Von Neumann’s War

by John Ringo

  Evasive maneuvers at subsonic speeds were proving fruitless. The boomerangs had the ability to match speeds and simply attach to the fighters’ surfaces. One of the fighters behind him, Bull thought it was Lieutenant Granz’s, was surrounded by six of the ’rangs and seemed to simply come apart. The mostly aluminum and sheet metal fuselage and wings of the fighters stripped off like friable plastic and vanished in midair.

  “Stay fast Falcons, they’re closing!” Ridley warned. “Afterburner!” He kicked in his afterburner and yanked and banked to treetop height, then pulled up hard again, nearly blacking out. He couldn’t look back at these speeds; all he could do was hang in there. He was flying practically nap-of-the-earth at high Mach and the ground effect buffet was shaking his fighter apart.

  High inertia structural damage, the warning system cooed. Warning. Warning.

  “AAARRRGGGHHH… AAARRRUUUMMMPPHHH… UMMMP… UMMPPHH!” he grunted and squeezed his muscles as hard as he could trying to curl his toes right through the bottom of his boots. Ridley bit down hard on his bite block as a black spot appeared in the center of his vision and the tunnel started closing in. Then Thud!

  “WOOOHH… WOOOOHH… SHEEWWWWW!” he breathed and squeezed as another Thud and then Spang sounded through the aircraft. The fighter was already bucking from the air compression around it but these were solid hits. It sounded and felt like he was taking flak. Hell, he could be hitting treetops, he didn’t know. He pulled up a bit to try to get out of the ground buffet and there was another, hard, Spang!

  “Bull, I’m hit, I’m hit. Ejecting!” Rene screamed over the net.

  Ridley rolled his head slightly to the right and saw his wingman’s fighter fly into thousands of pieces just as his ejection seat fired. Almost at the same time he saw his own right wing fly apart and the ship immediately begin to go into “out of control” condition.

  Still not completely out of his tunnel vision and his mind hazy, Lieutenant Colonel Matthew “Bull” Ridley instinctively reached between his knees and pulled the eject handle. The process had been drilled into him and it had served him well once during the first Gulf War. The training would save him this time. Thwack, bang!

  Ridley was flung out of the fighter jet into the evening air at several hundred miles per hour just as the jet came apart below him. Fortunately, the fuel load didn’t detonate. The g load and the spin were worse than any roller coaster. To Ridley’s bemused astonishment and distaste, it seemed a lot worse than it did a decade and a half ago. Of course, that time he hadn’t been at damned near Mach One and below Angels Seven.

  Then his chute popped and things slowed down for a second. Ridley could see the chute from several of the twelve remaining NATO squadron pilots already deployed. He had made it much closer to the tree line than the others and most of them were a thousand or more feet above him. And then one by one their chutes began to fail. Ridley tracked the closest chute to him; he thought it was Rene. Then he realized why the chutes were failing.

  The boomerangs swarmed the chute and the dangling payload and almost as soon as the swarm surrounded the downed pilot, his chute collapsed and he began a plummet toward the ground. The plummet appeared to Ridley to be more of a controlled dragging and tossing, like a dog shaking a chew toy in its mouth.

  Ridley strained hard to pull his right leg upward so he could reach his pistol. Just as he grabbed for it something invisible jerked it right out of his hands. The carabiner on his right shoulder ripped away from the harness. Then his clothes seemed to explode and be pulled away from him. The invisible force that grabbed him flung him sideways, slamming him into two shiny boomerangs that ripped the buttons and hasps from his flightsuit, again tossing him upward.

  Ridley’s helmet thwacked hard into something. And then he felt a sharp stabbing pain in his left shoulder as he was spun face first into the top of a tree and into another alien probe. The faceshield of his helmet cracked and flew off as the buttons and other metal fasteners were ripped from it. The probe tossed him up and outward into another one and this one yanked the shoes right off his feet, breaking three bones in his left foot and dislocating all his toes on his right. With all the metal gone from his body, the probes left him plummeting downward.

  Fortunately, he was at damned near tree height. A final plummet through several thick tree limbs spinning and smacking him around ended with a skipping, scraping, bouncing, and rolling stop on the ground at the base of a tree. Ridley lay there on the edge of consciousness in pain from head to toe staring up at the sky.

  “So much for making colonel,” he muttered, then passed out.

  Chapter 14

  Roger had been as good as his word. In less than fourteen hours Gries and Cady had been flown over to France on one of the C-17s that was supporting the Stryker brigade out of Stewart. Only one battalion had been off-loaded and mated up with their vehicles but there was another already queued up to land.

  Shane had stopped by the local French “unified defense” headquarters, which was located in a small industrial building on the outskirts of Le Havre. Even in the worst conditions in Iraq, headquarters units had always been pretty button down and operational. When he went to the headquarters to try to get some intel on the situation, he’d found utter chaos. Nobody recognized his priority, or cared. Nobody seemed to have any idea what was happening or what to do about it if they did. He’d seen one three star French general wandering around the operations room asking everyone if they had a pencil sharpener; he seemed to have forgotten why he needed a pencil sharpened and was simply concentrating on a task he could perform.

  While there were plenty of people willing to talk, nobody seemed to have picked up any information about the probes. Repeatedly, units had reported contact and then gone off the air. Areas where probes had hit — they sort of had those mapped out through negatives: military and police units that didn’t respond — had lost all communications. Refugees that had made it to units still in contact reported that the probes were “eating” vehicles and even buildings. That was about all the intel they had.

  After a fruitless hour in the command center, Shane and Thomas, who had managed to use their priority to secure a Humvee, joined the convoy of Strykers and support vehicles headed to the Calais area. Nobody knew why they were heading to Calais and after seeing the chaos in the headquarters Shane was pretty sure even the French weren’t sure why the Strykers were heading to Calais. But those were the orders.

  The drive was unpleasant. Despite cops trying to stop people using the limited access highway, civilians were out in force. Everyone seemed to have some place to be they thought better than their homes in the emergency. The convoy was caught in a traffic jam for an hour outside Calais before the battalion commander ordered the combat companies to head off-road. The support vehicles and logistics could catch up later. They thumped down off the limited-access highway, cut through some fields ripe with winter wheat, hit a few side roads that weren’t quite as crowded and finally reached their assembly area, which was another light industrial park near the town of Coulogne.

  Cady drove the Humvee over to where the battalion staff was setting up a forward tactical operations center. Shane had paid his compliments to the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Walter Schon, when he’d first linked up with them in Le Havre and scrounged a vehicle. Schon was a bright officer with the tall, lean, clean-cut look that was de rigeur for modern infantry commanders. Shane had recalled a paper the commander had written in Command and General Staff on operational maneuver in the defense and had mentioned it, which the commander took as the intended compliment. They got along. They knew some of the same people and they both came out of the same school of modern military hard-knocks. Schon had had a company in Iraq as well and saw in Shane a fellow, only slightly junior, up-and-coming officer. He’d spent a few minutes picking Shane’s brain about the anticipated threat and had come away if anything more depressed.

  Now they were in position and Shane got out to watch the battalion man
euver into defensive positions. Nobody knew exactly what they were defending, as such. But they spread out with a defense geared on a generally easterly axis, the Strykers and a platoon of Abrams tanks that had been sent in support finding hide positions along the slight slope of a hill.

  “How do these things attack?” Major Forrester, the battalion operations officer, asked as Shane and Cady walked up to the huddle by the command Humvee. “Ray guns or what?”

  “Major Gries?” the colonel asked, looking over at the attached “expert.”

  “That’s what I’m here to try to find out, sir,” Shane admitted. “We’ve never seen any evidence of directed energy weapons, but the views we’ve gotten have all been on dead planets and the Moon. And not many of those, sir.”

  “We have gotten no word on their method of attack as well, sir,” Lieutenant Leroie said. The French liaison shrugged. “Every unit has gone off the air shortly after contact. Including the Euro-NATO F-16 squadron.”

  “What’s the update on the invader’s position?” the colonel asked Captain Carson, the intel officer.

  “The last update I got was when we left, sir,” the captain replied. “They’d apparently wiped out everything around Paris and Tours as well as entering Belgium and Germany. It’s all negative intel, though, just where units weren’t responding. They have picked up some swarms on radar, but they’re mostly staying low and the radar has all gone down, quick. So have radio, land-lines and even cell phones. We had an AWACS up with F-15 escort, but they took that out nearly four hours ago.”

  “Where was it?” Shane asked. “Where was it orbiting, that is?”

  “I dunno,” the intel officer replied, shrugging. “Why?”

  “Well, if they were in and around Paris and it wasn’t, why’d they go for it?” Shane asked.

  “Good question,” the colonel replied. “I guess we’ll have to find out, won’t we? How hard are these things to kill, do you think?”

  “They’re flying, sir,” Cady interjected. “Hard to hit even if what we have can kill them.”

  “We don’t have a clue what they’re made of,” Shane admitted. “It could be super unobtainium for all we know. No data at all, Colonel.”

  “I guess we’ll have to gather some,” the colonel said. “Major, I’d like to speak to you for a moment.”

  He put his hand on Shane’s shoulder and led him a bit away from the staff.

  “Did I put my foot wrong, sir?” Shane asked.

  “No,” Colonel Schon said. “Not at all. I wish we knew more, but that’s like wishing this wasn’t happening. No, it’s about your mission. Could you define it for me, again?”

  “To observe first contact, evaluate the threat and report,” Shane replied. “Basically, we’re an eyeball recon for the Neighborhood Watch team.”

  “Exactly,” the colonel said, his face working as he considered his words. “So, when we first make contact with these things, what are you going to do?”

  “Observe the effect of our weapons, sir,” Shane said, confused.

  “Major, every single unit that has made contact with these things has dropped out of the net shortly after first report,” the colonel pointed out. “What does that tell you?”

  “That they’re pretty damned bad news, sir,” Shane replied.

  “What it tells me is that we’re going to get butt-fucked,” Colonel Schon said. “Fast and hard. I don’t know how, but we will. And your job is to… ?”

  “Get the word back. Why, sir?” Shane said, his stomach sinking.

  “That’s right,” the colonel said. “Concentrate like fire on that mission, Major. Concentrate hard. Nobody, but nobody, has succeeded in it. And the United States has to know what these things are. How they fight. How we can fight them. I’m going to lose this battle, Major, sure as God made little green apples. Sending us here is pissing in the wind. My one and only hope is that while I may fail in my mission, you succeed. If you do, it might make losing my battalion, losing my troops, worthwhile. Do not fail me. Do you fully comprehend what I am saying.”

  “Yes, sir,” Shane replied, swallowing.

  “I didn’t have many Humvees to spare,” the colonel said. “I gave you that one for a reason. Use it.”

  “Yes, sir,” Shane repeated.

  “That’s all.”

  * * *

  “What was that all about, sir?” Cady asked when Shane waved him towards the Humvee.

  “The colonel was clarifying our role in this battle,” Shane said, sitting down in the passenger seat as Cady climbed in the driver’s.

  “And that is?” Cady asked.

  “Master Sergeant, I don’t often say this,” Shane replied. “But when we make contact, you just obey my orders like lightning. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” the master sergeant said, uneasily. “I usually have a fair understanding of them, anyway, sir.”

  “Well, here’s a portion of your commander’s intentions,” Shane said. “Keep a careful eye on how to drive the fuck away from here and get to someplace where we can make it back to the States. Or at least England. You work on that for the time being.”

  “And what will you be working on if I may ask, sir?” Cady said, trying not to smile.

  “I’ll just be sitting here and worrying like hell.”

  * * *

  “Lieutenant Colonel, can you hear me?”

  Ridley felt a searing pain in his left shoulder and decided to lie still and pray it would go away. His head still hurt, badly, and he had quit trying to cope with the pain in his feet and toes more than ten or more hours ago.

  “Bull! Can you hear me, sir?”

  “If I open my eyes there had better be somebody there and this not be a hallucination!” Ridley said. He cracked his eyelids slowly, and instinctively tried to hold his left hand in front of them to shade his eyes. That didn’t work. His left shoulder complained by sending a sharp twinge of pain through his upper body. “Fuck!”

  “Sir, don’t move until we know how bad you are,” Rene said.

  “Rene! I thought you were dead?”

  “Uh, yes, sir, same goes for you. Although, you are the first survivor I’ve been able to find.” Rene leaned slowly over Ridley and surveyed him. His helmet was cracked completely through all the way from the front of his forehead to the back of his neck. Rene separated the helmet and threw it aside. There was a tree limb about a half-inch in diameter sticking out of Ridley’s left shoulder and his upper left side was covered in blood, but he didn’t seem to be bleeding any longer. Rene slowly removed Ridley’s socks. His left foot was swollen and likely broken and three of his toes on his right foot were turning brown and blue.

  “You look rough, sir.” Rene straightened and adjusted the makeshift sling around his left arm.

  “Shit, Rene, you don’t look so hot either.” Ridley opened his eyes completely and waited for his vision to adjust. He wiggled his fingers on both hands and realized he had complete control over his right arm and hand. He moved both legs and wiggled his toes — that hurt like hell.

  “I’m not sure you should move, Bull.”

  “Aw shit, just superficial stuff, I think.” Ridley adjusted the way he was lying on the ground and then forced himself to a sitting position with his back to the tree. He rolled his neck left and looked at the stick protruding his left shoulder. “Reckon I ought to pull that out?”

  “No, sir, I wouldn’t do that. It might start bleeding again. From the looks of it you lost a good bit of blood from it going in.” Rene sat down and leaned against the tree beside the lieutenant colonel.

  “How bad are you, Rene?”

  “Left collarbone is broken and I have some cracked ribs I think. My right knee is twisted pretty badly, but I can walk. My left eye is hard to keep open but I’m managing it.”

  “Yeah, you look rosy. I don’t know if I can walk or not, but I can try if we need to.” Ridley felt the stick in his shoulder and decided to leave it the hell alone.

  “That’s just
it, Bull. I’m not sure where we would go.” Rene sighed and closed his eyes for a moment.

  “Any idea where we are?”

  “Yeah, I think we’re about eighty kilometers north of Bethune and maybe ten or twenty south of Calais.”

  “What about the aliens? You seen any since you been on the ground?” Ridley felt through his torn garments hoping to find water or an MRE or something — no luck.

  “None. They all seem to have headed off to the east right after we went down.”

  “Hmmm. Hey, tell me something. Just how the hell did you survive that fall?” Ridley tried to grin.

  “I was tossed into one of those things chest first. I bear-hugged it and hung on for dear life, until it crashed into the treetops. I fell from there. And you?”

  “Hell if I know!” Ridley laughed and then grimaced in pain.

  The two men rested in silence against the tree for a few minutes more. Ridley finally decided to test his strength and forced himself up to his feet. He could put all his weight on his right foot with pain that he could endure from his toes, which were mostly numb now. But his left foot would not support his weight for more than a few seconds without sending unbearable pain up his body. Ridley sat back down.

  “Rene, you think you could tie a splint around my foot with that bum collarbone of yours?”

  “We’ll do what we can, sir.”

  Ten minutes later the two men were hobbling along through the woods of France, trying to make their way north toward Calais. They had been told that would be the rearward evacuation point for the attack. Ridley leaned heavily on the rough walking stick that Rene had found for him, but was able to walk slowly. At their present pace they figured to reach Calais in a couple hours, but with any luck they would find help long before that.