House of Steel The Honorverse Companion - By David Weber Page 0,69

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