John Ringo - Von Neumann’s War

“And?” The little space shuttle slowed, then stopped. Roger tapped it with his right index finger and sent it whirling again.

“Blue forces totally consumed by the red forces threat,” Alan read from the report.

“No shit.”

“No shit. What now?” Alan shrugged his shoulders, looking up from the report and noticing that Roger was only partly paying attention to him.

“That was a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollar obvious answer, huh?” Roger sat quiet for a moment longer, spinning the little desk gadget again. “Let’s have some fun with this and model in some other stuff. I mean magic stuff. Try something like in Independence Day , or The Puppet Masters or War of the Worlds or something.”

“Well, we tried chem-bio agents like in those last two you mentioned and no luck,” Alan said with a frown. “To be realistic, we have no idea about their physiology so there is little way we can put in an agent with a high confidence. Oh sure, we could fudge it in the simulation if you want to win, but it wouldn’t be based on reality.”

“Like any of this stuff is? We don’t have a clue what we’re up against here. Hell, there might just be some ten million year alien varmint hatching planet-wide there — who knows?” Roger shrugged.

“Well then, since it’s all made up anyway, I’ll add some miracles to see what happens.” Alan scribbled on the printouts.

“Do that just to see what happens if we were to find that, I dunno, toothpaste, or bad breath, or something as equally unlikely kills them. Who the hell knows? What about cyber?” Roger sat back in his chair now bored with the desk gadget.

“We tried that and it had little impact. Again, I’ll fudge a run for you.” Alan scribbled some notes on the printouts again, then began tapping his head with the pen.

“Hell, give us transporters and antigravity just to see what happens.” Roger sort of smiled while at the same time looking disappointed. “Hey, how about adding power armor like in Starship Troopers or the veritech fighters, hovertanks, and cyclones in Robotech .”

“I’ll get right to it.”

“Oh, by the way, Alice Pike called me Saturday night with an interesting bit of information. Apparently John Fisher’s daughter strikes again.”

“Refresh my memory… John Fisher’s daughter?” Alan asked.

“You know, she’s the thirteen year old amateur astronomer who captured the images of Mars with her eight-inch telescope — the ones that we’re putting in the final report to Ronny.”

“I didn’t realize that was John’s daughter. How about that?” Alan said. “Apple didn’t fall too far, huh?”

“Well, like I said, she’s made another unwitting contribution to the Neighborhood Watch.” Roger said.

“How so?”

“I didn’t realize this, but John and Alice have known each other for years and their daughters go to the same school together. It appears that John’s daughter has gotten Alice’s daughter watching sci-fi and cartoons. Anyway, Alice and her daughter watched an episode of the cartoon called Justice League Unlimited this weekend. Alice said that we needed to see that episode.”

“Really? JLU? I’ve seen commercials for that, but I haven’t had time to watch it,” Alan said. “Did she say what the episode was about?”

“Yeah, she did.”

“Well?”

“Von Neumann probes attacking Earth.”

“What’d ya mean that nothing helps?” Alan Davis just could not believe that the combination of powered armor suits, supercyber weapons, SuperCrest (as they had called the alien chem-bio agent as a joke on Roger), ultrahigh bandwidth communications, and even through-the-Earth transporters were not enough to beat the simulated alien red forces. After a month of modeling, no blue force winning scenario had been modeled.

“Well, watch the big screen and you can see the results for yourself,” the programmer from the CASTFOREM simulation group explained. “We used D.C., Atlanta, L.A., New York City, and Seattle as the central points of attack and had the red forces spread radially outward from there as blue forces were depleted. Now, we did have to assume a continuous supply of red forces from space.” The software engineer tapped a few keys and nodded to the screen.

The big screen on the wall of the War Room displayed a map of the United States with multiple blue forces gathered at scenario battle theaters scattered across the country. A tiny red dot appeared at each of the cities mentioned and they began growing into red blotches that oozed outward. As more and more red began to spread across the map, engulfing the blue forces, a window on the side displayed a tally of casualties and capabilities losses. The numbers were staggering: in the tens of millions and growing each second.

“This even uses the transporters, right?” Alan asked.

“Right. You see here that just about a year after the initial attacks begin, the war is over. Red forces win and spread to the rest of the world, pretty much no matter what miracles we use.”

“There has got to be a way to win this thing.” Alan scratched his head while he stared at the big screen.

“Sure there is,” the engineer said, shrugging. “It was obvious. You didn’t ask for the scenario, but I ran it anyway.”

“Don’t keep me hanging,” Alan replied.

“You have to cut off their infinite resupply of troops from space.”

“Now how the hell are we gonna do that?” Alan asked with a frown. “Where is Superman when you need him?”

“Doing it with Lois Lane?”

“Mr. President, every war game we’ve run so far says that we cannot win an all-out invasion,” Ronny Guerrero explained to the President and his senior staff.

“You mean your boys down in Alabama have come up with no brilliant ways to beat this thing?” the NSA asked.

“Yes, ma’am, and as I understand it, nobody at the Pentagon has come up with anything either. The suggestions of the Neighborhood Watch team is that we need a larger all-out defense development effort to determine if there are possible solutions available.” Dr. Guerrero paused to measure the President’s reaction.

“You mean something big, like the Manhattan Project, don’t you?” he asked.

“Well, sir, I think it would have to be bigger than that and Star Wars and Neighborhood Watch combined,” Ronny said trying to make no facial expression, but it was hard for him to hide the grimace.

“Well, keep moving ahead at the level of efforts you have now and add a little to have your team figure out how to set a program like that up. But we’ll wait until we get the recon from Mars before we embark on such a mammoth economic drain. Who knows how that would affect the economy right now?” the President replied.

Ronny held his expression blank, but thought that the President should be more concerned about Earth’s survival than the economy. He’s not equipped to understand what we are facing . I’m not sure I am.

The Neighborhood Watch team leaders and data reduction staff gathered around their respective consoles at the Huntsville Operations Support Center at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. There were others riding consoles at DSN locations around the world and at various relay satellite ground stations. Of course, only people who knew all about Neighborhood Watch were aware that any signal was being received from Mars. In fact, the stations being used were all “shut down for repairs.”

Roger Reynolds sat quietly at the HOSC trying to make heads or tails out of the previous image that had just completed downloading. The image was taken minus two hours from Percival’s closest approach to the planet’s surface. The telemetry data received to that point suggested that Percival should get as close as about fifty-four kilometers from the surface. At that altitude an image from the high resolution point camera would have a resolution of about ten centimeters — small enough to see a license plate but not read it. The probe was approaching Mars fast and would go from 50,000 km away, through the closest approach, and to 50,000 km past Mars in a period of less than two hours.