John Ringo - Von Neumann’s War

The base was buzzing with excitement and there were convoys of military vehicles on every roadway. Helicopters were buzzing in and out overhead as Cady drove Alice and the teens to the shelter on the Redstone Arsenal.

The shelters were built back during the Cold War but since then had been used as storage facilities for explosives and chemicals. When the news of the threat of an alien invasion was released, every old Cold War fallout shelter and civil defense location across the country was refurbished and brought back online as part of the shelter system for the populace. The shelter system on the military base was assigned to the personnel involved with the local contingents of Neighborhood Watch and Asymmetric Soldier and their families.

Alice, the girls, and Sergeant Cady met John Fisher in one of the makeshift control rooms for the ISR data analysis team. The room was an obvious afterthought to the shelter. The walls were 2x4 construction with cheap paneling and had been added to the large empty bunker by simply bolting the stud sill-plate to the concrete. The walls went eight feet or so high, then were open to the higher ceiling of the shelter. The makeshift control room had laptops strewn all around it on small tables and there was a bird’s nest of cabling and wires running around the room. Four large flat-panel displays were mounted on two of the walls and cables draped from beneath each of the panels to a rack of servers and tele-communications equipment in the corner of the room. This rack seemed to be the nexus of the disarray of cabling.

John Fisher and Alan Davis were staring at the large screens discussing the scrolling numbers and characters as if they could decipher it.

Charlotte hugged her father.

“Daddy, what’s going on?”

“I’m glad you made it, darling. I owe Alice and Cady one. It looks like the aliens have decided it’s time to move to Earth.” John clicked a touchpad a few times and an image of Earth popped up on one of the flat screens. “You see these circular and elliptical lines here all around the planet?”

“Uh huh.”

“Well, that is where we used to have satellites. As far as our space debris monitoring radars can tell, none of them are there. On the other hand, this…” he clicked a few more times on the touchpad, “is what the radars are picking up.” A cloud of blips filled the region around the planet.

“What does it mean?” Tina looked at her mother.

Alice shrugged.

“Dunno.”

“It means they’re wiping out our eyes and ears and communications capabilities,” Alan muttered. “John, I’ve got to get this to Roger. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” Alan popped a jumpdrive out of one of the laptops and hurried out.

“Well, Mr. President, the cloud surrounding the planet seems to be gone,” Ronny Guerrero explained to the President and the NSA.

“That’s good, right?” the NSA asked.

“Not really, ma’am. The latest data that we’ve been able to get back from radar at various locations around the globe has allowed us to make this composite of the data.” Ronny flipped the image up on his laptop.

“Here you can see a large cylindrical swarm of small contacts. Each seems to be less than thirty centimeters across, but there are estimated to be more than three billion of them in this tube that extends out from Earth nearly a thousand kilometers and is about three hundred meters in diameter. Analysis of the multi-static radar data suggests that there is only about one meter separation in any direction between these things within the tube. The cloud that was around the planet seems to have directed itself into the tube. Although there are still some few thousand of the contacts around the globe, most of them have converged into this tubule. And it’s coming down. Now.”

“Yes, Ronny, I can see that, but where is this thing centered?” the President asked.

“Well, sir, as best we can tell, it looks like somewhere just east of Paris, France.”

“Captain Holmes, sir. E-3 is enroute to target zone.” Captain Eddie Holmes of the NATO E-3A AWACS contingent from Geilenkirchen, Germany checked the charts velcroed to his left thigh. “E.T.A. of twenty-three minutes.”

“Little green men, cap’n?” Lieutenant Tod Alvers said. “Reckon we’ll see any?”

“You heard the briefing, Lieutenant. They’re machines. That scares me more than little green men. Living things implies that they might be reasoned with or even be sympathetic, but machines on the other hand…” The captain marked a checkpoint on his map and keyed the crew frequency. “Davis, are we getting returns from this thing yet?”

“Roger that, Cap’n. I’ve got the largest passive return I’ve ever seen. We haven’t got the transmitter active and the ambient return looks like God’s chaff cloud out there about three hundred miles east,” Tech Specialist Davis replied.

“Well, keep us posted up here and clear of those things, you hear me? I want all data live on JTIDS starting now. And as soon as we’re in range go active with the radar. The Pentagon wants as much information as we can get.”

“Roger, Cap’n. JTIDS link is operational. We’re in range now, sir. Going active with JSTARS now.” Davis typed in the proper commands on his keyboard to activate the radar systems on board the AWACS aircraft. His screen showed a cloud of metal that looked more like the return from a thunderstorm than from a squadron of flying machines. “Sir, we have zero resolution at this range. Just a large cloud, still trying to get a hard measurement. There must be billions of them, sir.”

“What are they doing, Davis?”

“They’re—” Davis stopped abruptly. “The cloud is changing shape…”

“Captain,” Lieutenant Alvers said, quietly but urgently, pointing toward the cockpit window.

“Holy shit! Bank! Bank! Bank!”

A swarm of meter-long boomerang shaped metallic objects consumed the aircraft and began ripping it apart. The aircraft metal on the empennage of the aircraft was rapidly stripped away. The cockpit and cabin pressurization gave way.

Banking and diving the aircraft seemed to have no effect on the swarm’s ability to match velocity and attack. Captain Holmes and Lieutenant Alvers banked and juked until the plane was pulled apart. Eddie looked out at the right wing and shook his head as it buckled; it was covered with meter-long boomerangs.

“This is Bob Campbell in Paris,” the CNN reporter said. “The reports of the alien landing are spotty at this time but it appears that they’re approaching Paris. The French military has issued a statement saying that they’re in position to defend the city and citizens should remain calm and in their homes. Thus far we have no reports of how the fighting is going and all communications from the area are cut off.”

“Probably because they lost,” Roger said, sipping a beer as he watched the streaming video. With all the satellites down, the report from Paris was being fed through Internet pipe over trans-Atlantic cable links and it was flickery and scratchy, with the reporter’s words occasionally coming in either before or after the video. “Our intel feed says that the French military’s already lost contact with them. Lost it right after they said they were engaged. Nothing since then.”

“They’re going to fight hard,” Shane said. He was sipping a Diet Coke since he considered himself “on duty.” Even if duty was watching the world end, live. “Everybody disses the French military. And, okay, their generals and politicians are fucked. But the troops are good and the junior officers are first rate. The good ones just can’t get promoted past colonel.”