John Ringo - Von Neumann’s War

“Contact, contact,” a calm, French accented voice said. “Visual, two o’clock, low.”

“Zehn Uhr!” a slightly more excited German voice said hastily.

“TWELVE!”

The two formations were closing at a combined rate of nearly four thousand miles per hour. One second there was only a shiny, slightly gray cloud. The cloud, like coming closer to a pointillist painting, suddenly became billions of dots and then the dots became a cloudy sky filled with meter long boomerangs that… were… freaking… everywhere !

Ridley began yanking and jerking the joystick control at his side in a desperate attempt to weave in and out of the cloud of alien probes. The F-16 was in a supersonic dive at the edge of its operational capabilities, but the alien metal boomerangs zipped up effortlessly into the squadron and began tearing the manmade vehicles to shreds. Ridley watched as one of the boomerangs passed right through the empennage of the F-16 flown by Luftwaffe Captain Heinz Zwack, sacrificing itself to destroy the fighter. Two more exploding Falcons was all it took to tell him this was not a survivable tactic.

“Full throttle and push through, push through!” he yelled.

“Bull, we must slow to firing speeds!” Rene exclaimed.

“Push through the first wave, Rene! Then bank just like we trained!” Ridley ordered. His orders were doing no good. The less seasoned pilots were anxious to go to missiles and guns and to do that they had to slow down. At Mach speeds the alien boomerangs seemed to have a hard time maneuvering with precision, but as soon as the F-16s banked and slowed the little alien probes matched velocity vectors and ripped them apart.

Ridley pushed the F-16 nose down so fast he thought the wings would fly right off and Rene stayed right with him. Maybe twenty or so of the other pilots matched the tactic as well. Ridley’s eyes rolled up as a shiny metal boomerang zipped by his cockpit in a blur.

“Jesus, that was close!”

At the bottom of the dive the F-16s did a slow curving bank with little juking maneuvers thrown in to avoid the boomerangs. The dive took them mostly below the initial cloud of the alien probes, giving them a few seconds to slow and maneuver to firing speeds.

“AAARRRGGGHHH… AAARRRGGG… UUUMMMPHHH!” Ridley grunted and squeezed his abdominal muscles, calves, and thighs as the air bladders inflated as tight as they would go. Ridley bit down on the bite block hard and grunted again.

Warning, warning, excessive g-forces, blackout danger! The cockpit chimed.

“Nooo shhhiiittt! AAARRUMMMPPHH!” Ridley grunted through the bank and immediately went to the Joint Helmet Mounted Cueing System to fire the Aim-9X Sidewinder air-to-air missiles. “Fire one, fire two, fire three…” Ridley rolled the fighter upward and painted as many targets as he could. His wingman and the other remaining twenty or so fighters were following suit.

The Sidewinder missiles left sinewy and twisted contrails at Mach 2.5 upwards through the belly of the cloud of alien boomerangs. At the supersonic velocity of the deadly missiles the alien probes seemed to have some — not a lot mind you, but some — difficulty matching their velocity and attacking the missiles until it was too late.

Ridley watched for the split second it took for his first missile to explode and fragment just in front of a subswarm of boomerangs. Several of the alien probes were blown into fragments and scattered into several other probes nearby, killing them with fratricide. Ridley also noted that as soon as the handful of probes were destroyed several handfuls filled the void and swooped up the flying debris like a magnet picking up iron filings.

“There are too many of them, Bull! I’m out of missiles and guns seem to have no effect!” Rene said frantically.

That was apparent. Rene had taken an angle shot at a stray boomerang. The probe flew right into his fire cone, actually seeming to bank towards the tracers, but the bullets just seemed to disappear as they closed the target.

“Roger that, Rene! Let’s make a dive for the hard-deck and try to get away from these goddamned things! Falcons evade and escape as best you can! Retreat!”

“ Oui , Bull!”

Twelve of the F-16 Falcons remained and dove as hard to the surface as they could manage. Bull looked up and back, fighting the Gs to get a look at the enemy. Incredibly, the damned boomerangs were banking inside their curve. The F-16 was the most maneuverable fighter on the face of the earth at these sorts of speeds and the damned things were inside their maneuverability envelope! A good bit of the swarm had already banked around and were closing from the rear at well over the max speed of the Falcons. They looked like boomerang-form air-to-air missiles, without the smoke trail.

Evasive maneuvers at subsonic speeds were proving fruitless. The boomerangs had the ability to match speeds and simply attach to the fighters’ surfaces. One of the fighters behind him, Bull thought it was Lieutenant Granz’s, was surrounded by six of the ’rangs and seemed to simply come apart. The mostly aluminum and sheet metal fuselage and wings of the fighters stripped off like friable plastic and vanished in midair.

“Stay fast Falcons, they’re closing!” Ridley warned. “Afterburner!” He kicked in his afterburner and yanked and banked to treetop height, then pulled up hard again, nearly blacking out. He couldn’t look back at these speeds; all he could do was hang in there. He was flying practically nap-of-the-earth at high Mach and the ground effect buffet was shaking his fighter apart.

High inertia structural damage , the warning system cooed. Warning. Warning.

“AAARRRGGGHHH… AAARRRUUUMMMPPHHH… UMMMP… UMMPPHH!” he grunted and squeezed his muscles as hard as he could trying to curl his toes right through the bottom of his boots. Ridley bit down hard on his bite block as a black spot appeared in the center of his vision and the tunnel started closing in. Then Thud !

“WOOOHH… WOOOOHH… SHEEWWWWW!” he breathed and squeezed as another Thud and then Spang sounded through the aircraft. The fighter was already bucking from the air compression around it but these were solid hits. It sounded and felt like he was taking flak. Hell, he could be hitting treetops, he didn’t know. He pulled up a bit to try to get out of the ground buffet and there was another, hard, Spang!

“Bull, I’m hit, I’m hit. Ejecting!” Rene screamed over the net.

Ridley rolled his head slightly to the right and saw his wingman’s fighter fly into thousands of pieces just as his ejection seat fired. Almost at the same time he saw his own right wing fly apart and the ship immediately begin to go into “out of control” condition.

Still not completely out of his tunnel vision and his mind hazy, Lieutenant Colonel Matthew “Bull” Ridley instinctively reached between his knees and pulled the eject handle. The process had been drilled into him and it had served him well once during the first Gulf War. The training would save him this time. Thwack, bang !

Ridley was flung out of the fighter jet into the evening air at several hundred miles per hour just as the jet came apart below him. Fortunately, the fuel load didn’t detonate. The g load and the spin were worse than any roller coaster. To Ridley’s bemused astonishment and distaste, it seemed a lot worse than it did a decade and a half ago. Of course, that time he hadn’t been at damned near Mach One and below Angels Seven.

Then his chute popped and things slowed down for a second. Ridley could see the chute from several of the twelve remaining NATO squadron pilots already deployed. He had made it much closer to the tree line than the others and most of them were a thousand or more feet above him. And then one by one their chutes began to fail. Ridley tracked the closest chute to him; he thought it was Rene. Then he realized why the chutes were failing.