by David Weber
None of which meant they didn’t spend any effort on those sorts of operations, and they’d obviously realized long ago that Manticore was going to constitute their greatest challenge. Under the circumstances, they had to have assigned a substantial chunk of their intelligence efforts to “the Manticore Problem.”
That was why Shell Game, the operation designed to protect Gram’s secrecy, had been stood up over fifteen T-years ago. Gram’s first fruits had been decanted into BuWeaps’ openly maintained R&D programs, like Section Thirteen and Project Python, with carefully worked out and documented pedigrees designed to provide plausible origins for them which had nothing at all to do with top-secret R&D think tanks based on HMSS Weyland. In addition, BuWeaps had its own R&D staff, working independently of Gram, within the sorts of security safeguards anyone would have anticipated. That staff was doing good work, too, without ever realizing that much of its function was to serve as the Office of Naval intelligence’s counterespionage staff’s stalking horse—the “honeypot,” as Roger had called it—designed to attract Peep espionage efforts. Nor was that staff aware that there were Manticoran “spies” seeded throughout its ranks, charged with making certain that every scrap of useful data it might turn up would be channeled to the even larger, carefully concealed R&D staff assigned to Gram. And even if anyone eventually figured out there was a research effort going on aboard Weyland, Gram itself was hidden behind a secondary level of BuWeaps’ official research efforts which had been located on the station precisely to cover Gram and serve as a second level “honeypot” for anyone who got past the first one.
Which doesn’t even consider the fact that Gram is under the command of that well-connected but clearly-something-of-a-dim-bulb, Captain Jonas Adcock, he thought wryly.
The House of Winton wasn’t above using planted stories to help mislead and misdirect the Star Kingdom’s enemies, and Roger’s staff, under Elisa Paderweski’s competent direction, had “leaked” several new stories subtly underscoring the point that King Roger and Queen Consort Angelique were “looking after” Captain Adcock until he was finally ready to be eased out into retirement. It was hard to conceal the kinds of information flow—in and out—a research effort like Gram required, but Shell Game had considered that aspect, as well, and Jonas’ personal relationship with Roger gave him a perfect excuse to “take time off” from the sinecure in the Office of Fleet Logistics which had been created for him aboard Weyland for visits to his sister and his brother-in-law. Visits which just happened to let him deliver personal and highly comprehensive briefings to Roger, the space lords, and the two or three senior officers at BuWeaps who knew about Gram.
“I don’t think our security’s been broken, either, really, Roger,” he said now. “That doesn’t keep me from spending the occasional sleepless night worrying about it, of course. But I think you’re right about how the Peeps would have reacted by now if they knew about it. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t have picked up at least a whiff, though, and simply not realized how far along we actually are.”
“Probably not. But that brings up an interesting question, you know.” Roger gave his brother-in-law a very level look. “We can’t keep you hidden away in Gryphon orbit forever, Jonas. At some point, your research is going to be far enough along that we need to start major development, and there’s no one currently at BuWeaps with the knowledge and the expertise you have. I’m not going to be able to leave you as a mere captain much longer.”
Jonas’ jaw tightened. He started to reply quickly, then made himself stop and draw a deep breath. The worst of it was that he knew Roger was right . . . even though Roger was also wrong. The problem was that it all came down to a judgment call, and someone had to make it. Which, given the fact that Roger Winton was King of Manticore, meant he had to make it.
“I know you don’t want to hear that, and I know you’re not going to want to give up Gram,” Roger continued, “but I don’t think I have a choice. The new fusion bottles, the new shipboard armors, the new LAC notions Sonja’s playing around with, and—especially—the new shipkillers, if we can get them to work, are going to be an even bigger game changer than I ever hoped for when we first established Gram. That’s been your work since well before I ever came along, and I wish with all my heart that the rest of the Star Kingdom could know how very much we all owe to you and your people. But at the moment, it’s all still theoretical, and you know it.”
The King shook his head, waving one hand in a brushing away gesture.
“I know you’ve built small-scale proof of concept test rigs for a lot of it, Jonas, but you’ve been a King’s officer even longer than I have. You know how true that old adage about ‘many a slip betwixt cup and lip’ really is, and the transition from experimental theory into developmental hardware and then into actual, deployable weapons systems—reliable weapons systems, with workable doctrine for their use—has one hell of a lot of possible potholes along the way. Not only that, but if Mjølner works out remotely as well as your current models suggest, every single ship-of-the-wall in the galaxy’s going to turn obsolete overnight. All of them, Jonas . . . including ours. We’re talking about a fundamental shift in the combat paradigm like nothing the human race has seen since the invention of the Warshawski sail itself. We’re not only going to have to develop the weapons, we’re going to have to design entirely new, fundamentally different warships to mount them, and then we’re going to have to build the ships, and we’re going to have to do all of that without letting the Peeps see what’s coming. I’m sorry, but I can’t think of anyone else I’m prepared to trust to see to all of that. You’ve got good deputies aboard Weyland; you’re going to have to turn Gram over to them, because I need you here.”
Jonas wanted—badly—to protest, but Roger’s face told him protests would be useless. He knew that expression. He’d seen it more often than he could remember on the face of the man who’d set out to “build his house of steel” so many years before. And the clincher was that he couldn’t argue with Roger’s logic.
He doubted that even Roger fully grasped everything Gram had accomplished and was still accomplishing. Yet the King had fastened unfailingly on the most critical of all of Gram’s potential products.
Every capital ship in the galaxy was optimized for the brutal savagery of the close-range energy weapon slugging match, because every admiral in the galaxy knew missiles were little more than nuisance weapons, employed against a modern ship-of-the-wall’s missile defenses. Oh, with the emergence of the laser head-armed missile, the threat had begun to shift, over the last dozen years, but a ship-of-the-wall’s armor was so massive, its defenses were so good, and laser heads (even the RMN’s latest version) were so light compared to the throughput of shipboard energy batteries, that naval designers and builders had contented themselves with merely incremental improvements in missile defense. Wallers mounted a few more missile tubes and a lot more counter-missile launchers than they used to, and virtually every modern capital ship had upgraded by now to the longer ranged and more effective laser cluster for point defense. But nothing had changed the view that a solid core of graser-armed superdreadnoughts simply could not be stopped by anything short of a matching force of similarly armed ships.
But Mjølner was something else again: a true long-ranged shipkiller, not a mere “nuisance.” The concept had actually first been suggested by Roger himself almost fifteen T-years ago, even before Section Thirteen had perfected its very first laser head, and on the face of it, it had been an impossible dream. Of course, Jonas had observed that quite a few of Roger Winton’s notions had been “impossible dreams” when he tossed them out and then expected his loyal minions to make them work anyway.
The problems with Mjølner had been just a bit more . . . profound than usual, however, and lay primarily in the fundamental difference between starships’, or even recon drones’, impeller rings and those used for missiles. Getting the sort of acceleration effective impeller drive missiles required out of some
thing which would fit into a practical-sized missile body required some substantial design tradeoffs. The sheer power load impeller nodes had to carry was one of them, both in terms of supplying the power in the first place—superconductor capacitors had undergone a significant upgrade when the modern missile came along—and in terms of surviving the power levels involved long enough to be worthwhile. Drones were larger than missiles, but even so they’d been required to accept far lower acceleration rates in order to get the service life their nodes required (and live within an energy budget they could meet) if they were going to have worthwhile range and endurance. Not that his people at Gram weren’t convinced they couldn’t make major improvements on existing drone limitations, of course.
Missiles were tougher, though, and the designers’ solution had been to accept impeller drives which literally consumed themselves in flight. Their acceleration rates had to be preselected at launch, and they couldn’t be turned off and turned back on—or even throttled back and then ramped up—the way drones could, because they were designed to operate at a self-destroying, overloaded level. The trick over the T-centuries since the impeller drive missile’s introduction had been to match the rate of node destruction to the attainable power budget of the missile to gain the maximum possible range/accel before the nodes blew.
Roger’s suggestion had been that they consider a staged approach, with multiple impeller rings which could be activated in sequence, and he’d only smiled blandly when Jonas and the rest of the Concept Development Office had goggled at him in disbelief. Even Jonas had been inclined to think he must have been smoking things he shouldn’t have, but he’d been serious. The CDO had been forced to more or less file the idea away for future reference, since it hadn’t had the budget or facilities to actually do anything with it, but Gram had started looking at the problems one by one with it from the day it opened its doors aboard HMSS Weyland.
There were a lot of them, those problems. If there hadn’t been, someone else would surely have tried strapping extra drives onto a missile already, after all. And the more Jonas and his people had looked, the better they’d come to understand why no one had ever been crazy enough to attempt it before.
First, there was the problem of power supply. Even with the improvements in capacitor technology, just feeding the energy appetite of a multidrive weapon was going to require an enormous missile body. At the time they’d started what had become Project Mjølner, they couldn’t have squeezed the thing into even the largest system defense missile ever built—they would have required something bigger than any existing recon drone, actually, which was far too large for anyone to consider carrying in the sorts of numbers which would be needed when waller met waller in missile-range combat.
Second, there’d been the question of node endurance. Design lifetimes had been increased markedly since the very first impeller drive missile was introduced in 1256, but it had taken all the weary years since just to get to where they’d been at the moment Roger had his inspiration. The notion that it could be pushed still higher in a relatively short time frame had seemed . . . unlikely, and they still hadn’t managed to increase the drive’s lifetime. They had, however, managed to increase the power levels it could sustain, which was going to lead to significant increases in missile acceleration rates. More importantly, at least in the short term, counter-missiles relied on their insanely over-powered impeller wedges, using those wedges as huge, immaterial brooms that destroyed anything they hit. With the new drive nodes, Manticoran CMs were about to become markedly more potent. Coupled with the RMN’s already existing advantage in electronic warfare systems and fire control, that was going to increase Manticore’s missile combat advantage still further. The trick, after all, was to hit the bad guy while he couldn’t hit you, and one way to accomplish that was to kill his shipkillers short of their target more efficiently than he could do the same thing to you.
But the third problem—the really killer problem—had been that there were only so many places on a missile where you could put the impeller rings. They literally couldn’t be put anywhere else without fatally compromising some other aspect of the weapon’s design . . . which wouldn’t have been so bad if an active impeller node didn’t rip hell out of the basic matrix of any other impeller node in its immediate vicinity. The nodes of a single impeller ring were tuned to one another, and (at least in a missile drive) all of them were up and fully powered at the same time. In a starship, or even a purely sublight light attack craft, the rings themselves were far enough apart to obviate any problem of mutual interference, and the nodes were big enough to incorporate the tuners which synched the alpha and beta nodes of each individual ring to one another. Even a starship, however, had to bring all of the nodes in a ring online, whether it intended to power all of them to fully operational levels or not, in order to get all of their tuners synched into the ring at once. Otherwise, the gravitic stress pouring off the active nodes warped the molecular circuitry of the inactive nodes. They had the same effect on other molycircs in the vicinity, as well, which was the reason starship impeller node heads had to be kept well clear of the hull and any other important systems they might affect. LAC nodes were weak enough they didn’t have to project very far, but superdreadnought nodes were enormous and required clearances—even from one another in the same ring, and even with the tuners in the circuit—which were measured in meters. The warping effect wasn’t a huge, gross, easily observable thing, but it didn’t have to be, because impeller node engineering tolerances were incredibly tight and demanding.
And, of course, there was no way to do that with a missile. There just wasn’t anyplace else to put them, and you couldn’t move them farther up, space them along the length of the missile body (even if that wouldn’t have compromised sensors and lasing rod deployment), because of their effect on other critical systems. They had to be concentrated in a very narrow chunk of the missile’s entire length and, by the same token, they couldn’t be concentrated that way without the first ring activated eating any others you’d installed!
And, fourth, even if you could somehow get the range in the first place, what did you do with it? The existing single-drive missiles were already pushing the limits of effective light-speed telemetry and fire control hard; if ranges were extended as radically as Roger’s idea suggested, the entire system would break down. Onboard sensors and AI could be improved to make each individual missile smarter and more capable, but there were limits to how far you could take that, especially with the new generations of decoys and ECM which were bound to confront them. One of Gram’s major efforts was directed at producing exactly those better, more capable defensive systems, given the RMN’s clear appreciation for just how dangerous laser heads were likely to prove, and it had to be assumed that any potential adversary would be thinking exactly the same way. That meant Manticoran missiles were going to have to go up against increasingly sophisticated countermeasures, in addition to thicker active defenses, and once they got beyond effective telemetry support range from the ships which had launched them, their effectiveness would decline sharply. And if that range was extended from the current shipkiller’s maximum powered range of roughly twenty-five light-seconds into multiple light-minutes, hit percentages were bound to plummet.
That didn’t mean it wouldn’t still be worthwhile, of course, especially if the RMN could score any hits and no one else could reply in kind. The problem was that no current design of waller could carry enough missiles of the size Mjølner’s multidrive progeny would require to score enough hits to be decisive against other capital ships at that sort of range. At the very least, the laser head itself would have to be substantially upgraded, well past any point Section Thirteen had currently envisioned, because the power of each individual hit would have to be increased to make up for how many fewer of them anyone could hope to score.
Every difficulty seemed to lead to two more problems, but Roger had insisted Gram could make it work, and the more he’d looked at it and all
the advantages it would confer, the more Jonas had come to the conclusion that they had to make it work. And the really remarkable thing was that it was beginning to look as if perhaps—just perhaps—they actually could.
The most critical breakthrough was what Sonja Hemphill and some of Gram’s other team leaders had dubbed simply “the baffle”—essentially, a very carefully designed generator which would project a tame plate of focused gravity to shield adjacent, inactive impeller rings from an active one. Doing it in a way that didn’t slice the missile body into divots the moment it came online had turned out to be . . . moderately tricky, and they still hadn’t quite licked the problem, but current results were promising. Very promising, actually . . . in an incremental, God-why-does-this-take-so-long, work-your-butt-off sort of way. And if they could only make the baffle work, all the rest of it was simply fiddly bits. Difficult, challenging, and expensive fiddly bits, perhaps, but still only fiddly bits; he was confident of that.
Some other interesting bits and pieces were emerging from the effort, as well. Sonja, for example, was intrigued by the implications of something she’d tentatively christened a “grav lance,” although it looked to Jonas like something which would be useful mainly for capital ships that managed to get to knife-fighting range of one another. He couldn’t really see anything lighter than a waller being able to make much use of it, but he was more than willing to let Sonja run with it.
The critical point, though, was that despite everything, it looked as if they might very well actually make Mjølner work after all. There were still more obstacles than he liked to think about, but he was confident his people on Weyland would overcome them in the end. And if they did—when they did—nothing would ever be the same again. Mjølner’s range would be incredible, its attack velocities unlike anything the galaxy’s navies had ever seen, its energy budget—and the penetration-aiding electronic warfare that would make possible—would make it far, far harder to intercept or spoof, and the new laser heads would be many times as destructive as any existing capital missile, even the RMN’s current weapons. It truly would complete what the laser head had begun and shatter the centuries-old, short-ranged, energy weapon combat model which had gripped galactic warfare for as long as anyone could remember once and for all.