Von Neumann’s War

by John Ringo

  “Why would all the probes there suddenly quit workin’?” Roger said more seriously as he swirled the pitcher of beer in front of him and started to pour more into his glass. The Hooters’ waitress passing by slapped him on the hand and took the pitcher away before he could pour a drop.

  “That’s my job,” the slim brunette said.

  “Ha, serious job security issues you got there, honey,” Alan said with a laugh as he offered his empty beer glass up as well. “Yeah, Tom,” he continued. “You tell us how that could happen.”

  Tom leaned back on his stool and took a big draw from his beer glass. “Well, personally, I think we should nuke Mars now. There ain’t no electromagnetic phenomena or anything that could do it. Haylfahr, iffin’ it wore solar flares or somethin’, it’d be affecting satellites here at Earth,” he said in his horrible attempt at an Alabama accent.

  Thomas Conley Powell, Ph.D., was a Californian only recently transplanted to North Alabama. Tom was the elderly “gray beard” of the bunch. In his early fifties and with slightly graying dark hair he represented an archetype of overeducated academician who would rather spend his time solving fourth order sets of coupled differential equations than eating when he was hungry. He was originally from the California Institute of Technology and had been transferred from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. So, the Alabama “hicks” had to give the “expert rocket scientist from JPL” a hard time.

  “ ‘I don’t know’ is the only answer I can come up with, guys,” he said seriously. “And you’re not the only ones asking, trust me.” With that, Tom shrugged and hit his beer again.

  “You know, I’ve been catchin’ up on some of my newsgroups the past few days,” Roger mused. “And the weirdest thing is that some of the amateur astronomy groups are saying that the actual color of Mars is changing. Now, I don’t know that I believe that since that would require some major changes in either the surface or the atmosphere of the planet.” Roger grabbed a buffalo wing by both ends and twisted it counterclockwise, then pulled both bones from it leaving nothing but the meat of the chicken wing in one strip. He dipped it in the hot sauce and then in the ranch dressing in front of him. “I guess we could calculate the surface change requirements, if we knew the extent of change that was being claimed.”

  “I don’t think I believe that shit,” Alan replied.

  “No, the calcuflation fwool be feasy,” Roger said with a mouthful of buffalo wing.

  “No, you idiot,” Alan said. “I don’t believe the color of Mars is changing.”

  “Well, that part I’m not sure about either. But I know that we ain’t talking to any of our probes there anymore.” Tom tried the trick with a wing and it squirted out of his hands and onto the floor. “Shit!”

  “I got it,” their waitress said, swaying over to wipe up Tom’s mess.

  “All I know is that the newsgroups are saying that there is a visible difference in the appearance of Mars.” Roger demonstrated the wing trick once again for Tom. “And, yeah, the guys on the newsgroups are amateurs, but they’re not stupid and they can’t all be nuts. ‘Amateur’ astronomers have better hardware than most professionals did in the 1960s and even later.”

  “Well, then we should try to calculate the significance of that change.” Alan demonstrated the trick also, then washed down the wing with beer. “They don’t have wings at JPL? Hell, Tom, it ain’t rocket science.”

  “I’ll never figure that out,” Tom said ruefully. He picked up his next wing and simply bit into it.

  “Are y’all talkin’ ’bout Mars?” their regular waitress asked with a smile as she approached, picked up the pitcher, and began refilling the glasses.

  “Yeah, Rog here thinks its changing colors on us,” Alan said.

  “Oh, it is!” the waitress replied. The three men stopped what they were doing and gave their undivided attention to the young blonde Hooters’ waitress — as if they hadn’t been already. She was pleasantly stacked, with shoulder length hair, blue eyes and long legs that ran straight up to a nice pair of assets. Her nametag read: Traci. It was also hard to read since it pointed more or less straight up.

  “How you know that?” Tom asked.

  “Oh, my advisor and I looked at it last night in PH 489,” the blonde said nonchalantly, as she refilled their glasses. “Y’all want another pitcher or anything?”

  “Sure, and some more wings… PH 489?” Alan said, scratching his head.

  “PH 489… hey, ain’t that a senior level special topics class?” Roger asked.

  “ORDER IN!” Traci yelled as she slid the order for the wings down a wire into the kitchen. “Yeah, it’s a senior level physics elective. I’m helping with the Astronomy for Poets class in order to get time on the ten-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope in the UAH observatory. After the freshman business and art majors are through, I use the telescope to make some real observations. I’ve been watchin’ Mars for my project. I’ve got about two semesters worth of data.”

  “Traci,” Tom said, peering at the girl’s breast-perched nametag. “I remember you. You’re a physics major or an optics major or something like that?”

  “Tom, you never pay attention,” Roger said with a smile. “That’s the whole problem with NASA; attention to detail. She’s an astrophysics grad working on her master’s. So, you’ve been watchin’ the red planet, hey. What have you found — any canals or little green men, little funny lookin’, big-headed aliens that go aaackk aaacckk aaack?”

  “You’re funny,” Traci said, smiling thinly. “Over the period of this semester I haven’t noted any visible difference. But if you take images of Mars from a semester ago then compare it to the way it looks now, it’s different.”

  “How so?” Roger asked.

  “It’s less red,” Traci said definitely. “The color has blue-shifted significantly. It looks more gray now. It might be my imagination but I think the albedo is up, too. Too bad the University At Home can’t afford a real spectrometer, ’cause I’d really like to see the detailed spectral content from Mars, like down to at least tens of nanometer resolution.” She paused in thought, then winked at Tom, springing up and down so her large and obviously unnatural breasts bounced charmingly. “If there are big-tentacled aliens coming to town, do you think they’ll like my hot and spicies?”

  “Uh…” Tom said, his higher brain functions momentarily circumvented.

  “Traci, could I get copies of those im-im-images?” Roger asked. He was just a tad more suave than his fellows, but even he stumbled over “images.” The two large images in his mind at present had nothing to do with Mars.

  “Sure,” Traci said, just as seriously. “What’s your e-mail address?”

  “Thanks.” Roger dug a business card out of his shirt pocket and handed it to her.

  “Nuke Mars NOW!” Tom said, coming abruptly back to the moment. “Wait a minute. The University At Home?”

  “Never mind him, Traci,” Alan said with a grin. “He’s a foreigner from the left coast. They’re not all that swift iffin’ you know what I mean.”

  “I forget you’re from California, Doctor Powell,” the waitress cooed, causing another meltdown. “I meant the University of Alabama in Huntsville or UAH. We affectionately refer to it around these parts as—”

  “The University At Home,” Roger and Alan chimed in.

  “I get it,” Tom said, grinning.

  “I’m so glad for you,” Traci replied, widening her eyes in mock surprise. “After all, it ain’t rocket science.”

  Roger and Alan tried not to fall off their stools laughing as the waitress bounced over to get their order. Tom just sighed.

  Chapter 2

  Time: Present — all contact with Mars probes lost

  “Well, sir,” the president’s science advisor George Fines explained, “scientists at the Space Telescope Science Institute have actually discovered that the bolometric albedo — that is what astronomers call the spectral content or colors of a planetary image — of Mars has chang
ed over the past year dramatically. But what is even more alarming is that within the past month it has changed at an incredible rate. The current spectrum when compared to the previous one shows that there are now many different metals, gases, and other compounds on the surface and in the atmosphere. This is an unprecedented change.”

  “Yes, George. I realize that, but what does it mean?” President Colby replied as he looked out the window of the Oval Office. He was a businessman — top of his class at Harvard. Economic recessions, inflation, hell, even depressions, he could handle. Planets changing colors during his administration was something he wasn’t sure he was prepared for. “How’s this going to affect us? I’m interested and all that, but it’s not like there’s a great big comet headed this way that only Bruce Willis can save us from…”

  “If I may, Mr. President,” NASA Director Jess Obannon interjected. “The planet got shiny all of the sudden. We don’t know why. Then we started losing probes. That… doesn’t look like coincidence.”

  “You’re saying… what?” the President asked. “Aliens? Little green men?”

  “We don’t know, Mr. President,” the science advisor said, frowning. “That’s the problem.”

  “Mr. President, we’re trying to gather more data. But we need more time. And, we need a closer look than we can get with Earth-based telescopes.” Obannon rubbed his bald head and looked nervously at the President’s back. “But, so far we can think of no natural cause for this.”

  The President rolled up his left sleeve, then began with his right as he turned to face the NASA bureaucrat.

  “All right then, I want this gagged. Nobody, and I mean nobody leaks this info to the public yet. Anybody that knows about it gets read the National Security Act and the pertinent Executive gag orders. I mean it. The economy is flaky enough as it is right now. No telling what rumors about Mars exploding or little green men will do to the NASDAQ and the Exchange.”

  “Mr. President, we might need other astronomers and planetary scientists to help figure this out,” the NASA administrator said. “If it’s classified we might not be able to convince the best ones to help.”

  Fines had dealt with the planetary science community long enough to know that NASA “scientists” didn’t believe in secrets except when it came to their personal publications. Most of them hated the military and the intelligence community and wouldn’t work and play well with them. He remembered the example of a few years before when the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA, then NIMA) told them that they had found the failed Mars polar lander in some of the other Mars orbiters’ imagery and that it was sitting upright on its landing struts. NASA scientists didn’t believe it because nobody is smarter than NASA scientists — and the NASA scientists said it was impossible to make such claims from the data available. NASA administrators at the Office of Space Science didn’t care or acknowledge that the NGA had spent a mammoth Cold War budget developing spy satellite image analysis techniques that were decades beyond those developed on NASA’s shoestring budget. But since they were not NASA, NGA couldn’t know what they were talking about — the “not invented here” syndrome.

  Fines knew that NASA scientists were not who he needed. He wanted the best scientists, so he knew not to look to the stagnant “white collar welfare” technical community. There were some smart guys at NASA, but most of them were involved with the nation’s spy organizations in some form or other. Brains go where the money is and for decades NASA’s budget was much smaller than the intelligence community’s.

  “Mr. President, I think we need the space reconnaissance community’s help,” the science advisor suggested.

  The President tapped his phone, “Judy, get me my NSA, the DCI, and the DNRO in my office right now, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, thanks.” He smiled at Fines. “You’re right, George. Now, let’s get this thing quieted down, shall we?” The President smiled and showed the science advisor and the NASA administrator the door.

  His phone buzzed as he sat back down in his chair. “Yes, Judy?”

  “Mr. President, the national security advisor is here to see you. Should I change your one o’clock meeting with Ambassador Chiaz?”

  “Yes, see if you can delay him until sometime next week, will you? And send Vicki in.”

  “Right away, Mr. President.”

  “Oh, Judy, as soon as the Chairman, the DCI and DNRO get here, send them in.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  * * *

  “Mr. President, from the data that we have it’s my conclusion that this is some sort of preparation for invasion,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs stated.

  “Really, Kevin? How would we know that?” Dr. Vicki Johnson, the national security advisor asked. “What if it turns out to be a natural phenomenon? Or if it’s unnatural, then what if they’re just moving in or building a home? If it’s an alien race, they might prefer Mars.”

  “Vicki,” the President interrupted. “I don’t know which thought scares me most. Whether we’re talking about preparations for attack or just moving in, we might still be talking about strangers — aliens — moving into our neighborhood. And we know absolutely nothing about them.”

  “We need to know more about what is going on, Mr. President,” the national security advisor commented. “But how to get that information is the hard part. Mars is a long way away from Earth.”

  “John, what do you think?” The President turned to the director of Central Intelligence. “Is there a way to get the recon we need?”

  “Not today, not tomorrow, hell, Mr. President, not even this month, maybe not even this year. We would need to complete a Mars satellite design and build and mission implementation in an extremely compressed schedule. I don’t know much, if anything, about that. What do you think, Mike?” he asked the director of the National Reconnaissance Office. NRO handled all the satellites used by the intelligence and military branches and developed the new technologies for the next generation systems.

  “I don’t know, either, Mr. President,” the DNRO replied. “I would like a couple of weeks to have my guys run some numbers. We would need some budget for this and I mean serious budget.”

  “Well, figure it out,” the President said. “But if they’re preparing for something, do we have two weeks? Hurry. Vicki, John, Kevin, I want y’all to make sure that NRO gets whatever support they need on this. For now this is to be kept quiet. Got it?”

  * * *

  “Major Shane Gries reporting for duty,” Shane said, saluting the Navy captain behind the desk. The officer, the equivalent of a full colonel in the Army, which meant a senior division staff officer or brigade commander, occupied just one cubicle in the large room in the bowels of the Pentagon, indicative of just how important the “Bureau” was considered by the real powers in the building. The desk itself had a high-end monitor on it with some sort of blueprint displayed and was just about covered in paper. Shane didn’t even recognize most of the forms on the desk but he did see that most had Top Secret cover sheets.

  “Welcome, welcome,” the officer said, returning the salute lazily. “I’m Captain Sparling, as you can see from that plaque on my overloaded desk. Welcome to Chaos Central. I’ve been eagerly awaiting your arrival, Major. Nay, I can only say how ecstatic I am to see you. Do you like traveling commercial?”

  “I can hang, sir,” Gries said, trying not to shake his head at the greeting. He’d expected the usual “you’ve joined the best outfit in the division” speech. Or fleet, he supposed, given that his new boss was Navy. Not “I’m ecstatic to see you.” That had a note of… foreboding.

  “I’ll give you the quickest run-down in history, Major,” the captain said, spinning his computer chair back and forth. Sparling was a short, frankly rotund, officer, which was very unusual to find in the modern military, wearing rather rumpled undress blues. He was balding and entirely unprepossessing, but Shane realized after just a moment that he had about the sharpest eyes the major had ever seen. He gave an i
mpression of casual unconcern, but Shane could tell that there was a mind behind those eyes going a mile a minute.

  “The mission of this bureau is simple in concept,” Sparling said, smiling broadly. “So simple I’m sure you can keep up, even if I use words of more than two syllables. We’re here to look at projects that have reached the preacquisition stage and determine if they have ‘real world’ flaws. There are two sides to that, Major. The first is that we definitely don’t want anything going out to the forces that is not enhancing to their mission. The second is equally important. The U.S. is a world master in combat because we have good training and we have the best damned technology in the world. Each new system that is an enhancement spreads the gap between us and the rest of the world. You ever gotten something new and gone ‘Crap, I wish I had this last week when it would have helped’, Major?”

  Shane thought about the squad tac-net that they’d gotten just before deploying. It had taken about a week for the troops to really understand it and after that they’d used it to communicate in ways that hadn’t been possible days before. He knew guys had been saved by that deceptively simple system; it was far more than just a radio. Then there were some of the new field medical items, like the blood clotter that was made from shrimp shells, that had saved more lives. But he just nodded, continuing to look the officer in the eye calmly.

  “You have no idea how many great ideas the Beltway Bandits think up,” Sparling continued, grinning widely. “There are dozens, hundreds, thousands of febrile, bright young minds scattered all over the United States and the world, trying to come up with the ‘killer app’ for the United States military. Which, next to mass market items, is the largest single market in the world. One item that really catches on and gets wide deployment can make or break a company and certainly those bright young men, and women. If the product gets picked up, they get bonuses and a nice house in the Caymans. If it tanks, they get ‘downsized’ and have to go into academia where they don’t get the house in the Caymans. With me still, Major?”