Even Alphas can fall short of the Mensa prize it seems. They were paying too much attention to the political and diplomatic side of things and not the hardware side of things when Collin set up his network. Personally, I can understand that, given how long ago the network had to have been inserted. Is it too optimistic to think the network is as old as King Roger? Which suggests the Alignment may not have been aware of Project Gram at the time.
Forgive the length of the post. The faucet was left running. Oops. Besides, I'm going to need the water.
Office of the Director of Naval Operations
Gregor Mendel Tower
City of Leonard
Darius System
“Well, most of the hardware was pretty much off-the-shelf. We’d already been tweaking the torpedo’s drive for you, and the gravitic sensors are out of our own grav com R&D. The biggest problem was power supply, really. My people haven’t been able to duplicate the Manty micro fusion plants yet. I think they’re on the track, and I’m actually predicting that they’ll pull it off in the next T-year or so, but it won’t be any sooner than that. Assuming Collin’s people don’t manage to steal the plans for us. Any chance of that?”
“’Fraid not.” Benjamin shook his head, his expression much less cheerful than it had been. “I had a report from him a couple of days ago. Apparently, the Manties are rolling up his networks in a big way. We always knew there was a risk of that—once those bastards Zilwicki and Cachat blew the top off, they were bound to start looking under every rock—but this appears to be worse than our worst-case assumptions. So far, we don’t have a clue how they’re doing it, and however they’re pulling it off, they’re obviously working their way down from the top. It seems to be spreading to Beowulf, too, although it looks like it’s going slower there. And I’m afraid we took out his best bet for getting us the kind of info your people need ourselves. Oyster Bay killed a lot of the agents he’d managed to insert into their construction units."
“I wish I could say I was surprised,” Daniel sighed, then shrugged. “Well, knowing something can be done is two thirds of figuring out how to do it. I wish we’d been paying more attention to the hardware side of things and less to the political and diplomatic side when Collin set up his networks, but I think we’ve at least identified the right paths forward for a lot of their stuff. Now it’s just a case of hammering through, and God knows we’ve got enough motivation!”
He smiled with very little amusement, and Benjamin nodded in both understanding and agreement.
Daniel’s researchers had yet to duplicate most of the cornucopia of hardware which had flowed out of Roger Winton’s long-term prewar R&D. In fact, they hadn’t even identified all of it yet. As Daniel had just suggested, they were making progress—in fact, their rate of progress continued to increase—but they remained far behind and he was unhappily certain the Manties weren’t resting on their laurels. Worse, now they were comparing notes with Haven. There was a reason Sonja Hemphill and Shannon Foraker were right at the top of Collin’s Assassinate As Soon As Possible list. If there were two navies in the galaxy who understood the need to stay ahead of the technological curve, it was the RMN and the RHN, especially under Hemphill and Foraker. It was unlikely, to say the least, that the Alignment was going to overcome the edge in their hardware anytime soon.
“Well, without micro plants of our own,” Daniel continued, “what my people had to do was to throw together a new fuselage big enough to let us graft together the power packs of two Wraiths. It’s…large.”
Benjamin snorted. The Wraith was the Mesan Alignment Navy’s equivalent of the Manty Ghost Rider recon platforms, and without Manticore’s new stealth systems—and their damned thumbnail fusion plants—building something equally hard to see had been a challenge. The good news was that the spider drive’s gravitic signature was incredibly faint compared to conventional impellers, so it didn’t require as much stealthing in the first place. The bad news was that the drive itself took up a lot of space and its plasma-charged accumulators took up almost as much. From the sketchy information they’d been able to assemble on Ghost Rider, a Wraith was probably at least seventy percent bigger than a current generation Manticoran recon drone. It was also much slower and lacked Ghost Rider’s FTL capability, but it was probably at least as difficult to detect, and indications were that its onboard sensors were a bit better even than the RMN’s current hardware.
But if Daniel was talking about something big enough to carry a pair of Wraith power packs, then he was talking about something which was probably at least two or three times as big as the MAN’s graser torpedo… which was already nearly twice the size of a Manticoran Mark 23 MDM. In which case, calling it “large” was something of an understatement, especially from the perspective of the man whose navy would be trying to deploy the damned things.
“How large a ‘large’ are we actually talking about here?” he asked.
“Try sixty-eight meters long and right on eleven and a half in diameter.” Benjamin winced. That wasn’t quite as bad as he’d feared, but it was still over ninety percent the size of a Manticoran Shrike-class LAC.
“I imagine it’s fair to call that ‘large,’” he said judiciously. “The final version’s going to be at least a couple of meters longer,” Daniel warned him. “That sixty eight meters is basically the carrier, the graser, and the power supply. We’ve designed four different nose sections, and I won’t know which one we’re using until I know how the software tweaks finally resolve.” He shrugged. “On the other hand, given that it’s already way too big to fire from anything we’ve got, including Detweiler’s torpedo tubes, I figure a few more meters here or there won’t hurt.”
“Probably not,” Benjamin agreed. He sat for a moment, eyes gazing into the distance and fingers drumming on his desk while he thought. Then he nodded to himself and refocused on his brother’s face.
“Unless we can figure out a way to carry these things externally without anybody noticing them, which seems unlikely, we’ll have to swim them out of a standard cargo hold. Will that be workable?”
“Don’t see any reason why not.” Daniel chuckled. “As a matter of fact, I figured you’d have to do that, so I’ve got another team busy designing what looks like a pair of standard Rhino-class heavy-lift cargo containers glued together end-to-end. We can fit one of these things into something that size and even tuck a presser into one end of the container. I figure that would let you drop the ‘Rhinos’ with the clock set for the Silver Bullet to deploy itself once the deploying ship’s gotten well clear.”
