September 1883 PD
“SO ARE YOU REALLY as full of fight as everyone in the Cabinet and at Admiralty House thinks you are?” Jonas Adcock asked, leaning back in the comfortable armchair and waving the brandy snifter appreciatively under his nose.
One of the few “upper crust” luxuries he’d come to enjoy was a good glass of brandy, and the Mount Royal Palace cellars’ collection of brandies was his secret vice. One his sister and brother-in-law always remembered at Christmas and birthdays. And one which he pandered to shamelessly on his visits to the palace.
“In a way, yes,” Roger replied, settling into his own chair with a sigh of comfort. Unlike Jonas, the King favored whiskey, and the glass in his hand contained Glenfiddich Grand Reserve. “I don’t want to, not yet, but we genuinely can’t afford to lose Trevor’s Star at this point. A logistically secure forward base well behind the enemy’s front lines? One we could reinforce faster than they could? One that would give us forward basing for raids on their shipping and infrastructure?” He shook his head, his expression grim. “I know we’re still outgunned, but Gram and our open R and D have already given us a substantial qualitative edge. And much as I’d love to wait until we had more of Gram’s programs into the developmental stage, or even ready to deploy, I just can’t sacrifice the strategic advantage of being able to deploy that far forward. My God, Jonas! It would put our advanced fleet base less than two weeks from the Haven System itself, instead of almost two damned months! Think of the force multiplier that kind of reduction in turn around time would give us! If we can get our fleet to Haven in a quarter of the time, it’d be the same as giving us four times the wallers . . . and they’d have to worry about us taking out their home system with a pounce through hyper rather than the other way around. For all intents and purposes, it gives us a hundred and fifty more light-years of strategic depth.”
“And, conversely,” Jonas said, nodding gravely, “losing the Trevor’s Star Terminus puts the Peeps a lot closer to us than that hundred and fifty light-years would suggest.”
“In a lot of ways,” Roger agreed. He sipped from his glass, then looked up with a grimace which had nothing at all to do with the rich, honeyed fire of the whiskey. “Mind you, I think they’d be lunatics to try an assault through the Junction, especially with only one terminus in their possession. Unfortunately, there’s nothing to guarantee they won’t be lunatics about it, and as I’ve said more than once before, even a failed Junction assault on their part would result in a state of war between us, anyway. We won’t have any choice but to upgrade and strengthen the Junction forts if we lose Trevor’s Star, either, which won’t help our naval budgets one bit. And that doesn’t even consider the consequences for trade patterns or the implications for morale. Losing Trevor’s Star would have to have a depressing effect on our people’s psychology. By the same token, it would have to pump up domestic support for the Peeps. Not only would San Martin be the wealthiest single planet they’ve managed to pick off yet, but it would give them a claim—potentially, at least—on San Martin’s share of the Junction transit fees under the Treaty of 1590. And if we don’t let them cash in on the treaty, they can always withdraw from it and charge whatever damned fees they want. That would be a shot in the arm for their economy . . . and one that would only make them even hungrier to grab off the mother lode for themselves. It would also give us the choice between accepting whatever fee schedule they set or trying to do something about it by force, which would simply get us into that war we’re all trying so hard to postpone. You know their propagandists would use the fact that they’d gotten away with punching out Trevor’s Star as another way to suggest to their domestic news market that we’re not willing to face them militarily, despite all our ‘posturing’ and ‘unilateral hostility towards the peaceloving citizens of the People’s Republic.’ And if they got away with jacking up the terminus fees, they’d just use our restraint as another example of how frightened of them we are.’”
“Of course they would.” Adcock’s grimace was as sour as Roger’s had been . . . and owed equally little to his beverage of choice. “And I’m sure they’d find all sorts of ways to use their possession of Trevor’s Star and our proximity to it, thanks to the Junction, to stage-manage tensions—and incidents—between us and them for their advantage whenever they felt like it.”
“Exactly.” Roger took another sip of whiskey and shook his head. “Like I say, I don’t want to fight them right now, but I’m a lot more willing to do that than to give up Trevor’s Star. Of course, if this visit with Ramirez works out next month, we may be able to have our cake and eat it too.”
“And if pigs had wings they’d be pigeons, Roger.” It was Jonas’ turn to shake his head. “You’re not going to convert the Legislaturalists into pacifists just by standing up beside San Martin.”
“No, but I genuinely believe from everything we’re hearing out of ONI and the SIS that we’d at least cause them to rethink, and probably rethink hard. Big Sky’s gotten better penetration than I think a lot of people realize. We don’t have anyone actually inside the Octagon, but we’ve managed to recruit or place agents a lot more broadly at lower levels, and we’ve gotten a better look inside their hardware than I ever expected.”
Roger sipped whiskey again, then shrugged.
“He’s going to shoot a copy of our latest tech analysis over to you—top-secret, burn-before-reading, of course—and I think you’ll find it interesting. Unless it’s a really clever example of disinformation, we’ve opened an even bigger edge in conventional weapons systems—especially ECM and our missile targeting systems—than we’d realized. It looks like our current-generation laser head grav lensing’s a lot better than theirs than we’d thought, too. They’re basically using the straight Astral design, without any upgrades, and I know Rodriguez has routed Section Thirteen’s latest throughput numbers to Gram. Our capital missile laser heads are almost twice as powerful as their current-generation hardware, assuming these numbers are good. And they’re nowhere near deploying a cruiser or destroyer grade version, whereas we—”
He shrugged, and Jonas nodded in understanding. Gram’s researchers had played a not insignificant role in pointing Section Thirteen at the component miniaturization which had permitted BuWeaps to engineer the newest laser heads down to something that would fit a missile body which could be launched from light units’ tubes. And carried in sufficient numbers to be useful, he reminded himself. One disadvantage of the RMN’s increasing emphasis on missiles was that magazine space had to be upsized to keep pace with the increase in launchers. That problem had already reared its head when the impeller drive counter-missile came into use, of course, and the increased standoff range of the laser head was only making that still worse. Last-generation sidewall burners had started the progression, but with laser heads, it became imperative to begin thinning the incoming salvos as early as possible, and only counter-missiles had that kind of reach.
And every counter-missile we carry uses up volume we can’t use on shipkillers, he thought. And if Mjølner works out the way we hope, thatAs going to get even worse. Or better…depending on who else has the same capability!
“I wish we had a better look inside their software,” Roger went on, “but we’ve managed to get our hands on actual tech manuals, and the decrypt codes, for their current generation shipkillers, radar, and gravitic sensors.”
Jonas’ eyebrows rose respectfully.
“Somebody’s damned well earned his pay, assuming they’re really current,” he observed. “Of course the fact that we got them also underscores one of my own worst nightmares!”
“And I’m not going to tell you our security hasn’t been breached,” Roger replied with a nod. “I don’t think it has, and what ONI’s been turning up suggests a lower level of tension among the Peeps than we’d be seeing if they had a clue about some of the things your people are working on at Weyland. If they knew about Gram, they’d either be running a lot more scared, or else they would’ve already launched a preemptive attack. The last thing they’d want to do would be to let us get the new systems through development and into deployment!” He shook his head again. “No, it looks to me like Shell Game’s working, Jonas.”
Jonas considered that for a moment, then nodded just a bit grudgingly. One thing which Roger had insisted upon fanatically from the very beginning was that Project Gram’s security had to be absolute. Gram was his ace in the hole, his desperately needed equalizer, and for it to be those things, it also had to be completely black, completely hidden from the People’s Republic of Haven’s spies and analysts. It helped that all indications were that the Peeps saw espionage more as an offensive than a defensive tool. They appeared to be far more focused on gathering political information, looking for dissidents who could be subsidized to destabilize opponents, using blackmail, extortion, and even assassination to weaken their targets at the critical moment. Their covert operations people were among the best in the galaxy when it came to that sort of mission, but it did tend to give their intelligence people a form of tunnel vision. They focused on short-range, intensive efforts to penetrate, undermine, and critically weaken the objective immediately on their targeting screens, and they appeared to assign their very best people to those sorts of ops, which left only limited personnel, resources, and funding for their chronically understrength long-range operations.
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 something 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.
And it can’t possibly be carried aboard any current design of capital ship, he thought. Not in sufficient numbers, at any rate; not even my boys and girls are going to squeeze it down into something that’ll change that minor problem! Which means we’re going to have to completely rethink hull forms, weapons tonnages, launch methods and mechanisms, and ammunition stowage, just for a start. I’m thinking those new lightweight LAC launchers might be part of the answer, at least in the short term. Build ourselves an offensive version of the system defense missile pods and use it as a strap on, or tractor it astern or something, at least for an interim approach. We’ll have to come up with something better in the long run though. Defining a new, workable operational doctrine’s going to be a big enough pain in the ass all by itself, but I’m willing to bet we’re going to have to redesign the ship-of-the-wall from the keel out, too, and then we’re going to have to find the wherewithal to build the damned things.And Roger was right; no one at BuWeaps or BuShips had a clue what was about to be thrown at them. If, on the other hand, there was a single man in the RMN who did have a clue . . .
“What exactly do you have in mind?” he asked.
“I’ve already talked to Castle Rock and Styler,” Roger replied. “Sometime early next year, they’re going to create a new command—we’re calling it the Weapons Development Board—and you’re going to be in charge of it. It’ll be based in Manticore Beta, aboard Weyland, so it’ll still be as much out-of-sight, out-of-mind as we can keep it, and if we can convince the newsies to think it’s more makework for a beloved but not that bright brother-in-law, so much the better. You will be being bounced directly to flag rank—vice admiral of the red—when you take over as CO, I’m afraid. In fact, I’ve already signed your promotion, but we’ve classified it under the Official Secrets Act, at least for now. As far as anyone outside a certain very select circle is concerned, you’ll still be a mere captain holding an acting commodore’s slot as a way to let Angelique and me funnel a few extra perks and a better pension in your direction.”
“I suppose I should be accustomed to being a drone by now,” Jonas observed with a dry smile, and Roger chuckled.
“We’ve all worked hard enough to convince the galaxy at large that you are one, at any rate!”
“And the duties of this new entity would be—?”
“I’m not sure whether it’s ultimately going to have to find a home under the BuShips or the BuWeaps umbrella, but for right now, it’s not going to belong to either. You’ll still be working out of Admiral Rodriguez’s office, officially, but your real job is going to be to start creating the liaison between BuShips and BuWeaps we’re going to need to move the new systems from pure research into development and then into volume production as early as possible. You’ll be doing as much of the work as you can from Weyland, if only because our security arrangements there have been worked out in so much depth, but eventually you’re going to have to have ‘branch offices’ aboard Vulcan and Hephaestus, as well. And in addition to the purely hardware side of things, you’re also going to be responsible for developing tactics and operational doctrine to use the new systems.”
“I see.”
Jonas considered for a moment, then shrugged.
“I won’t pretend I’m happy about the thought of giving up Gram. On the other hand, I see your logic, and I believe that somewhere around here it says that since you’re the King, we all get to do things your way, anyway.” He smiled briefly. “How much freedom am I going to have to request personnel?”
“Probably not as much as you’d like, at least initially.” Roger made a face. “Obviously we’re going to have to bring in additional manpower, which’ll mean expanding the number of people who have at least some idea of what Gram’s been working on all this time. We need to be careful about how we do that, though. And once anybody disappears into this Weapons Development Board, he won’t be being released to the general population again anytime soon. We may have to make some exceptions here and there, and we’re going to want people with the shooter’s perspective in this up to their elbows, of course, but the security requirements are going to remain paramount for the foreseeable future, as well. We’ll have to go public with it eventually, at least within the Service, if it’s going to do its job, but I don’t want to do that one instant before we have to. Call me paranoid, but I really don’t want this leaking to the Peeps until we’ve got the hammer we need to hit them so hard they don’t get up again. Why? Is there someone in particular you think you’d like?”
“I was thinking about young Alexander, as a matter of fact,” Jonas admitted. “I understand he’s just about finished with his current tour at BuPlan. The thought of getting him into harness with Sonja would probably make Sisyphus cringe, but this sounds like something we could really, really use his brain on, Roger. And you know a lot of senior officers’re going to have major reservations about such radically new hardware. They know what already works, and they’re going to fight like hell against risking the loss of proven weapon systems in favor of a batch of new, half-baked ideas which may end up not working and get us all killed, as a result. But Alexander’s broadly enough respected that if we can get him signed on, it’ll help enormously with the fleet’s acceptance in general.”
“Um.”
Roger frowned, sipping more whiskey and looking into space while he considered. He sat that way for several moments, then blinked and refocused on Jonas.
“I’ll think about it,” he said, “but my initial thought is that we need him elsewhere even worse.” He raised his free hand, forestalling any protest Jonas might have made. “God knows you’re right about how good he is and how respected he is, and he’s hit the ground running ever since he went back on active duty.”
The King’s expression went briefly bleak, recalling the horrendous air car accident which had crippled Lady Emily Alexander . . . and very nearly destroyed Hamish Alexander’s naval career as he went on to half-pay in his desperately determined battle to somehow reverse the verdict of his beloved wife’s catastrophic damage. He’d failed. Emily Alexander—actress, equestrienne, tennis player, and one of the Star Kingdom’s most beloved public figures—would never leave her life-support chair again. The fact that she’d confronted that truth, accepted the physical wasteland her future had become, without even a trace of surrender—that she’d already become one of Manticore’s premier HD producers, now that she could no longer take the stage herself—had only made her even more beloved, and she’d had the strength to encourage her husband’s return to active duty, as well.
“The problem is, we do need him where he is, at the moment, and we need to get him rotated back through active fleet command ASAP, as well,” Roger continued. “Your job is going to be to produce the next generation of weapons and the ships and doctrine we need to make them work. In the meantime, though, we have to have the very best commanders and doctrine we can get with existing weapons systems, and that describes Hamish perfectly. Eventually, we’ll have to bring him on board, but for now, I think he’ll be even more valuable to us in more . . . conventional roles. And let’s face it, Jonas. You and I are busy planning for a future war in which Gram’s weapons could prove decisive, but we can’t be remotely certain the Peeps will hold off that long. One of the reasons I’m going to be talking to Hector Ramirez is my hope that a united front with San Martin will cause the Peeps to back off, buy us the time to get the Weapons Development Board fully up and running and actually bring the new systems to a deployable level. If it doesn’t, though—if the Peeps don’t blink, and do go ahead and pull the trigger—we’ll have to fight with the ships and weapons we already have, and we’ll need someone who can use those weapons as effectively as humanly possible. Again, that describes Hamish perfectly. So the bottom line is that I simply can’t spare him at this time.”
“But you think I can probably have him at some point in the future?” Jonas pressed.
“Assuming we’re not actively at war with the People’s Republic, yes,” Roger said dryly.
“Good. I’ll hold you to that,” Jonas warned.
“Thanks for the warning.”
Roger smiled, then glanced at his chrono and made another face. This one was considerably more cheerful than the last one, Jonas noticed.
“Well,” the King stood, setting his empty whiskey glass on an end table, “I hate to drink and run, but Angel’s waiting for me.”
“Really?” Jonas stood as well. “Where are the two of you off to? I thought we were having supper together tonight?”
“Oh, we are,” Roger reassured him. “But not here. In fact, we’re—”
He broke off as the study door opened and Elizabeth stepped through it. The King’s eyebrows rose, and his daughter laughed.
“I bribed Captain Trevor to let me burst in on you without notice, Dad,” she said, then stepped past her father to hug Jonas tightly. “They told me you were here, Uncle Jonas, and I wanted to be sure I got to see you before you disappeared back off to the Admiralty again. Especially since I won’t be seeing you at supper tonight.”
“You won’t?” Jonas returned her embrace, then stood back, smiling at her. “And what have I done to offend you, Your Highness?”
She laughed again, the treecat on her shoulder tilting his head to regard Jonas with matching amusement.
“You haven’t done a thing,” she assured him. “Except for being guilty of bad timing, anyway. Mom and Dad are off to the Indigo Salt Flats for a little overdue recreation before heading off to Trevor’s Star.”
“I hadn’t heard,” Jonas said, looking across at Roger, and the King shrugged.
“We’ve kept it quiet. Angel and I are both worn out getting ready for this trip—especially her, I’m afraid.” He shook his head, his brown eyes softening with the memory of all Angelique had put up with since wedding him. “No newsies, no press, no guests—just the two of us. Well, and you, for supper. Possibly Michael, too . . . assuming he’s on speaking terms with me.”
“Bad?” Jonas asked.
“No worse than usual.” Roger rolled his eyes. “God, I love that boy, but there are times . . .”
“He’ll get over it, Dad,” Elizabeth assured him.
“And you won’t be joining us because—?” Jonas inquired, and Roger laughed.
“Jonas, you’d better get used to it,” the King said when his brother-in-law glanced back at him. “Ever since she and young Zyrr announced their engagement, she’s taken every opportunity she can find to drag him off to some glitzy nightspot somewhere. Yes, and pretended she was just studying for exams with him.” Roger shook his head, his expression mournful. “She thinks she’s actually fooling her soft-headed old dad, too. It’s sad, when you think about it.”
“You need to work on making your lower lip quiver properly, Dad,” his undutiful daughter said critically. “And, no, I don’t think I’m fooling you and Mom a bit, given the way Security keeps an eye on all of us. Not to mention the fact that I know you know perfectly well that Justin really is helping me study for finals. Or the fact that I happen to know you get along with him just fine yourself.”
“Respect,” Roger sighed. “It says somewhere in the Constitution, that the King is supposed to be spoken to with respect. I know it does.”
“By everyone except his family, Dad,” Elizabeth said, rising slightly on her toes to kiss his cheek and smiling at him. “But Justin really is waiting for me, and I’ve got to run, that’s the real reason I interrupted you and Uncle Jonas. I already talked to Mom, and I wouldn’t keep her waiting, if I were you.” She shook her head, brown eyes gleaming. “She’s really looking forward to this.”
“I know—I know!” Roger said repentantly. “She puts up with a lot.”
“Oh, it’s not all bad, Roger,” Jonas told him.
“No, it isn’t,” Elizabeth agreed. “And let me know how that new grav ski works!”
Roger smiled in delight, feeling the wind whip across his tightly curled hair as he rode the grav ski high above the blue sands which gave the Indigo Salt Flats their name. It really had been too long since he and Angel had taken the time to be just the two of them, treasuring one another properly, and the glorious afternoon offered them at least another three or four hours of daylight before they’d have to call it quits. He rather regretted the fact that the new ski Elizabeth had given him for his birthday had been downchecked by Planetary Security. The problem was minor enough he might have used it anyway, but as Major Dover had pointed out, there was no point taking chances with a brand new, possibly temperamental ski. They could always have it serviced for a later excursion, and the backup ski he kept here at the Flats was an old and trusted friend.
He came out of a perfect double spiral flip and looked over to see Angelique’s reaction. She looked back at him, raising her hand in salute while her dark hair whipped behind her in the wind of her passage, then banked gracefully and swooped upward, executing exactly the same maneuver. She was a little slower, but her control was better, and Roger chuckled. If there’d been any judges watching them, they’d have given the round to her on points.
“Ready for a quad, Angel?” he asked over the com.
“Why not?” She laughed. “I can’t remember when conditions’ve been more perfect.”
“You go first.”
“So you can study my technique?” She laughed again. “As Your Majesty commands.”
Her quadruple spiral flip was perfect, of course. It always was, and Roger hand-signaled his appreciation, then checked his readouts. If he was going to win this round, he needed every advantage he could get from the light wind and the thermal updrafts. He waited, until conditions were as close to ideal as they were going to get, then glided up into the first spiral.
Perfect!
The second went just as smoothly, and the third without a hitch. He was slightly ahead of her time, and he frowned in concentration, focused on the perfection of his technique, as he moved into the fourth spiral. He was just gathering velocity to imitate the flourish with which Angelique had ended her own flip, when the ski jumped under his feet.
It wasn’t much of a jump, but he was far too experienced a grav skier to think he’d imagined it. Another light jolt kicked at the soles of his feet. Again, it wasn’t particularly violent, and he was tempted to ride it out. He’d never competed professionally, but he knew he was among the Star Kingdom’s best grav skiers, and he was still firmly in control of the ski. He could put it down safely rather than baling and simply letting it crash.
Don’t be stupid, Roger. The thought flashed through his brain. You can get a new ski a hell of a lot easier than you can get a new neck, and the last thing you need is to bang yourself up at a moment like this! Ramirez is expecting you in less than three T-weeks now, you dummy!
He grimaced at the thought, but it was pure reflex and his left hand was already reaching for the tab to release him from the grav ski and onto the standby counter-grav pack. Then there was another jolt—this one a buck that must have been visible from the ground—and the shock shook his hand from the tab.
“I’m closing to help, Roger!” Angelique called over the com.
“I’m holding, love,” he responded, continuing to fumble for the release.
And then, impossibly, the ski failed completely. The velocity he’d brought into his last spiral turned against him, ripping his hands away from the release tab. The wind howled around his ears, no longer a joy but a demon, bent on his destruction. Fear burned through him, but he didn’t panic. He fought the slipstream, pulling his arms in close, sliding his hand down to the release tab even as he plummeted. His fingers found the tab once more, relief blossomed through the fear, and he pulled.
Nothing happened. Nothing at all.
Below him, the salt sands glittered bright, hard, and utterly unforgiving. He died with the sound of his wife’s scream in his ears and the sensation of a distant heart breaking.