John Ringo - Von Neumann’s War

Alan frowned.

“What are those?”

“Lord he’p me,” the master sergeant replied in his thickest accent. “Ah’s surrounded by ivory tahr intellectuals!”

“Katyushas are a type of box missile launchers,” Shane said.

“Oh, you mean like the Multiple Launch Rocket System?”

“Yeah, MLRS is another example,” Shane agreed.

“Got that then. We designed most of that system right here in Huntsville at the Missile Command. And the ATACMS before that. In fact, if you go down the road you came in on and turn back north for a few miles you cross ATACMS Road. But, Katyushas? Why does that ring a bell?”

“They’re the Russian equivalent, sort of.” Shane was thinking he needed to steer Alan back on topic.

“Oh yeah! Katyushas! Those are the little rockets we shot down with the Tactical High Energy Laser back in the 1990s. I remember seeing the videos.”

“Uh, Alan, back to the fireworks and the little nuke, how’s that help us?” Shane shook his head, trying not to grin. He thought of Katyushas as “those damned missiles the insurgents keep firing at us.” But Alan’s referent was “those missiles we’re figuring out how to shoot down.” It was times like this that he realized just how sheltered Alan and the rest were.

“Oh, sure, sorry. I think we could take something like a Bradley and put a battery of a hundred of these modernized W-54 warheads in the back of it. If you set this thing off all at once, you have a distributed discrete explosion the order of the Hiroshima blast. Hoo-weee! Helluva firework!”

“Uh, yeah,” Shane said, sighing. “First of all, the range of the Davy Crockett was within the blast radius—”

“That’s an urban legend, sir,” Cady interrupted. “I had a sergeant major when I was a wee lad who’d actually dealt with the system. It wasn’t that bad. But it was pretty damned close. You wanted to duck and cover after you fired.”

“And the Davy Crockett launcher was pretty big,” Shane pointed out. “I couldn’t see putting more than one or two—”

“Not the actual missile ,” Alan said, sighing in turn. “Smaller missiles, maybe based on Stingers. And the W-54 is old tech; there are much smaller and more powerful warheads now. I was thinking a pack about a meter or two on a side and maybe two meters long.”

“That might work,” Cady admitted. “Hell of a bang, that’s for sure.”

“Uh, Alan, if you have this rain of nuclear blasts distributed all around you, how do you expect to get out .”

“Well, you’re in a Bradley aren’t you?” Alan said, shrugging. “What’s a little radiation between friends?”

Shane and Cady looked at each other, then at Alan and then back at each other. Finally, Cady shrugged.

“What can I say, sir?” the master sergeant said, shrugging again. “This is what happens when you let rednecks play with nuclear weapons.”

“This image here was taken when we first noticed the landing tubeway at the Moon.” Traci pushed her glasses back up on her nose and chewed on the end of an ink pen. She had worked so many around-the-clock shifts tracking the lunar invasion over the last ten weeks that her eyes just couldn’t handle her contact lenses anymore. She needed a full eight hours of sleep to get her contacts back. She didn’t foresee getting that anytime soon. In fact, she had slept on a couch in Roger’s office the past two nights and had showered in the fitness facility across the street at least three times a week rather than at her apartment. Her job was monopolizing all of her waking moments.

“Yes, I’ve seen this image, Traci.” Roger looked over her shoulder at her computer screen.

“Okay, now look at this one taken two weeks later. See anything interesting?” She waited for Roger to analyze the image for a moment.

“A dust cloud!” The image now revealed a cloud of lunar dust just large enough for the Hubble imagery to resolve encircling the landing zone. The tubeway was no longer there either.

“Uh huh, now look at the image at six weeks after the landing.” Traci clicked a button on the mouse and another image popped up.

“Okay, the cloud is a little bigger.” Roger leaned in closer over Traci’s shoulder to see the screen better. The scent of the former Hooters’ waitress’s perfume wasn’t lost on him. She might not have been home in three days but she still looked and smelled good.

“And this one taken yesterday at about ten weeks from the landing.” Traci didn’t seem to mind Roger leaning over her shoulder. He was always all business anyway. Damnit.

“Again, it’s larger than the previous one, but the growth in diameter is smaller.”

“Yeah, I really need close-up pictures to really track this, but from this data I’ve calculated a growth rate,” Traci said. “The surface area of the moon is about 152,000,000 square kilometers, give or take. So if you turn that into a circle with that area, then the radius of that circle is about 6,956 kilometers. And at the present growth rate of this cloud it will reach that radius at about five hundred and fifty days from the initial landing.”

“What is that, let’s see five fifty divided by three sixty-five is… uh… about a year and a half,” Roger muttered.

“The size of this thing is still only about six hundred kilometers in diameter right now. The big growth starts sometime around nine months to a year.” Traci chewed the pen’s cap reflectively.

“Good work, Traci. This tells us we still have a few months more than a year to prepare.” Roger patted her on the shoulder. “Hey, why don’t you take a couple days off and get some sleep.”

“I’m okay. You’re the one who needs to take a break. You’ve been doing this a year or more longer than I have.” She took her glasses off and massaged her nose and eyes.

“You might be right. But until I get a closer look at these things I don’t see that happening. I wish I could see them with a few centimeters resolution.” Roger mulled the thought over in his mind while at the same time considering sleep.

“Well, why don’t you just send a telescope up there and orbit the Moon so you can do just that?” Traci put her glasses back on and sighed. “How long would it take to send a probe to the Moon?”

“Well, rocket-wise we could get a small probe there in a few days. It would take maybe three months to build it and integrate it into a launch system… hmm… and from the Moon we could get basically real-time video — well, maybe a few seconds delayed. That’s a really good plan.”

“Why haven’t you considered it before?” Traci asked.

“Think about it and you’ll figure it out,” Roger replied darkly.

“Well, you see, Mr. President,” Ronny explained, “we really had no way of knowing how long these things were going to stay on the Moon and were not sure we had time to go forward with a lunar mission. Fortunately, Dr. Reynolds has surrounded himself with good people. His lead astronomer was able to measure the growth rate of the lunar dust cloud to project the timeline. If we assume they’ll do like at Mars and wait until the planet is mostly covered, that gives us at least fifteen months from today. Also, Dr. Reynolds’ launch team has been working around the clock to get as many launch systems ready and waiting as possible since the beginning of Asymmetric Soldier funding.”

“Good, Ronny, good. So how long before we can get a better picture of what is going on?” The President looked tired and Ronny could tell he needed to cut this briefing short.

“Within the next three to four months, sir.”

“Well, Roger, as far as the propulsion part of the mission is concerned it’s relatively simple,” John Fisher was explaining. Tom Powell sat beside John in Roger’s office nodding his head in agreement.