Von Neumann’s War

by John Ringo

  Sure about his snipe point, he slid the Barrett forward and snuggled it into his shoulder, peering through the BORS sniper scope and tracking for targets. He scanned the street and the side buildings until an RPG or a grenade going off in the building across the street caught his attention. The walls around the explosion were being pockmarked by fire from somewhere to the side. And it was increasing.

  Nelms calmly but hurriedly scanned in the direction of the sound of the AK fire; there they were. Seven insurgents had dug in on the third floor of the building, or what was left of it, and were zeroing in on Top and the stack as they tried to move from the interior hallway to the exterior rooms where the other insurgents were taking cover.

  Breathe in… out one, two, three, squeeze. The trigger on the Barrett depressed, and Specialist Nelms tracked the round. The rifle used the venerable .50 caliber Browning Machine Gun round or “50 BMG.” Developed during the First World War, the round was extremely powerful with massive overkill on “soft” targets like Iraqi insurgents. When the target was hit, the bullet, quite literally, blew the tango apart. The upper torso of the Iraqi insurgent blew upwards and to the left, trailing unidentifiable pieces, while the severed legs and pelvis dropped out of sight.

  The Barrett had pushed Nelms back at least three inches, despite the fact that he was stretched out on the ground, but he brought it back into battery automatically and retargeted. Breathe… squeeze!

  This time he’d hit high and the round punched through the terrorist’s upper chest, spreading a red stain across the wall behind the muj and covering his buddies with blood. The impact tore away the connective tissue and bone on the right side of the Arab’s throat and upper chest and when he fell backwards his head flopped off to the side.

  Nelms contemplated the sight for about an eighth of a second with dispassion. It was an interesting example of ballistics and he wanted to make sure he’d seen it correctly. With the exception of casual professional interest, he had no other feelings about the shot. He sometimes wondered if that was because of all the hunting he’d done or because of the nature of the enemy. He, like most of his fellow soldiers, really did not like the Iraqi insurgents. They had no particular honor in their fighting methods, most of them weren’t even from Iraq and, in general, they were incompetent at anything but setting roadside bombs. To Nelms the man that he had just shot was less than a human, and killing him felt more like stepping on a cockroach than murder.

  Nelms pulled the sniper rifle in and up and rolled to the right and then bear crawled to the window at the far end of the room; the signature from a Barrett could sometimes be very noticeable so the experienced snipers had called for no more than two shots from a single position. Quickly he dropped the bipod of the rifle on the windowsill, targeted, and fired twice.

  He held still to see what the remaining insurgents were doing. Through the BORS he could see the last two of them scanning for him and covering at the same time. They were preparing an RPG. Nelms didn’t pause this time to breathe, he just opened fire on them with the rifle, forcing them to cover. The commotion drew attention to the insurgent terrorists’ location and two bursts of SAW fire from first squad took care of them. Nelms ceased fire and continued to scan for targets.

  * * *

  “Top, this is Bravo Six,” Gries said, glancing at the building. He had been able to track the first sergeant’s movements pretty closely by the carnage apparent from the windows. “I’m sending a squad from second in through the bottom floor. Be advised, there’s no more fire coming from the building; the tangos have done a runner.”

  * * *

  “Roger,” First Sergeant Cady said over the tac-net. “We’ll just tag and bag, then.” He looked down the corridor and thought for a second. “Gregory, we’ve got this floor, Second’s got the bottom. Tag and bag!”

  * * *

  Shane was checking his e-mail when the Third Battalion CO, Lieutenant Colonel Mark M. Markum entered his office.

  “Nice job on that ambush,” the colonel said, sitting down in a rickety Iraqi chair one of Shane’s troops had “liberated” and installed in his office. “The news media is making it look like definitive word we’re unable to ‘ensure the security of Iraq during the upcoming election’ since we couldn’t even guard these scientists. But that’s par for the course.”

  “We had three wounded and one dead,” Shane said, shaking his head and taking a sip of pop. “I’d like some way to figure out when we’re going to be ambushed.”

  “Science fiction isn’t reality,” Markum replied. “All we can do is keep killing the insurgents and hope they get the picture. When the Iraqis take over for good and all… well, we’ll see what they can do.”

  “I’d like another citation for Cady,” Gries said, changing the subject.

  “He do another Terminator?” the colonel asked, chuckling. “I remember when he was just a sergeant in Second Brigade. Look how little Thomas has grow’d.”

  “Well, he deserves it,” Shane said, sighing.

  “You don’t look happy,” Markum replied. “You didn’t take that many casualties this time for how hard you got hammered. So what’s up? Oh, your majority?”

  “I suppose I shouldn’t be pining on it,” Shane said. “I was just hoping I’d have mail. I was on the list. I thought I’d have my leaves by now.”

  “As soon as you get your leaves you have to transfer out of the company,” the colonel pointed out.

  “I’m aware, sir,” Gries said, smiling faintly. “And, yeah, I don’t want to do that, either. Tough call, huh?”

  “Giving up your command for the shittiest rank on earth?” Markum said, grinning. “Yeah, it’s a tough call. Career or the only fun to be had in the Army, command?”

  “Fun,” Shane said darkly. “I’ve got letters to write tonight. But, yeah, command is as good as it gets. I don’t know whether I should be hoping I get my major leaves or sorry if I do.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to decide soon,” the colonel said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a small cardboard rectangle with two sets of major’s leaves on it. “I got the mail, not you.”

  “Crap,” Gries whispered, shaking his head. “What now?”

  “You’ve got fifteen days to perform change of command,” the colonel said, smiling. “Then you’re on temporary orders to deploy back to rear det at Fort Stewart. The rest of your orders, I’m given to understand, are somewhere in somebody’s inbox awaiting ‘determination.’ ”

  Shane frowned at that and glanced over at his commander.

  “I’m up for CGSC, right?” Gries asked, referring to Command and General Staff College. The Army’s premier course for “middle managers,” CGSC was a prerequisite for promotion beyond major, just as War College was a prerequisite for flag rank. It could either be taken as a correspondence course or on-site, the “full” course, at Fort Leavenworth. The latter was much preferred, promotion-wise, to the former and Shane had been given to understand that as soon as he had his majority he was on the list. He’d been a very good boy in the Army, getting all the little merit badges he was supposed to get, the airborne wings, the Ranger tab, and never getting anything short of a “walks on water” review. With the star on his Combat Infantryman’s Badge, meaning he’d been to war, as an infantry officer, twice, he was a shoe-in for full bird at the very least, assuming he didn’t really screw up. Since he didn’t screw the wives of subordinates, the daughters of generals, or males, he figured he was golden. If he could get the “full” CGSC course.

  “Got no idea,” the colonel replied. “All I know is you need to start clearing your company so you can boogie on back to Stewart and the world. Me, I’m stuck here for the next five months.”

  “How do I get out of this Mickey Mouse organization?” Shane said, trying to smile.

  “You can’t,” Markum admitted. “You’re also on stop-loss.”

  * * *

  “So, what’ve you got Mr. Hamilton?” Dr. Simms asked as he flipped throug
h the three hundred pages of data Jack had just dumped on his desk.

  “The data from the Hubble Telescope run we made last month on the Martian surface albedo doesn’t match the data we took last year,” Jack said, furrowing his brow. He had hopes of completing his dissertation with this run of data, but for some reason the albedo he measured this year with the aging space telescope was completely out of synch with last year’s data. Furthermore, it didn’t match in very odd ways. If he had tainted the data some way or if the Hubble was failing again, all his four years of research could be wasted — or at least delayed another year or two. And damnit, Jack was ready to graduate and start making money. As much as an astronomer ever made, anyway.

  “Let’s not be rash, Jack.” Dr. Simms continued scanning the spectral graphs in the stack of printouts. “I know the Earth-based data won’t be as defined as this, but have you considered getting Sandi over at Flagstaff to make a measurement for you? At least then we would have something to compare the Hubble data to. You could implement that filtering technique of yours to clean it up some.”

  “Well, I hadn’t thought of Sandi,” Jack admitted. “But I did try it with my sixteen-inch setup at home. There just isn’t enough aperture for the measurement. I’ll call Sandi and see if she can help me out.”

  “Who knows, Jack, they may already have the data for some other measurement. Don’t give up yet.” Simms tapped one of the figures and chuckled, “But I don’t think this can be right. That is a lot of silicon. It looks like a computer factory.”

  Time: Present minus eight months — first European Mars probe failure

  It had taken Jack about four months to collect all of the data he needed. Fortunately, Dr. Sandi Thiaput at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, had made several measurements of the Martian albedo for another project the previous year and Sandi e-mailed the raw and post-processed data to him. But a new measurement had to be ordered and put in the experiment cycle. It was more than three months of merely waiting for his turn at the telescope. When the time came and the system had been set up to make new Martian surface albedo measurements, Jack logged on to the telescope control page and took over the system; he could manage the telescope at the Lowell Observatory from his office at Johns Hopkins University via the Internet.

  The measurement involved taking several exposures over several hours each and the need for multiple measurements required several nights of telescope time. Jack had lost about a week of sleep by the time the final data was crunched through his filtering algorithms and massaged into a form that made sense to the human eye.

  As the algorithm ground to a halt, the computer pinged to alert that it had completed processing the data. The ping startled Jack awake. The graph that was displayed on the screen really woke him up.

  “Dr. Simms! Dr. Simms!” Jack screamed as he burst into the rotund little professor’s office. “It’s real! The reflectance albedo of Mars has changed in the past year!”

  “Calm down, Mr. Hamilton, and let me see what you have there.” Dr. Simms nodded for the graduate student to sit as he took the stack of printouts from him. The graph on the top page showed the reflectance of Mars as of the previous year in black and the most recent measurement in red. The red and black curves were clearly different in both shape and magnitude.

  “You see what I mean? The planet is, well, brighter! And it has different compounds on the surface than before.” Jack rose from his seat, leaned over his advisor’s desk and tapped his finger on the red curve.

  “You’re certain this data is correct?” Dr. Simms asked, stroking his beard as he pondered the graph. “You sure Sandi isn’t just playing a trick on you of some sort? She’s been known to do that in the past. This looks… This can’t be! It’s either the most remarkable data in history or… but that’s the spectrum of… This can’t be right!” he said as he grabbed a materials reference book from his shelves.

  “You can go ahead and look it up if you want, Doctor, but I already did that,” Jack said. “It’s aluminum and lots of it! There’s also steel, carbon-based alloys of all sorts, silicon, and even what looks like gold. And most of all, it must be highly polished for the albedo to be that high. And there has to be lots of it!”

  “This can’t be right—”

  * * *

  “This can’t be right,” Shane muttered, glaring at the e-mailed copy of his orders.

  “What’s wrong, sir?” Captain Tyler asked. The two had been in opposite cubicles since Gries had returned from Iraq. From CO of an in-combat company to Assistant S-4 would look lousy on a review, but it was just a holding position while DA figured out what to do with him. Usually, that sort of thing was worked out months in advance of a captain’s promotion, but in Shane’s case, something had gotten in the works. He’d been on the horn to DA nearly daily, trying to find out where he was going — CGSC, a major’s position “commensurate with career progression” or what. In the meantime, he’d been Assistant Rear Detachment S-4 (Logistics) officer, Field Grade Officer of the Day at Division Headquarters and any other jack-shit detail a field grade officer could get shafted with.

  And now this.

  “Orders,” Shane said, angrily. “I’ve got my orders.”

  “And they are, sir?” Captain Tyler asked. He was the “real” assistant S-4, a supply officer who knew his career prospects were limited to maybe making full bird colonel in charge of an out-of-the-way depot instead of the strong possibility of stars. Despite that, the slight officer couldn’t resent Major Gries; the guy was just too damned nice.

  “Pentagon,” Gries said, steamingly pissed off. “Deputy Assistant Project Officer, Infantry, Defense Design and Acquisitions Bureau.”

  “What does that mean, sir?” Captain Tyler asked, carefully, aware that the normally laid-back major was right on the edge of going off.

  “I have no fucking idea,” Shane replied, sharply. “But it’s sure as hell not Command and General Staff.”

  Transcript of the Ret Ball, The Truth Nationwide Show

  Nonclass: Open Source

  Ret Ball: You are listening to the Truth Nationwide, the largest syndicated talk-radio program on late night across this great country. We have open callers tonight. Whatever topic you wish to discuss we want to hear it. Kim from Tampa, Florida, you are on the Truth Nationwide.

  Caller: Oh my gosh, it’s so great to be on your show, Ret. I listen to you every night and you really do have your thumb on the pulse of the world.

  Ret Ball: Thank you, Kim. What do you want to discuss tonight?

  Caller: Well, I was wondering about something. With the war over in the Middle East and all we don’t see much on the regular news anymore, but have you seen the stories about the European Space Agency and the Russians losing their Mars spacecraft? I mean, I saw a little blurb about it on CNN but there were no details. Why have we lost several probes from different countries all within the past year?

  Ret Ball: Ah yes, I have seen a few articles about this at SpaceWeekly.com but they explained away any unusual circumstances.

  Caller: I’ll have to check that article out, but isn’t that typical. They always explain away everything. Thanks, Ret, keep fighting the good fight.

  Ret Ball: Thank you, Kim. Let’s see, the next caller is, AHA! Our old friend and regular caller, Megiddo from underground. Go ahead old friend, you are telling the Truth Nationwide!

  Caller: Greetings and salutations, Ret! It’s good to hear that there are people out there with their eyes and ears open. Indeed, we’ve lost several probes at Mars and it’s only a matter of time before we start losing all of them there. Have you observed Mars lately, Ret?

  Ret Ball: Why I guess I haven’t, Megiddo. Why? Tell us what is going on, old friend.

  Caller: Well, I have been watching since the first European probe was lost and something about the little red planet looks… different.

  Ret Ball: Different? How so?

  Caller: The albedo is shifting, Ret, shifting in a way that is cle
arly the result of intelligent design. I’m telling you, Ret, the CIA knows about this and they’re covering it up, spending all their time trying to track me down instead of facing this critical threat to our very lives! Our solar system is under an invasion from an extraterrestrial intelligence as we speak. The government is never going to warn us in time to take action; it’s all up to you, Ret. This is your hour! You must spread the Truth, Ret!

  Ret Ball: I see. So the government is behind a cover-up of an ET invasion. Typical of them, Megiddo my old friend. Well, I’ll have to get my telescope out and go take a look at the red planet for myself! We will speak the Truth! No matter what forces come against us! You’re on the air…

  Time: Present minus four months — loss of first U.S. Mars probe

  “Well, Tom, you work for NASA, you tell us,” Roger said with a sly grin. “Alan and I are just lowly space defense contractors and wouldn’t know anything ’bout no NASA rocket science.”

  Dr. Roger P. Reynolds was born, raised, and educated in his home state of Alabama. Although he was well known in the space reconnaissance community as somewhat of a space systems engineering genius, outside of those classified rooms you would never know it. In his late thirties with a runner’s build, a more seemingly stereotypical educated Southern redneck you could never find — right down to his slow Southern drawl and his Roll Tide necktie and ball cap.

  “That’s right. Us here Huntsville Alabama hicks don’t know nuthin’ ’bout no rocket science,” Alan said in his best Southern drawl, laughing. Alan Davis, unlike Dr. Reynolds, whom he thought of as “his sidekick,” was only first generation redneck; his parents had moved to Huntsville when he was seven. Now at thirty-seven years old there were still hints of his Yankee dialect in his speech. Alan had stayed a North Alabamian and gone through college at the local university earning master’s degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering before “going corporate” and getting a job doing mechanical and electrical engineering on space defense projects for the Space and Missile Defense Command and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).