Von Neumann’s War

by John Ringo

  “Now for the tricky part,” he said. He took a long piece of carbon fiber that looked something like a thin whip and screwed it into the top of the mine. With the whip trigger in place he carefully pulled out the safety pin and pocketed it.

  “This really sucks,” Jones said, as he got his second mine in place. “Nobody said nothin’ about no permafrost shit.”

  “I guess they thought it’d be melted off,” Mahoney said. “Now shut up and dig.”

  With the last of the sixteen mines planted, Mahoney tapped Jones on the shoulder and motioned to back off to their cover point. The two specialists slipped back up the valley about thirty meters and took cover in a low spot in the tundra. Jones lay flat on a bed of yellow tundra poppies.

  “Did you signal Top?” Jones nudged the other specialist and pulled out his binoculars.

  “Shit, I thought you did. Hold,” Mahoney raised to a knee and made a couple of quick hand motions. “Did he see it?”

  “Top gave thumbs up. Do the same and get the fuck ready.” Jones set the binoculars on the poppy bed in front of him and took aim with the HE ball gun. Mahoney signaled and readied his HE ball gun and loaded a riot grenade canister in his potato gun.

  * * *

  “Nelms, when you get the word I want you firing that potato gun as fast as you can, got it?”

  “Right, Top! Ready.” Nelms had all ten of the riot canister magazines he and Top had brought strapped across his shoulders on their bandoliers and his potato gun at the ready.

  “Okay, hold one.” Top looked to the north and gave the major the signal that they were ready to go and waited for the return signal to go ahead.

  * * *

  “Sir, west side is ready,” Sergeant Gregory informed the major.

  “Good.” Shane readied his potato gun and the Kevlar and Spectra 1000 net that the Huntsville scientists had put together for him.

  “All right, troops, remember your orders. We shoot the motherfuckers dead! Every goddamned one of them but the one the major shoots with his special bag. I want suppression fire to keep those damned things from flying away and stay ready with the potato guns.” Staff Sergeant Gregory gave a nod to the major. “Ready, sir.”

  “Move out!” Shane gave the go signal to Top on the east flank while Gregory motioned the west flank on.

  * * *

  The first two or three minutes were uneventful and nerve-racking as the rear and side flanking positions closed in around the little alien probes. The forty or fifty some-odd shiny metal boomerangs skittered over the ground as if they were cattle grazing. Perhaps that’s what they were doing.

  But the ambush plan was perfect. The little bots sauntered unaware right into the minefield.

  The long whip was attached to a detonator. As soon as the first bot touched the whip it was bent slightly sideways. This released a shear pin, which in turn released a spring-loaded firing pin. The firing pin detonated the primer, which triggered a pre-charge. The pre-charge traveled downwards to a launching booster and a moment later the primary charge detonated.

  The first riot mine erupted upwards, then the primary detonated, spreading the Coyote glue into a small spheroid cloud that settled over several of the probes.

  “Fire!” Gries gave the word and the rear flank opened up on the unsuspecting bots.

  FWOOOMP! FWOOMP! FWOOMP! FWOOMP! Sounded the potato guns from all directions. Several riot grenades detonated just above the small swarm of boomerangs and spread the Coyote glue, covering a majority of the swarm sparsely, but enough to stick them to the ground and temporarily prevent them from flying away. And then came the rapid spikt spikt spikt of the HE ball guns, followed by the kerpow of the HE balls detonating against the bots and the tundra.

  FWOOOMP! FWOOMP! FWOOMP! FWOOMP! Several more riot grenades detonated and the confused bots triggered several more of the mines that Jones and Mahoney had emplaced. Top rushed to the edge of the gooey cloud, spattering away at the loose bots with the minigun. HE balls exploding at more than two hundred a second made an interesting visual and sound effect. The HE balls were proving effective against the bots. It appeared that the alien boomerang-shaped probes were no more or less fragile than earthbound vehicles and materials and the HE balls disposed of them in a nice little fireball of scattering bot shrapnel.

  Jones and Mahoney held their positions, firing both HE balls and riot canisters as fast as they could. Gries and the rest of the rear flank pressed inward until the major didn’t think moving closer was a wise idea.

  “Check advance! Round ’em up!”

  Privates First Class Gibson and Letorres pushed the west flank inward. The Coyote glue would hold an individual bot for a few seconds while it tried to spin and wriggle out of the glue’s grip. When that would fail, the alien boomerangs would propel upward very fast, stretching the glue to its elastic limit. Where a bot was held by a thick glob of the riot glue it would be yanked back downward into the tundra hard. The impact would render the probe useless in a shower of sparks. Gries noted how it looked like a special effect from a cheesy science fiction movie when the things malfunctioned or were knocked down.

  Several of the bots nearly reached the elastic limit of the sticky mess to freedom — nearly. But the flower that rises above others is cut down. Out of the mix they were natural targets for the HE ball guns, and the entire herd of the alien probes was nothing but cattle to the slaughter. The HE ball guns were performing well above Gries’s expectations in dispensing destruction on the probes. He owed Alan Davis a beer.

  “That one on the edge, there!” Gries pointed. “I got that one.” Shane took aim on the bot and depressed the trigger of the compressed air cannon. FWOOMP went the potato gun. Just as the bot stretched to the edge of the Coyote glue trap the canister Gries fired exploded open into a thick spider web of Kevlar and Spectra 1000 filaments with synthetic gecko-skin patches mixed in. The hi-tech net spread open and wrapped and tangled around the alien thing. The bot started spinning wildly, trying to free itself. Pieces of the composite fiber net began to fly off in multiple directions. And it looked like the bot had some capability of cutting through it since large portions were disappearing. If the thing had not been doused in Coyote glue before Gries fired the net, it would have gotten free.

  “Riot grenade!” Gries yelled and pointed at the nearly escaping bot.

  “Got it!” Staff Sergeant Gregory hit it with another net grenade, giving Major Gries time to reload his potato gun.

  As the last bot was blown the hell up, Gries flung his last net grenade around the captive one. It wasn’t going to hold and Sergeant Cady realized this at about the same time Gries did. Like an Olympic sprinter Cady rushed the little alien probe, wielding his custom battle club. With one muted blow from the club the bot stopped resisting captivity, sputtered silent with a shower of sparks and fell back into a pool of the thickening riot glue with a subdued thud!

  “Cease fire, goddamnit!” Gries ordered as one of the specialists on the west flank fired an HE round way too close to Top. Cady dropped and covered as the explosion sent an aftershock through the cold and hardening Coyote glue. A finger of the glue plopped a few inches from Top’s face.

  “Goddamnit Gibson, what have I told you about blue on bluing me?” Cady yelled.

  “Don’t do it, Sergeant?”

  “You bet your ass, don’t do it!” he yelled at the private.

  “Uh, Top,” Gries grinned offering him a hand up from the ground. “Thought we were gonna take home a live one.”

  “Sorry, Major, but I just couldn’t see anyway we were gonna catch a live one. It was eatin’ right out of that net the eggheads made us. I figured if I just banged it lightly, they might could put it back together. And I sure as hell didn’t want that thing gettin’ away and bringing back a few hundred thousand of his buddies. Besides I just tapped it.”

  “Concur, Top.” Gries knelt by the dented alien probe and poked at it with the barrel of his potato gun. There was a buzzing like an angry wasp inside
and then another brief crackle of static electricity on its surface. It shuddered for a moment and then was still.

  “I think maybe we do have a live one,” Gries said musingly.

  * * *

  “Mr. Secretary, after making a quick analysis of the most recent spysat photos and comparing that data with the NSA Internet data as well as the seismograph detections, we believe we can say what is going on now.” Ronny Guerrero’s image came through the T1 datalink in real-time to the President’s underground headquarters in Wyoming.

  “Well Ronny don’t keep me hanging,” SecDef Stensby replied. The entire presidential staff had assembled in the War Room of the underground headquarters for this debrief. They all were hoping for good news, but none were expecting it.

  “Right, sir. It looks like it was a firewall along the sixty-degree eastward latitude line. We’ve got signs of detonations in Mashhad, Iran; in Turkmenistan; Uzebekistan; Temir, Kazakhstan; Ural, Samara, Ufa, Izhevsk, Perm, Magnitogorsk, Tagil, Ukhta, Ifdel, and many other Russian cities with the first wave of detonations. There were also a few in Yemen, Oman, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. It appears that there were a total on the near order of one hundred and sixty strikes, most of them from multiple reentry vehicles,” Ronny explained.

  “My God!” President Colby shook his head. “General, check me if I’m wrong but that’s a significant portion of Russia and China’s nuclear arsenal.”

  “About that, sir,” General Mitchell said.

  “Are we going to have nuclear winter on top of everything else?” the President asked angrily.

  “Uh, sir,” the national security advisor said, then looked at the secretary of defense.

  “Mr. President,” the secretary said, carefully but definitely. “Let me state for the record that most secondary analysis of the original nuclear winter scenario indicate that it’s overstated.”

  The President frowned for a moment, then shook his head.

  “How overstated?” he asked.

  “The terms that comes to mind are deliberate ‘political tinkering’ and ‘junk science,’ ” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said bluntly. “Then a descent into urban legend. The total energy output of all of the nuclear weapons in the world at the height of the Cold War is lower than the output of the Mount Saint Helens blast. Even with fudging hard on secondary effects, nobody except the original scientists could come anywhere near a ‘mini-iceage’ scenario from a full-scale nuclear war. Upon review, even most of the physicists involved in the original study repudiated it. What we’ll get from this blast is a slight reduction in temperatures, hardly noticeable except by fine study. As a matter of fact, given the destruction of the worldwide sensory networks, I’m not sure it will be testable at all. Oh, and some spectacular sunrises. And a slight increase in background radiation, but nothing that’s going to cause two-headed babies; possibly a slight increase in cancer rates. Given that if we don’t win, the human race is going to be wiped out, a slight increase in cancer rates is the least of our worries.”

  “Point,” the President said, nodding. “Did it work?”

  “Not the way they intended, sir.” Ronny paused to flip through his data. “Uh, if you will flip to slide four of the package we just sent you, you’ll see that the second group of detonations that took place a few minutes after the first were located in India, China, North Korea, and the far eastern parts of Russia.”

  “Why does that mean that these nukes didn’t work?” the SecDef asked.

  “We did not fire on those locations. Ergo, they must have fired upon themselves. We suspect the initial detonations tipped off the Von Neumann probes that the launch sites for these nukes were a threat and then they must have attacked those locations. That is the only explanation for nuking yourself that we can figure, sir,” Ronny finished and waited for a response.

  “We were planning a similar tactic,” General Mitchell said quietly. “I hate to say it, but I’m happy as hell that the Chinese and Russians beat us to it.”

  “Do we know how effective the bombs were at destroying the probes?” the NSA asked.

  “All we know is what is in slide five.” Ronny waited for them to flip to the last slide the Neighborhood Watch had sent over the T1 hotline. It was a slide containing several images from the last ten or so spyphotos they had received. The compilation slide showed multiple tubules of alien probes descending on Nagpur, Calcutta, Chengdu, Si’an, Beijing, Novosibirsk, Bratsk, Omsk, and Chita. The probes were consuming the Eurasian continent.

  “One of the most interesting things here is that the probes let the missiles fly and detonate as if they had no clue as to what they were or that they didn’t care if they lost millions of bots. We guess that the missiles were launched from beyond the occupied regions and flew to the edge of the bots’ territory.”

  The President nodded. “I see.”

  “Until now the bots had only imposed the no-fly zone over the occupied regions with a bit of cushion around it.” Ronny let that sink in for a second and then continued.

  “It looks like now from data we’ve been able to gather that they’re imposing a global no-fly zone. This is going to limit operations severely. And, of course, as reported in the media and on the Internet, contact has been lost with most of these areas,” Ronny continued. “The last significant contact was from a blogger in Singapore stating that the probes had been reported approaching across the straits from Malaysia. Internet pings from the National Security Agency indicate that there are no remaining Internet nodes on the Eurasian landmass. With the exception of South America and areas of Africa, we appear to be alone in this fight, Mr. President.”

  * * *

  “Home,” Jones said, sighing as he lowered his end of the mesh “stretcher” to the ground. The bot had turned out to weigh a good two hundred pounds, despite its small size, and they’d taken turns carrying it back to the cached Humvees.

  Besides the bot they’d managed to pick up about another two hundred pounds of assorted bits, including one bot that was blown in half, revealing the interior. It was, as far as anyone could tell, just a mish-mash of metal and what looked like glass, damned near solid, which explained the weight. The small team had had a time humping all the bits, and their gear, back to the Humvees.

  The bots had been carefully observed by satellite and it was noted that they’d stopped, presumably temporarily, on a strict line. For safety the Humvees had been left twenty kilometers west of the line and the attack point had been set up about two kilometers inside. It had been a long twenty-two klicks humping all those bits over the tundra.

  But the Humvees were still there, which meant they didn’t have to hump it the whole hundred and fifty to the Thumb of God.

  “Keep moving,” Cady said, grasping the whole bot and lifting it into the bed of the Humvee. “I’m not going to be happy until these things are back in the States. And not very then.”

  “They’re not radiating,” Mahoney said. He was the team’s designated electronics and intel geek and already had the devices the scientists had loaded them with out and operating. “No radio signals. No gravitational signals. No apparent subatomic particle stream.”

  “Doesn’t mean they’re not talking to somebody,” Cady growled. “Load it up and let’s move.”

  He dumped his ruck and the minigun in the back of the Humvee and got in the driver’s seat, picking up the squad radio and donning the headset. The new system they’d been issued had no carrier wave for the bots to home in on and only radiated when used. The system worked over short ranges using the so-called ultrawideband Pulson chip technology and was theoretically too low-level and spread-spectrum a signal to pinpoint. Alan and Roger had really geeked out on them. Hopefully, they wouldn’t have to use it.

  Shane climbed in next to him as Mahoney and Gibson climbed in the back.

  “Mahoney, you getting anything at all?” Shane asked as Top put the vehicle in gear.

  “I’m getting intermittent radio from east of the line, sir,” th
e specialist replied, looking at the readout on the Gateway laptop. “Multiple frequencies, very short bursts. It’d be interesting to set up a full radio intercept site somewhere near here. I think Doc Reynolds is right; these things use plain old radio.” As the Humvee bumped over the springtime tundra he kept hitting keys and nodding.

  “Interesting,” the specialist said. “There was a big burst of signals about six hours ago, sir.”

  “That when we hit them?” Shane said, then shook his head. “No, that was about four hours ago. Any idea why?”

  “Negative, sir,” Mahoney replied. “Big burst of signals that went on for about three minutes. There was heavier signal traffic before, then it peaked in number of transmissions and power, went down to still increased levels. Then it fell way off. It’s still down.”

  “Let’s hope that’s a good sign,” Cady said.

  “Concur, Top,” Shane replied, pulling out one of the new combat field ration packs. The replacement for the MRE had a heater pack built in using a friction tab starter. He pulled the tab on a packet of fettuccine Alfredo with chicken and set it on his thigh to warm. “I’ve got beef stew and chicken romaine, Top. Take your pick.”

  “I’ll take the stew,” Top said, his eyes scanning the horizon. “That romaine shit gives me the shits.”

  The sergeant major was just finishing his beef stew, controlling the Humvee’s wheel with his knee while spooning up the stew, when Mahoney made an interrogative noise from the back.

  “Sir…” the specialist said, hesitantly.

  “Go,” Shane said, pitching his finished alfredo out the window.

  “I’ve got increasing probe signal strength,” the specialist said. “Could we stop for a second?”

  “Hold it up, Top,” Shane said, sticking his arm out the window and signaling with a closed fist for the two following Humvees to pull up.