Von Neumann’s War

by John Ringo

“Ouch,” Jones said, glancing nervously over his shoulder. “I don’t like being out here; we’re exposed as hell.”

  “Tell me about it,” Mahoney replied as Sergeant Gregory came back around.

  “Listen up,” Gregory said, waving them over to huddle around him. “Couple of safety points. Top was watching the video from Monte Sano Mountain. First point, watch where you move. The laser’s not going to miss you if you get in its path—”

  “I already pointed that out to Jones,” Mahoney said.

  “Right, good…” the staff sergeant replied. “Stay close into the bunker. The laser is set to skim the edge of this ridge. If you’re close into the bunker, you’re out of its line of fire. Second point, when the laser hits these things it chops them up. When they get close, we’re going to have pieces of probe slamming into the ground all around here. And into us. Keep your damned helmets and armor on. It might keep the damage down. When they get real close, the air starts getting filled with burned up metal. It’ll rip up your lungs. When they close with us, go to MOPP one, mask only. The mask will keep you alive. Clear?”

  “Clear,” Jones said. “How’d we draw this shit detail, Sergeant?”

  “Somebody’s got to do it,” Gregory replied with a grin. “You don’t expect them wind-dummies to get their berets all dirty, now do you?”

  * * *

  “Got it,” Shane said, keying the com for the intel section. “Sir, would you take a look at the group of probes located at 5413 by 3845? That’s right by the Oak Park athletic field. Looks like about… hell, maybe a thousand of them. I don’t have backtrack, but it looks as if they stopped there and are just… sitting.”

  “Good eye, Major,” the J-2 colonel said. “Let me get a couple of people to eyeball them.”

  “Over fifty percent across Phase Line Groovy,” J-3 reported.

  “Prepare to lase—” General Riggs said and then stopped, holding his hand to his earbud. “Roger.” He looked up and then clicked a control, zooming the main viewscreen into the group that Shane had spotted. With the zoom cranked up, it was apparent that the probes had changed shape slightly. There was now a circular opening that looked very much like a cannon mouth on the front of the probes.

  “Laser targeting, Weeden East only, designate that group of modified probes as high priority.”

  “Roger,” Lasing called. “Slewing. We have the group targeted.”

  “Initiate lase,” General Riggs said.

  There were a few probes between the laser and the presumed “anti-laser” group. They didn’t really pose much of a problem except for creating small clouds of gaseous metal. But as soon as the lasers hit the first probe, the modified group began to move, dropping down to the deck and accelerating towards Weeden Mountain.

  They also began jinking in and out of the shadow of the remaining buildings, flying down roads not much off the ground. There were enough buildings, and enough rubble from buildings, that the group was able to an extent to avoid the lasers. For that matter, it was hard to tell, but it appeared that some of the laser-killers might have taken brief hits and kept going. And they weren’t the only group headed for the mountain. It seemed as if the lasers were the signal for most of the probes to drop what they were doing and head for the Arsenal.

  “That got their attention,” General Riggs said. “Where’d the killer group go?”

  “Disappeared into the mass,” J-3 responded.

  “We’re trying to pick them up again,” Lasing called.

  “Negative,” General Riggs replied. “Open up full lasing across the area. Engage at will.”

  “Roger.”

  “There they are,” Shane called as the killer probes exited a corporate park and started crossing the “no-man’s land” that had been established around the perimeter of the Arsenal. Among other things, the “no-man’s land” was the first line of anti-probe mines. But those mines depended on the probes pulling the metal out of them to function. And the “killer bots” weren’t interested in metal, just lasers.

  The inner edge of the no-man’s land was also where the lasing stopped. Once the probes crossed it, and more than half made it across since the lasers were targeting the whole sky, they were under the fire basket of the lasers. The only thing between them and the lasers were the few troops on the mountain and the platoon around the laser site.

  “Vampire, vampire,” Shane called on the platoon net. “Approximately four hundred bots with unknown weapon approaching from the northeast, coming in low. Top, shift to heavy on the northeast.”

  * * *

  “Sir,” the EWO officer said over the channel to the general, “we can initiate IBot at any time.”

  “Hold it,” Riggs said, nodding. “If we can stop them from getting the lasers and let more of them come into the basket I’d prefer it. I don’t want them outside the basket and passing on that we’re spoofing them.”

  “Roger.”

  “Start broadcasting.”

  * * *

  Weeden Mountain had long been known to the general Arsenal public as “Antenna Hill.” It had a vast array of antennas on it used for everything from cell phones to satellite uplinks. And the probes liked radio.

  On command, every single antenna started broadcasting. And those few probes that were still eating Huntsville dropped what they were doing and headed for the redoubt.

  * * *

  Private First Class Jason Soldiers had lived with his name his whole life. But despite his name, he had enlisted in the 82nd Airborne at the ripe age of eighteen. One of the few books he had ever read, and enjoyed, was called Starship Troopers. In it he ran across a point that really resonated with him. The main character had just joined the military in that book and, much to his chagrin, had ended up as a simple infantryman. He had told this to the one NCO he had met, the recruiting NCO, and gotten a very odd, to him, reaction. The recruiting NCO, a former infantryman missing a couple of limbs, had told him that “the infantry’s the only really important arm. Everybody else supports us. Because we’re where the rubber meets the road.”

  That was what he’d told the recruiter when he signed up. He wanted to be where the rubber meets the road.

  At the moment, though, he really wished he’d gone in for radar technician or computer repair. He’d gotten the word that there was a group of bots headed for the lasers. And they had orders to take them out.

  The only problem being that it seemed like every single one was headed for his bunker. There seemed to be a million of them and they were coming in very low, very fast, and very very hard.

  There seemed to be only one thing to do, so he toggled off the safety on the M-240R, picked a point in space over the bots and pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  The remaining problem of the M-240R, after it was cooled, was ammunition. The best choice would have been the ramjet rounds demonstrated by Dr. Reynolds and Alan Davis. However, producing enough of them in any reasonable time had proved to be impossible. Instead, a modified sabot round was the best that could be created. Since the probes ate metal as it flew towards them, the new round consisted of a plastic outer “shoe,” or sabot, with an inner ceramic round. As the round left the machine gun, the plastic sabot fell away, leaving the ceramic round to do the damage, however the relatively low-density ceramic round tended to tumble beyond about four hundred yards and lost velocity rapidly.

  The probes, on the other hand, had a momentum of their own. And the ceramic rounds, while lightweight, could still shatter the metal facing of the probes in tests.

  Against the killer probes, however, things did not go as well as planned. Soldiers watched in disbelief as the rounds sparked and crashed into the probes, but seemed to have little or no effect. A few of the probes lost control and slammed into the mountainside in a shower of sparks. But the majority, even when they were struck by the ceramic rounds, continued on as if nothing had happened.

  Soldiers stopped firing and spun around, pressing a button he had been told not to use
under any circumstances. It was the button that put him through directly to the brigade commander in the bunker.

  “This is Soldiers, Bunker One-Niner-Five. Sir, the killer probes are armored, repeat armored. Ceramic rounds have no effect, repeat no effect.”

  * * *

  “Move it!” Cady yelled, redeploying the platoon so that most of them were on the northeast side. “Shag ass!”

  “Sergeant Major!”

  Cady looked up in surprise as the voice of the major boomed out of the sky and then realized there must be a PA system on the laser bunker.

  “Platoon! The killer bots are armored, repeat armored. Try to hit them on the underside and see if that works.”

  “Oh, this just gets better and better,” Jones said, taking a knee and hefting his rifle. The platoon had been armed with the latest version of the sergeant major’s “super-gun.” Thanks to Alan, Lurch and a local paintball company, the gun was capable of firing more powerful rounds, faster.

  “Time to cue the music, sir,” Cady muttered. As he did the speakers began to crackle with the sound of thunder and lightning.

  * * *

  “What are you doing, Major?” the general asked quietly.

  “I hope you don’t mind, sir,” Shane said, gulping. “It’s something we would do in Iraq when we knew we were in the deep. Motivational material, sir. Just a song one of the troops liked and we picked it up as a unit thing.”

  “ ‘Citadel’ by Crüxshadows,” the general said, smiling faintly. “You do think we’re in the deep.”

  “I see a citadel alone,” Shane replied. “Clinging brave, defying fate. Not sure there’s a better description. Sir, permission to speak to Lasing?”

  “Do it. Out here.”

  * * *

  “Lasing, this is Major Gries,” Shane said. “Can you make a bubble to the northeast of the bunker? We’ve got dead ground under your laser. I need to move my troops to cover it.”

  “I can give you a bubble,” the lasing officer replied. “Five meters wide and, say, three and a half high call it? That do?”

  “Fine, and I’d suggest tightening your fire into that area.”

  “Teach your granma to suck eggs, Major,” the lasing officer said, with grim humor in his voice. “Already done. Those things are our main threat at the moment.”

  “Any way to point out where it is?” Shane asked.

  “They’ll know.”

  * * *

  “Crap, look at that,” Jones said as a small bush directly in front of them exploded.

  “Laser,” Mahoney replied over the music. “That’s why you don’t want to go forward. You’ll be the burning bush. There,” he added, waving at what appeared to be thin air. But there was a faint glow as the laser ionized the atmosphere. “That’s what you’ve got to avoid.”

  “Top, move forward,” the speaker boomed, cutting off the music. “There’s a hole in the lasing, due northeast of the bunker, five meters wide, two plus high. You should be able to spot it. Move forward to cover the dead ground! You need to stop them before they get to the top of the mountain!”

  It was the first time that Jones had actually seen the sergeant major shocked. Everyone looked over at the NCO and could see him with his jaw wagging up and down, trying to find something to say. Jones wasn’t sure whether to be terrified or laugh out loud. He decided a hysterical chuckle was called for. Okay, cackle.

  The, more than one, hysterical cackle seemed to center the big NCO.

  “What the fuck are you doing still sitting here with your thumbs up your ass?” Cady roared. “You heard the man! Gregory, take right, I’ll take left. Tighten up and stay low. Forward!”

  Cady swung left and duckwalked forward, keeping one eye on the occasional strikes on the ridgeline and the other over his shoulder, trying to use the two points to get some idea of the line the deadly, and invisible, beams were following. After a brief pause Staff Sergeant Gregory headed right, doing the same.

  “Jones, Mahoney, Nelms,” Gregory said, expanding on the sergeant major’s orders. “You three front rank, between the S’maj and me. Crawl it. When you get to the edge, poke your head over. Shag ass.”

  Mahoney and Nelms both looked at Jones, who shrugged and grimaced.

  “Bugger this for a game of soldiers,” he hissed but then threw himself prone and started fast-crawling forward on elbows and knees with the other two following and then catching up to flank him.

  The rest of the platoon followed, more or less in groups of three.

  “Second and third ranks,” Cady said, still sidling towards the edge and trying to stay out of the beams, “get ready to fire upwards. When those things come over the edge, just fucking hose it until you’re out of ammo!”

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Jones said as he reached the edge of the summit. It had been a fairly abrupt drop to a short bluff. Now it was as perfectly cut as if it had been carved away… well, it had been carved away by a laser. The fact that the laser wasn’t, at the moment, shaving it seemed a minor point. “This is fucking nuts!”

  “We gonna do this?” Nelms asked nervously. The normally sanguine sniper seemed unusually perturbed.

  “No,” Jones said, then shrugged. “One… two…”

  * * *

  “What the fuck?”

  Staff Sergeant Richard Simone was a data security specialist code five, about the highest level available. He’d previously been assigned to the Pentagon after several minor but politically embarassing hacking attacks on secure systems. Dick Simone had been coding at the age of eight and “script kiddying” by the time he was ten. But after a while he realized that it was much more fun trying to stop hacking than actually doing it. He still maintained his connections with the cracker community, if for no other reason than to keep up on the latest slang. A few of the cooler elements even knew that he’d gone “legit;” there was a certain cachet among the really good crackers out there when they found an “enemy” that was their class.

  Dick could have made much more money in the civilian world, especially since the military mostly left data security to relatively low-paid noncoms. But he had the “mentat civitas,” that sense of honor and duty that was the core of being a soldier. Eventually he’d stop reenlisting and go get a job where he could make some real money.

  Well, he had had that as an option until the bots got here. Now, being in Weeden Mountain was about as safe, and well paid, as it got.

  But despite the total chaos in the world the Internet was still, more or less, functioning and there was still the occasional jackass that tried to crack the system. And he’d just spotted one.

  The guy was using a fairly simple buffer overflow attack but with a nice little fillip of an encryption packet designed to overcome Blowfish. The point seemed to be to create a zero day exploit, which he didn’t have a chance of managing. So far, nobody had cracked Blowfish. A “zero day exploit” was trying to crack it on the fly. Wasn’t going to happen. The cracker had hit the first firewall and thought he’d made it past. But Dick had set that one up as a trap; when a cracker using any of a thousand or so methods cracked the firewall it set off an alarm. Then Dick could watch them try to crack the second wall. And the second wall, if it detected the cracking, actually sent the cracker into a bypass loop that looked like a computer system but was really a very elaborate ruse, a honey trap. And all the while, Dick could be backtracking the crack and cracking the other guy’s computer.

  Dick called up a spider to follow the cracking back and got his first shock of the incident when a message popped up.

  “Ah, thank you for detecting me. I need, very very urgently, to contact Dr. Reynolds. Tell him this is Megiddo and I’ve got the codes he needs. This is urgent since I understand that you are under attack.”

  * * *

  RocketRog: Megiddo?

  Megiddo: The same. I have completed a program that I believe will permit you to control the bots. It uses the same frequency spectrum as the IBot program that Dr. Pike developed. Ho
wever, this one gives you the ability to stop them, have them land and reset their passwords so that you can lock out higher controls. I’m working on further refinements, however this should do for the time.

  Rocket Rog: Boss. When can I get it?

  Megiddo: The kind sergeant that contacted you gave me a secure point to which I might upload the program. It is currently uploading from a mirror site I placed a trojan on some time ago. And tell the nice sergeant that the tracer bot he just sent goes to one of the few remaining servers in Australia. Good luck.

  ‹Meggido has signed off›

  * * *

  “…three! AAAHHH!”

  There wasn’t much to do but scream and pull the trigger. As soon as Jones put his head over the edge of the bluff all he saw was a wall of metal. The bots were actually flying through the tops of the trees, which had been sheared off by the laser, just under the beam. And the lead wave was no more than a pickup-truck’s length from the edge of the bluff, headed, as far as he could tell, right for his face.

  The exploding rounds were not designed to penetrate armor, and Jones could see even in the split second that he had, that these bots were much heavier than the ones that they’d brought back from Greenland. They were thicker top to bottom and the metal had an odd sheen to it. For some reason a battlefield in Iraq came to mind but he couldn’t figure out why. The thing that went through his head in a flicker was a smell of all things. A hot, metallic stink that he couldn’t quite place in the chaos that was this moment’s existence.

  Despite the fact that they were not armor penetrators, the explosive rounds had an effect. Enough small explosives in a small area can sometimes make up for larger explosives, even if in very odd ways. The main thing that they did was throw the bots off course. The probes were packed in wingtip-to-wingtip and running in a narrow gap between the ground and the lasers overhead.