Von Neumann’s War

by John Ringo

  Shane and Cady slowed to a walk as they approached the soldiers and held up their hands as they walked forward.

  “Please enter the car, sir,” a British private said politely, gesturing at the open door. “Buses are being shuttled down to—”

  “Bad idea,” Shane said. “Private, I’m Major Gries with the Neighborhood Watch organization. I need to talk to your officer right GOD damned now.”

  “Sir, we’re supposed to—”

  “I said right now, Private,” Shane snapped.

  “Yes, sir,” the soldier replied unhappily. “Sergeant!”

  * * *

  “Leftenant Porter,” the lieutenant in charge of the demolition squad said, saluting the disheveled American major in ripped uniform and pink and blue running shoes. “Royal Sappers. Pleased to make your acquaintance, sir, but—”

  “We don’t have time, Leftenant,” Shane said, saluting in return. “Do you have commo to higher?”

  “Yes, sir, there’s a phone—”

  “Get me to it,” Shane said. “And get ready to pull out. You do not want to be here even as we speak.”

  * * *

  “Lieutenant Colonel Forsythe, Royal Engineers. To whom am I speaking?”

  “Colonel, this is Major Shane Gries, Neighborhood Watch,” Shane said, sighing to finally be in contact. “Sir, you need to pull out your demo squads, right now, sir. We were present for the assault on the Stryker battalion as observers. If we don’t make it, please immediately inform the Neighborhood Watch group that the probes simply eat formed metal and then reproduce. That is their only attack. But, sir, your men are going to die down here. The probes rip rebar right out of concrete walls and will eat those big pipes as soon as they find them, flooding this tunnel. And they’re going to find this tunnel, soon, sir. They also pluck bullets fired directly at them right out of the air. They appear to ignore carbon — the master sergeant killed one with a stick. But, sir, this tunnel is about to start flooding as soon as one of those things finds a pipe. Sir, is this clear, sir?”

  There was a pause and then a sigh.

  “Thank you, Major, yes that is clear,” the colonel replied. “My orders, however, are also clear. The pipes have to be rigged. However, I will give orders that you are to be brought to the surface as rapidly as humanly possible. And I will send on your observations. That is the first clear intelligence that we have gathered on their attack method. Did anything work?”

  “Shooting them didn’t, sir,” Shane said. “There’s a type of bullet I saw that might work, but…, sir, I don’t have time for this, sir.”

  “Agreed, Major,” the colonel replied. “Give me the leftenant.”

  * * *

  “Was it bad over there, sir?” the private driving the truck asked.

  The vehicle was a railway support truck that ran on the rails of the bed. As they drove down the tunnel, Shane could see soldiers rigging pipes every mile or so. It seemed like overkill. And unnecessary.

  “It defies description, son,” Cady responded for him. “And I’d put your foot down if I were you.”

  “Why, Master Sergeant?” the private asked nervously.

  “Because these things eat metal, Private Thorgate,” Shane replied distantly. “And as soon as they get in the tunnel and find one of those pipes on the French side, it’s going to flood. How well can you hold your breath?”

  “Not well, sir,” the private said, pushing his foot down. “Sir, all those sappers—”

  “Are dead as yesterday’s news,” Shane replied.

  “Oh fuck,” Cady said, quietly.

  Shane looked over his shoulder and could see lights going off behind them in a shower of sparks. But in the sparks he could see, as well, a wall of water.

  “Floor it!” Cady yelled, pushing his foot down over the private’s and shoving the accelerator of the truck all the way down.

  “The sappers!”

  “They’re dead!” Shane yelled. “And so are we if we don’t make it out of this damned thing!”

  “Probes,” Cady said, looking over his shoulder. There was no “driving” the truck; it was on rails. All you had to do was push the accelerator or the brake. The private had taken a look over his shoulder and made the decision not to try to use the brake.

  Shane looked back and he could see one of them. But it seemed to be caught in the water rather than flying or… assimilating. As he watched it was slammed against the wall of the railbed and began to come apart like a child’s toy. He got a brief glimpse of the interior, which was just so much metal bits. He also could see bodies being washed on the wave, which was still down in the railbed. Of course, so were they. And the bodies were being torn apart just like the probe. Some of them were civilians from the clothing, but others were in uniform. The sappers hadn’t made it out.

  The water got closer and closer despite the fact that the truck was hurtling along at well over a hundred miles per hour. But just as it seemed the water would catch up — it was less than thirty meters behind — they entered the broad crossover cavern and it spread out through the cavern, receding in the background as they started to climb up the slope to light and air.

  They rocketed out of the mouth of the tunnel doing nearly a hundred and twenty and as soon as they were out Cady took his foot off the pedal.

  “I’m getting damned tired of running away from these things,” the master sergeant said, angrily.

  “Then figure out a way to fight back,” Shane said.

  * * *

  The C-130 lifted from London just as the probes began to spread across the English Channel. The giant cargo plane was filled with shell-shocked and wounded soldiers and civilians packed in as tight as they could fit. Gries and Cady made their way to the back of the plane, taking stock of the people on board and gathering intel from their stories. As they made it to the back of the plane Shane noticed in the dim lighting of the cabin a lieutenant colonel in flight gear with a bloody stick poking out of his left shoulder. The man looked like he had seen better days. Shane saluted him.

  “Major Shane Gries, sir. This is Master Sergeant Cady.”

  “Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Ridley.” Ridley half saluted the major and the master sergeant. “This Belgian fellow here is Flight-Lieutenant Rene Lejeune.”

  “Sir, if you don’t mind my saying, you look as though you could use some medical attention.” Gries nodded to the stick.

  “Well, they promised to take that damned thing out in London, but I guess it’s been in there for more than a day now so it can wait till we get to the States,” the lieutenant colonel said dryly.

  “What happened to you, sir?” Gries asked.

  * * *

  Ret Ball: We have yet to hear any word from Europe. We can only pray that the NATO troops there are holding their own. Next caller, Frank from Albuquerque, you’re on the Truth Nationwide.

  Caller: Hi, Ret! The media is only coming across on local stations and over Internet broadcasts! My satellite dish gets no signal and my cable company only has the local channels active. I don’t think the infrastructure is there any longer to get the news from around the world. Are we being pushed back to the pretechnology era?

  Ret Ball: That is a really good question, Frank. Are we? What is the intent of this alien threat? Aha, Megiddo is on line two. Go ahead Megiddo, old friend, you are on the Truth Nationwide.

  Caller: Hello, Ret. I’ve been listening to all of the military channels with my spectrum analysis equipment and I can tell you that the units that were deployed have stopped transmitting.

  Ret Ball: How could you know that, Megiddo? The forces were deployed in Europe.

  Caller: Oh that, I’ve been DXing by listening to signals bouncing off the ionosphere. I’m sure others out there have noticed this. Not long after the deployment there was plenty of encrypted communication taking place. But now… there is nothing.

  Ret Ball: And why do you think that is, Megiddo?

  Caller: I think it’s obvious, Ret. Those units no lon
ger exist; they have been destroyed.

  Chapter 16

  “They wanted to keep you in Washington,” Roger said as Shane settled into the chair in the hastily made conference room. The “core” of the Neighborhood Watch group was seated around the table, which was really a dining table, to debrief the two soldiers. “But we convinced them you’d be better utilized giving us the skinny directly.”

  “Thanks,” Shane said, sighing. “I really don’t want to be in D.C. when those things get here.”

  “I don’t know where I want to be,” Cady interjected. He’d gotten a new uniform and a new set of sergeant major’s insignia to go with it. “Maybe on a mountain somewhere in a log cabin with some wooden farming implements.”

  “What’s the word on England?” Shane asked, nodding at the sergeant major’s comment.

  “You made it out of England just in time,” Tom answered somberly. “They crossed the Channel when your flight was still in the air. All contact has been lost with the south of England and it’s spreading north. All of northern France, half of Germany, all of Belgium and the Netherlands are gone.”

  “Belgium, huh. I guess Rene will be staying with us for while,” Shane said. Cady nodded in agreement.

  “Who’s Rene?” Alan asked.

  “Long story, you’ll meet him sooner or later, but he was one of the two surviving pilots of the northern aerial assault. He and USAF Lieutenant Colonel Ridley were both part of the NATO-Euro Falcons. They were on the plane with us from London. They were really banged up. I told him they should come visit us when they were better.”

  “They had a rough go of it,” Cady added.

  “Go ahead and tell us what you saw,” Roger said, nodding at Shane and turning on a digital recorder. “Start from when you first saw the probes. When you’re done, we’ll get to the questions. We’ll send the recording out on the net so everybody can get a look at it. There’s not going to be any securing data from this point on; that decision has already been made. But you’re the only people we can find who got an accurate look at the probes and made it back to tell about it.”

  Shane related the story of the fallen Stryker battalion and the flight through the tunnel, shaking his head as he did.

  “I didn’t want to just run away,” he admitted. “But Colonel Schon made it pretty clear that that was my job.”

  “That’s what he was telling you,” Cady said, “when he drew you aside.”

  “Yeah,” Shane replied. “That’s what he was telling me.”

  “And he was right,” Roger said firmly. “There’s important stuff in what you just described.”

  “How long do you think it took those two to twin?” Tom asked. “It sounds like mitosis, just like a bacteria.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Shane admitted. “It was just like watching a cell divide. I wasn’t timing it but maybe thirty seconds, a minute. No more.”

  “How close did they get?” Tom asked, his eyes narrowed.

  “What do you mean?” the sergeant major asked.

  “How far away were they from the metal when they… sucked it up?” Tom expanded.

  “Oh,” Shane said, frowning. “Not far. They got down to within a meter or so when they were ripping apart the Humvee. I… you know, I never saw them… pull from farther away than a meter or two.”

  “They were right above head height when they attacked me,” Cady said. “They seemed to stay down at that level most of the time when they were… searching, I guess.”

  “Two meters or so?” Tom said, nodding. “Interesting.”

  “You think the… what is going on with that?” Roger asked. “Tractor field?”

  “Something like that,” Tom said, nodding again. “Call it that for now. How is the sixty million dollar question. But it appears to be range limited.”

  “Yeah, point,” Roger said, making a note.

  “And they were only going for formed metal?” Alan asked.

  “Yeah,” Cady said. “But they went for everything. I mean, they were ripping the dog tags off so fast people were getting their heads cut off.”

  “No dog tags,” Roger said, making a note.

  “Way beyond that,” Shane replied. “They ripped out everything. Wiring, torn-apart cars. And you should hear Lieutenant Colonel Ridley describe how they tore apart their F-16s.”

  “They really liked the armor on the tanks,” Cady pointed out.

  “Heavy metals,” Tom said, nodding. “Makes sense. Heavy metals are going to be universally in short supply due to the way they’re made.”

  “Well, all you need is a lot of heat, right?” Cady asked. “You sort of melt it and roll it out—”

  “He means how the atoms are made,” Roger said, smiling slightly. “Not how you form the metal. You know how atoms are made?”

  “No,” Shane admitted. “Does it matter?”

  “If they need heavy metals it might,” Roger admitted. “All atoms except hydrogen are formed by fusion. Two hydrogen nuclei fuse in a star to form a proton, a neutron, a positron, and a neutrino. This picks up another hydrogen nucleus running around and there you have it — helium. Our sun is currently in the proton-proton cycle. The lower weight stuff, up to iron, is formed just like that in other still fairly common regular stars that are in the CNO cycle. Uh, that is for carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. These CNO stars are more massive than our sun. Above iron, though, it takes a supernova. So, the heavier the metal, the less likely it is to be produced. Some of them are more likely, on a quantum level, than others as well. But it makes sense that if they have to use certain materials in their production, reproduction whatever, that they’d concentrate on heavy metals.”

  “They like it,” Shane said. “But they seem to go for everything. I mean, they stole the sergeant major’s battalion coin and my ring. They left the stone, though. It was a synthetic ruby.”

  “And that doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Alan pointed out. “Ruby’s aluminum oxide. They were working with titanium oxide on the moon. Why use ores there and not here? I mean, there’s iron in blood, lots of it. Why not rip that right out of our bodies?”

  “They’ve got all this formed metal,” Tom said, shrugging. “Why bother? And there’s as much concentration of iron in soil as in blood. They might get around to strip mining iron out of the very soil in time, it sounds like they have the ability, but why bother? There’s more iron in a knife than in the human body. They fed on the damaged probe?”

  “Yeah,” Shane said, nodding.

  “And another one,” the sergeant major interjected. “I don’t know what happened with that. It was right after we were leaving the town. I don’t think you saw it, Major. There were two of them attacking another one. Happened so quick I didn’t bother to point it out and we were sort of hurrying at the time.”

  “Why?” Roger asked, a crease appearing between his eyes.

  “Well, we’d just gotten new shoes…” Cady said, his face sober as a judge.

  “No,” Roger said with a sigh. “Why were they attacking it? Was it damaged?”

  “It didn’t look that way,” Cady replied, smiling at having gotten a yank in on the eggheads. “They were all three flying along, but they took it apart like a lobster.”

  “That’s odd,” Tom said, frowning.

  “That’s what I thought,” the sergeant major said, shrugging. “But they ate it.”

  “And they appear to be ignoring carbon,” Roger said, making a note on the sergeant major’s observation. “They need that for steel at least.”

  “It’s everywhere,” Tom said, shrugging. “And they don’t need much since they don’t appear to be using composites or plastics. They also appear to be ignoring silica. You mentioned broken windows scattered on the street.”

  “In the town where we got the shoes,” Shane said, nodding. “They didn’t really touch most of our gear. It was all screwed up, mind you. They’d even ripped open the MRE pouches, which kind of confused me until I remembered they had metal
in them. But the plastic and cloth was all there.”

  “So how do we attack them?” Roger asked.

  “Sticks,” Cady said. “I’m getting me one of those staff things.”

  “Not a winning option, I fear,” Shane pointed out.

  “Bullets don’t work,” Cady said. “I think what was happening was they were just eating them out of the air. I don’t know how, bullets go damned fast.”

  “They intercepted the Mars probe at somewhere around fifteen kps,” Tom replied dryly. “That’s much faster than any bullet, Sergeant Major.”

  “You know, that is interesting because Ridley said that the Sidewinders were somewhat effective and that the probes didn’t pluck them out of the air as easy. He also said their guns were ineffective. Why would that be?” Gries asked.

  “Don’t know, we need to talk to him. But you know bullets don’t maneuver and missiles do… hmmm?” Tom pondered and rubbed his beard.

  “But they don’t go for plastics,” Alan said. “And they don’t appear to… see a threat to them. The sergeant major hit them with a stick. Rubber bullets?”

  “That’s an idea,” Roger said, making another note. “More.”

  “I was thinking about the sergeant major’s wallet…” Shane said, then paused uncertainly.

  “Go on,” Roger said, his eyes narrowing.

  “They picked it up,” Shane went on, his eyes unfocussed. “Because there was metal in it. And I remembered thinking I wished it was a bomb…”

  “They’d just rip out the detonator,” the sergeant major said. “They’re made of metal.”

  “But…” Shane said, still looking at the far wall. “What if you had say a slab of C-4 with a friction detonator in it. All plastic or whatever. Hell, a match with some gunpowder. Attach a sort of pin to it, something solid metal like the sergeant major’s wallet…”