law-giver to also be a genius in matters architectural would probably have been a bit much, but this hulking stone maze must have been an eye-catching archaism even when it was brand new. And that had been six hundred years ago.

  Is it possible Benjamin and Gustav Anderman were both just a little confused about which age they really lived in? he wondered. After all, Anderman thought he was what’s-his-name—Frederick the Great, reincarnated—didn’t he? I wonder who Benjamin thought he was?

  But whoever or whenever Benjamin had thought he was, or the fact that his palace had been modernized several times in the last six centuries—and despite the fact that the Mayhew family had moved delightedly to the much younger Protector’s Palace next door sixty years ago—the Old Palace was still older than the entire Star Kingdom of Manticore... and its harsh fortress skeleton still showed unyieldingly. The banquet hall’s roof towered three stories above the marble-flagged floor, with square-cut rafters a meter on a side and blackened with time. Some of the banners which hung from those rafters were all but impossible to identify, their bright embroidery smoothed away and obliterated by time, but he knew the one which hung directly over Benjamin IX’s high seat. Its device was hard to make out, yet it hardly mattered. Benjamin the Great had personally ordered the standard of the vanished Steading of Bancroft hung over his chair here in the Great Hall, and there the trophy had stayed for six hundred T-years.