little less polite to me,” Adcock said cheerfully. “And Dame Carrie’s too good at playing the game to tilt at any windmills. Sir Frederick made it abundantly clear what his spending priorities are—both in terms of platform procurement and in terms of R and D—when he helped kill the rest of the Samothrace program. Given his seniority and his current position, locking horns with him would be . . . counterproductive. At best, it’d end up wasting a lot of energy, burning a lot of political capital, and not accomplishing a hell of a lot. Understand me, that’s not because Sir Frederick has any ulterior motives; it’s just that he knows what he knows that he knows, and as the man responsible for calling the shots, he’s going to do it the way his own best judgment says he should. And God knows he was absolutely right about how many eighty thousand-ton cruisers we can build for every seven million -ton superdreadnought we don’t build. I may not fully agree with the decisions he makes, and I have to say that I’d just as soon not have my kneecaps broken by someone as good at political infighting as he is, but I understand why he feels the way he does and I can follow his logic, even if I think it’s flawed.
“So can Dame Carrie, and she’s not about to wreck her personal working relationship with him and create the kind of general disruption that fighting with him about R and D direction in public would produce. Especially not”—he shot Roger a very level look—“when Sir Frederick’s going to be retiring within the next three T-years. No one knows who’ll be tapped to replace him as First Space Lord at this point, but with Baron Castle Rock as First Lord, it seems likely that whoever it is will be more supportive of the baron’s policies. Which I presume must bear at least some faint resemblance to your mother’s policies, given how firmly she’s supported him.”
“I think that would be a not unreasonable assumption, Sir,” Roger said, picking his words slowly and carefully, and Adcock smiled crookedly.
“Well, what Dame Carrie’s done is to create what she’s rather grandiloquently dubbed the ‘Concept Development Office.’ Um, that’s us , Commander. You, me, Lieutenant D’Orville, and a batch of remarkably senior and closemouthed ratings and petty officers from the various technical branches. We don’t appear under that particular title on any of the BuWeaps organizational charts, and we don’t have an actual R and D budget, and no one’s letting us play with any hardware at the moment. But we do have direct access to Dame Carrie and quite a remarkable reach in terms of the information available to us. We’re not being allowed to do any development, but we’re doing one hell of a lot of research .”
“What sort of research, Sir?”
“We’re going through every technical report ONI’s generated in the last twenty T-years, Commander,” Adcock said flatly. “And we’re going through every report any of our reservists serving in the merchant fleet might happen to file between voyages. We’re also auditing every current R and D project BuWeaps is being allowed to pursue and looking back at all the ones BuWeaps wasn’t allowed to pursue, and we have subscriptions to all of the Manticoran—and Beowulfan— civilian technical journals, as well as the SLN’s Naval Quarterly . And the reason we’re doing that, Commander Winton, is because it’s our job to look at everything , whatever the source, and assume nothing about practicality or feasibility until we’ve put it under a microscope and looked at it molecule by molecule. For example, this”—he tapped the reader on his desk—“is Aberu and Harmon’s internal report on that ‘laser head’ they tested back in ’33. The Sollies turned it down, and I can see why, based on the tests. But we’re not going to simply take their word for how useless it was, because that’s our job: to come up with blue-sky ideas,
“So can Dame Carrie, and she’s not about to wreck her personal working relationship with him and create the kind of general disruption that fighting with him about R and D direction in public would produce. Especially not”—he shot Roger a very level look—“when Sir Frederick’s going to be retiring within the next three T-years. No one knows who’ll be tapped to replace him as First Space Lord at this point, but with Baron Castle Rock as First Lord, it seems likely that whoever it is will be more supportive of the baron’s policies. Which I presume must bear at least some faint resemblance to your mother’s policies, given how firmly she’s supported him.”
“I think that would be a not unreasonable assumption, Sir,” Roger said, picking his words slowly and carefully, and Adcock smiled crookedly.
“Well, what Dame Carrie’s done is to create what she’s rather grandiloquently dubbed the ‘Concept Development Office.’ Um, that’s us , Commander. You, me, Lieutenant D’Orville, and a batch of remarkably senior and closemouthed ratings and petty officers from the various technical branches. We don’t appear under that particular title on any of the BuWeaps organizational charts, and we don’t have an actual R and D budget, and no one’s letting us play with any hardware at the moment. But we do have direct access to Dame Carrie and quite a remarkable reach in terms of the information available to us. We’re not being allowed to do any development, but we’re doing one hell of a lot of research .”
“What sort of research, Sir?”
“We’re going through every technical report ONI’s generated in the last twenty T-years, Commander,” Adcock said flatly. “And we’re going through every report any of our reservists serving in the merchant fleet might happen to file between voyages. We’re also auditing every current R and D project BuWeaps is being allowed to pursue and looking back at all the ones BuWeaps wasn’t allowed to pursue, and we have subscriptions to all of the Manticoran—and Beowulfan— civilian technical journals, as well as the SLN’s Naval Quarterly . And the reason we’re doing that, Commander Winton, is because it’s our job to look at everything , whatever the source, and assume nothing about practicality or feasibility until we’ve put it under a microscope and looked at it molecule by molecule. For example, this”—he tapped the reader on his desk—“is Aberu and Harmon’s internal report on that ‘laser head’ they tested back in ’33. The Sollies turned it down, and I can see why, based on the tests. But we’re not going to simply take their word for how useless it was, because that’s our job: to come up with blue-sky ideas,
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