Von Neumann’s War

by John Ringo

  “They pick it up,” Alan said excitedly, “pull the pin for you and… BOOM!”

  “Okay, now we have a weapon,” Roger said, making another note. “An anti-probe… mine?”

  “Yeah, a mine,” Shane said, nodding.

  “You could throw them,” the sergeant major said. “Slingshots…”

  “Potato guns,” Alan said, grinning. “I’m not sure you’d want a lot of velocity on them.”

  “Proximity detonators,” Tom said. “If your tanks or whatever fired explosive rounds with proximity detonators, the probes would catch them in the air and blow up. You’d have to tinker with the timing, but…”

  “Good,” Roger said, making more notes. “This is good.”

  “Those super bullets,” Cady said. “You said they were made from ceramic, right?”

  “They can be made from metal,” Roger said. “But they’re usually ceramic.”

  “They won’t intercept those,” Cady pointed out.

  “Put a bit of metal in them and they might fly right into them,” Alan said.

  “They’d probably try to match velocity,” Tom pointed out. “Like they did with the probes. Our probes, that is.”

  “Be interesting to see them try,” Alan replied. “In atmosphere.”

  “Ah,” Tom said, nodding. “Good point. That’s probably why they couldn’t stop the Sidewinders.”

  “Directed energy weapons,” Shane said. “Lasers. They’re vulnerable. I don’t see why you couldn’t shoot them down with lasers.”

  “Technology hurdle there,” Roger said but made the note. “And we’re going to need a lot of whatever we use. We need to figure out how these things work. To do that, we have to capture one. Alive or dead, I’m not sure it matters.”

  “I wouldn’t like to try to keep a live one,” Cady said. “Dead… hit it with a stick. I’m telling you, we need a staff corps.”

  “We already have a staff corps,” Shane pointed out, grinning. “The Chairborne Rangers.”

  “But the other ones just eat it,” Alan pointed out.

  “Get around that when the time comes,” Roger said. “We need one for study.”

  “Capture one…” Shane said, his eyes narrowing. “You know what I was doing before you feather merchants roped me in, right?”

  “Looking at wild-eyed projects?” Cady asked.

  “And some of them were pretty wild,” Shane said, nodding. “There’s two I’m thinking of right now. One of them was Gecko-Man and the other was Coyote glue.”

  “Gecko-Man?” Tom asked, smiling. “Coyote glue?”

  “They were both pretty screwy,” Shane admitted. “Gecko-Man was synthetic gecko-feet skin. It sticks to just about anything. If you had gloves made of it you could climb right up a wall. You can stick it and then unstick it with a sort of rotational motion. Think super, stick-to-anything Velcro.”

  “I can see where you’re going with that,” Roger said, nodding. “Figure out a way to get them to stick it to them and attach it to something.”

  “Have to be a pretty strong something,” Tom pointed out. “I’m not sure what the energy budget of these things is but they can fly into and out of a gravity well. That means one hell of a lot of pull.”

  “I wonder how resistant to electricity they are?” Alan asked. “Get them to stick to a live wire?”

  “They’d just eat the wire,” Cady pointed out.

  “Coyote glue was really, really weird,” Shane said. “DuPont had come up with it. One of those things like super putty. They were working on something else and got this. It’s an adhesive, very sticky, but it’s elastic as well.”

  “Like the Coyote gets his foot stuck and it pulls back?” Alan asked, grinning. “Tries to pull it off with his hand and gets the hand stuck?”

  “Just like that,” Shane said, smiling back with a nod. “It only starts to set when it hits air and it never really gets hard or dry. Just… stays sticky for a long time. They wanted to use it for a crowd control system. The current glue they use for that, if it gets over a person’s face they suffocate. They were pretty sure they could tinker Coyote glue so a person could pull it away from their face but not get entirely away. But I was thinking…”

  “Put out a trap with some of it,” Roger said, nodding. “They get stuck to it. Like flies on a spider web.”

  “Energy budget again,” Alan pointed out sourly, looking over at Tom. But Tom was clearly gone somewhere, with an abstracted expression on his face.

  “Yeah,” Roger argued. “But you can tinker that. Admix some high strength materials in it like Spectra 1000 fishing line. Give it a good foundation, just a big ass concrete slab.”

  “It’s really elastic,” Shane pointed out. “Really, really elastic. I could see one of these things, well, pulling really hard. And then getting pulled back just as hard.”

  “Okay, we’ve got some good stuff here,” Roger said, nodding. “The probe mines—”

  “And potato guns,” Alan pointed out.

  “And… low velocity kinetic bombardment devices,” Roger said, writing carefully. “What’s the status on Gecko-Man materials?”

  “They’re going to need funding,” Shane said. “Fast and a lot. Hell, with all the money flying around they might have gotten it already.”

  “We’re up on that,” Roger said, nodding and making a note.

  “Spring traps,” Cady interjected.

  “Say again?” Roger asked.

  “The super Velcro,” the sergeant major said. “Think about, oh, I dunno, a ball of this gecko stuff. With some metal in the middle and some sort of plastic spring thing or a bungee cord. The metal releases the plastic spring. They pull it up, the spring goes off, they’re wrapped in super Velcro. I’m not sure what happens then…”

  “Bombs,” Shane said. “They’re tied to something. You name it.”

  “Spring traps,” Roger said, making a note. “Proximity fuses. Coyote glue.”

  “They’ve got some high falutin’ name for it,” Shane said. “But that’s what all the engineers called it.”

  “Ceramic scramjet rounds,” Roger said. “Directed energy weapons.”

  “Staffs,” Cady insisted. “Everybody gets a big stick.”

  “I’ve got a friend who’s into that SCA stuff,” Alan said. “I’ll get you a good one.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Spikes!” Tom said, excitedly.

  Roger and Alan just looked at him, used to the sudden apparent nonsequiturs, but Cady and Shane were clearly confused.

  “Volleyball?” Shane asked. “Like hit volleyballs at them really fast?”

  “No,” Tom said. “Although it’s a thought. Take some of your Coyote glue. Make a holder with a carbon fiber spike in it. Bait it with metal. Attach it to something strong, but not incredibly strong. Maybe put a capacitor on the spike. The probe grabs the bait, pulls away, can’t, pulls harder, the attachment breaks, the spike goes through the probe and it’s history. Then we study it.”

  “I can see that,” Alan said. “We could get one to study that way, assuming we can keep the others off.”

  “Surround one of those traps with mines?” Cady asked. “Winner of the mine avoidance contest gets to be dissected?”

  “If it’s a small swarm that might work,” Shane said. “As tactics if not strategy.”

  “Okay, I’m gonna write up the notes and send it to the working group,” Roger said. “We’ll have to see what happens on communications when they get here. This is even going to screw Internet communications.”

  “Oh, that’s another thing,” Shane said. “They zero in on RF. Anything broadcasting gets eaten. Fast.”

  “Very important note,” Roger said. “Let’s take a break while I get this out and then we’ll come back and look at some of these ideas in more depth.”

  “You think any of this is gonna work?” Cady asked Shane as they filed out of the room.

  “It’d take a miracle.”

  * * *

  “I
t’s gonna take a miracle,” Alan handed Roger the latest CASTFOREM models that had been tailored to Gries’s and Cady’s debriefing information.

  “Red consumes blue,” Roger read the printout and sighed as he tossed it onto his desk.

  “Yeah, it just took a little longer this time.” Alan made a Jetson’s car sound with his lips as he plopped onto Roger’s couch and lay back with his hands behind his head and his feet propped up.

  “What would you do, coach?” He glanced at his autographed picture of Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant on his office wall and muttered to himself.

  Alan smiled in response. “He’d probably call for a run right up the gut.”

  Roger grinned and nodded in agreement.

  “The problem with all these great ideas Alan, is scale.” Roger toggled the Mathcad simulation on his laptop to calculate and then kicked back in his chair. He considered spinning his little desk gadget but thought better of it.

  “What do you mean, Rog?”

  “Well, Gries and Cady were thinking tactically about how to kill one or a few of these things. We need to kill billions of them. We need to be thinking strategically. And a potato gun just will not do it. Even the supersonic F-16s and missiles only made a microscopic dent in their population before being destroyed. That reminds me; get somebody making completely composite fast airplanes. Don’t know how to power them, but get somebody on it.” Roger shook his head at the graph that was drawing on his computer screen. Alan rose up and took his little notepad from his belt, grabbed the stylus, and jotted some notes down.

  “Well, the ideas may only be a drop in the bucket or spit in the ocean, but it’s a start.” Alan shrugged as he continued jotting notes. “We can’t just sit around and do nothing.”

  “Sure, but according to my calculations here, which consider death and growth rates of the probes, we would need a million potato guns with thousands of rounds each to keep up. Looks like CASTFOREM agrees with me.” The temptation overwhelmed Roger and he decided to spin the little space shuttle gadget. He flicked it with his index finger and it went spinning.

  “So, we make that many. And I’ve already figured that out. We don’t use potato guns — well, maybe a few as larger grenade launchers. Instead we use paintball guns. Sarge and I’ve found three different manufacturers of them that can make canned air powered full auto systems that fire up to fifteen balls per second. The balls just have a liquid paint in them anyway so…” Alan paused and looked up from his PDA to see if Roger was paying attention. “So, we fill them with a high explosive. And here is the good part. I only had to come up with two very simple modifications to make them completely out of a carbon polymer material. No metal. And Sarge found one company — couple of enthusiasts really — that has a minigun that can fire nearly three hundred rounds per second!”

  “That’s good work, Alan. How long before we can get delivery on them?” Roger asked.

  “Two weeks for the first thousand rifles and first hundred thousand rounds. But we’re building up manufacturing capability at all the redoubts now that we know what we’re dealing with. We’ll have millions of rounds and hundreds of thousands of guns within a month and a half. The minigun needs more mods since it had more metal in it and the first twenty will be delivered in a month.”

  “Great, let’s hope we have that long. Triple the efforts on that if you can. But we still need a Hail Mary play or a hook-and-ladder kick-off return to use if we’re behind by a touchdown and only five seconds left on the clock.” Roger was subconsciously upset with the fact that there would be no more SEC Football and his game analogies and euphemisms were starting to surface as a symptom. Others had symptoms of the under-siege society in other ways. God only knew how Alice’s and John’s little girls were handling it.

  “Well, I’d say we’re a couple of touchdowns back and its time to pray for the onside kick,” Alan added to the analogy.

  “I’ve been thinking about what Shane said about them attacking the radios and the report of the AWACS going down and the probes hitting the Falcons when they went active. You know, they hit the probes around Mars and the Moon, which all had transmitters going. Sure we shielded the lunar probe good, but it was still radiating like a bastard out the back lobe of the antenna. Hmmm… what if they weren’t taking out our eyes but were just hungry for radio?”

  “Maybe, but that might just be a good way to accomplish knocking out our eyes.” Alan pondered the radio emissions point for a second. “So, where are you going with this?”

  “What if we took a nuke or some other BMF explosive and attached it to a huge radar transmitter? Or several distributed radars with a bomb each? We wouldn’t kill them all but we might could contain their movements and reduce their numbers. Gries was telling me something about a so-called killing field tactic that comes to mind.”

  “Killing field, yeah, I see. Well, if they rebuild themselves with nanotechnology, blowing them up might be a bad idea,” Alan replied.

  “Would it really? Wouldn’t the fireball vaporize most of the material or carbonize it? I’m asking here, I don’t know.”

  “Well, you know what the Martian Manhunter said in that episode of Justice League Unlimited. The nanomachines would just get spread out all over the place and the threat would be spread that much further. Of course, that was just a cartoon. Who knows?”

  “But what if they don’t use nanotech to replicate?”

  “Okay, I’ll bite. But if they don’t use nanomachines what do they use?” Alan shrugged. “Tom was right a long time ago. We should’ve nuked Mars when we lost the first probe.”

  “We need some of these things to study.”

  * * *

  “Mr. Sergeant Cady,” Tina tugged sheepishly at the back of the large intimidating black man’s shirt. “You walk fast.”

  “Hello, Tina. And it’s Sergeant Major Cady. Just call me Top, like everybody else. That’s really what a first sergeant is supposed to be called, not a sergeant major, but my troops are used to it. What can I do for you?”

  “See I told ya, Dingbat.” Charlotte punched her on the arm.

  “Charlotte,” Cady nodded at the other teenager, amused.

  “Well, uh, Charlotte and I have been hearing all of you guys talk about these metal-eating alien robots. Is it true?” Tina asked.

  “Well, I’m not supposed to talk about it, but don’t you worry your pretty little head about it. You should talk to your mom and see what she will tell you.”

  “Well, I would but her and Dr. Fisher, you know Charlotte’s dad,” she nodded at Charlotte. “Well, they flew off to somewhere to build a new rocket or something. They won’t be back for a few days and, well, we’re worried about something.”

  “Oh, who is watching y’all girls?” Cady was surprised.

  “Oh my God, Top. We’re both fourteen years old, and surrounded by the Army, what could happen to us?” Tina held her hands in the air palms up and cocked her head sideways.

  “Right, uh okay,” Cady said, trying not to think about various songs he’d sung over the years. The answer was: a lot. “There are alien robots in Europe, on the Moon, and Mars and the other planets in the solar system as far as we know and they eat metal. Good enough for you? Nothing to worry about; we’re all working hard to find a way to stop them. I need to get back at it.”

  “Uh, we were afraid of that.” Tina smiled big at Cady and Charlotte pointed at her braces.

  “Metal like this, perhaps?” Charlotte said as she pointed.

  “Jesus Christ!” Cady realized her concern. Some of the horrible images from his and the major’s trip to Paris of soldiers being decapitated flashed in his mind. What if a bot got close enough to pull the metal out of this poor kid’s mouth? If the damn thing pulled the metal straight out of her mouth she would likely lose some teeth and have her lips, and tongue ripped to shreds. And what if she was facing the wrong way when the bots pulled the braces free? Cady had seen the damned alien things pull rebar right out of concrete; braces thro
ugh a little girl’s head would be nothing for them. And as far as he could tell, the goddamned machines would care less. Then it dawned on him, Why didn’t they take the fillings in MY teeth when they had the chance? Cady remembered that the bots had not taken Gries’ ruby at the same time. He also seemed to recall something about fillings being made of silver, tin, copper, and mercury. Dog tags are stainless steel, he thought. With all the dog tags and iron rebar around, the bots were eating buffet style and not getting to everything on the table — just eating the treats, perhaps. Sooner or later, Cady was certain, they would. The damned bots would eat every piece of metal on the planet, including the metal fillings in his teeth and the braces in the cute little fourteen year old girl’s mouth in front of him. Goddamn heartless bastard machines!

  “Come with me, girls.” Cady about faced and headed back down the hall toward the major’s office. “Jesus Christ!” he muttered again careful not to add further expletives in front of the teenagers.

  * * *

  “Roger, the sergeant major and I need a minute with you.” Major Gries pecked on Dr. Reynolds’ door and peeked in around the door frame.

  “Can it wait, Shane? Ronny is breathing down my neck for a progress report to go to the President this afternoon.” He looked over his laptop at the major. It had been some time since Roger had gotten plenty of sleep and he suspected it would remain that way for, well, years. He felt haggard and hated putting off his more real duties of interacting with the people working for him, but he was conflicted by the fact that he also wasn’t going to turn in a half-assed report that was going all the way to the President.

  “Uh, actually, I think this ought to be in your report.” The major stepped fully into the doorframe and leaned his shoulder against it.

  “Okay, what is it?”

  “Sergeant Major,” Gries turned away from Roger.

  “Yes sir!”

  “Bring in exhibit A, please.” Gries half grinned but only at the theatrics. The thought of kids around the world having had their faces destroyed by these alien things really pissed him off. Though he and Cady had only seen the aliens attacking military and only caught their interaction with a few civilians, he knew that countless kids with braces and other medical metal implants must have been tortured and killed by the damned mindless alien robots.