John Ringo - Von Neumann’s War

The boomerangs swarmed the chute and the dangling payload and almost as soon as the swarm surrounded the downed pilot, his chute collapsed and he began a plummet toward the ground. The plummet appeared to Ridley to be more of a controlled dragging and tossing, like a dog shaking a chew toy in its mouth.

Ridley strained hard to pull his right leg upward so he could reach his pistol. Just as he grabbed for it something invisible jerked it right out of his hands. The carabiner on his right shoulder ripped away from the harness. Then his clothes seemed to explode and be pulled away from him. The invisible force that grabbed him flung him sideways, slamming him into two shiny boomerangs that ripped the buttons and hasps from his flightsuit, again tossing him upward.

Ridley’s helmet thwacked hard into something. And then he felt a sharp stabbing pain in his left shoulder as he was spun face first into the top of a tree and into another alien probe. The faceshield of his helmet cracked and flew off as the buttons and other metal fasteners were ripped from it. The probe tossed him up and outward into another one and this one yanked the shoes right off his feet, breaking three bones in his left foot and dislocating all his toes on his right. With all the metal gone from his body, the probes left him plummeting downward.

Fortunately, he was at damned near tree height. A final plummet through several thick tree limbs spinning and smacking him around ended with a skipping, scraping, bouncing, and rolling stop on the ground at the base of a tree. Ridley lay there on the edge of consciousness in pain from head to toe staring up at the sky.

“So much for making colonel,” he muttered, then passed out.

Roger had been as good as his word. In less than fourteen hours Gries and Cady had been flown over to France on one of the C-17s that was supporting the Stryker brigade out of Stewart. Only one battalion had been off-loaded and mated up with their vehicles but there was another already queued up to land.

Shane had stopped by the local French “unified defense” headquarters, which was located in a small industrial building on the outskirts of Le Havre. Even in the worst conditions in Iraq, headquarters units had always been pretty button down and operational. When he went to the headquarters to try to get some intel on the situation, he’d found utter chaos. Nobody recognized his priority, or cared. Nobody seemed to have any idea what was happening or what to do about it if they did. He’d seen one three star French general wandering around the operations room asking everyone if they had a pencil sharpener; he seemed to have forgotten why he needed a pencil sharpened and was simply concentrating on a task he could perform.

While there were plenty of people willing to talk, nobody seemed to have picked up any information about the probes. Repeatedly, units had reported contact and then gone off the air. Areas where probes had hit — they sort of had those mapped out through negatives: military and police units that didn’t respond — had lost all communications. Refugees that had made it to units still in contact reported that the probes were “eating” vehicles and even buildings. That was about all the intel they had.

After a fruitless hour in the command center, Shane and Thomas, who had managed to use their priority to secure a Humvee, joined the convoy of Strykers and support vehicles headed to the Calais area. Nobody knew why they were heading to Calais and after seeing the chaos in the headquarters Shane was pretty sure even the French weren’t sure why the Strykers were heading to Calais. But those were the orders.

The drive was unpleasant. Despite cops trying to stop people using the limited access highway, civilians were out in force. Everyone seemed to have some place to be they thought better than their homes in the emergency. The convoy was caught in a traffic jam for an hour outside Calais before the battalion commander ordered the combat companies to head off-road. The support vehicles and logistics could catch up later. They thumped down off the limited-access highway, cut through some fields ripe with winter wheat, hit a few side roads that weren’t quite as crowded and finally reached their assembly area, which was another light industrial park near the town of Coulogne.

Cady drove the Humvee over to where the battalion staff was setting up a forward tactical operations center. Shane had paid his compliments to the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Walter Schon, when he’d first linked up with them in Le Havre and scrounged a vehicle. Schon was a bright officer with the tall, lean, clean-cut look that was de rigeur for modern infantry commanders. Shane had recalled a paper the commander had written in Command and General Staff on operational maneuver in the defense and had mentioned it, which the commander took as the intended compliment. They got along. They knew some of the same people and they both came out of the same school of modern military hard-knocks. Schon had had a company in Iraq as well and saw in Shane a fellow, only slightly junior, up-and-coming officer. He’d spent a few minutes picking Shane’s brain about the anticipated threat and had come away if anything more depressed.

Now they were in position and Shane got out to watch the battalion maneuver into defensive positions. Nobody knew exactly what they were defending, as such. But they spread out with a defense geared on a generally easterly axis, the Strykers and a platoon of Abrams tanks that had been sent in support finding hide positions along the slight slope of a hill.

“How do these things attack?” Major Forrester, the battalion operations officer, asked as Shane and Cady walked up to the huddle by the command Humvee. “Ray guns or what?”

“Major Gries?” the colonel asked, looking over at the attached “expert.”

“That’s what I’m here to try to find out, sir,” Shane admitted. “We’ve never seen any evidence of directed energy weapons, but the views we’ve gotten have all been on dead planets and the Moon. And not many of those, sir.”

“We have gotten no word on their method of attack as well, sir,” Lieutenant Leroie said. The French liaison shrugged. “Every unit has gone off the air shortly after contact. Including the Euro-NATO F-16 squadron.”

“What’s the update on the invader’s position?” the colonel asked Captain Carson, the intel officer.

“The last update I got was when we left, sir,” the captain replied. “They’d apparently wiped out everything around Paris and Tours as well as entering Belgium and Germany. It’s all negative intel, though, just where units weren’t responding. They have picked up some swarms on radar, but they’re mostly staying low and the radar has all gone down, quick. So have radio, land-lines and even cell phones. We had an AWACS up with F-15 escort, but they took that out nearly four hours ago.”

“Where was it?” Shane asked. “Where was it orbiting, that is?”

“I dunno,” the intel officer replied, shrugging. “Why?”

“Well, if they were in and around Paris and it wasn’t, why’d they go for it?” Shane asked.

“Good question,” the colonel replied. “I guess we’ll have to find out, won’t we? How hard are these things to kill, do you think?”

“They’re flying, sir,” Cady interjected. “Hard to hit even if what we have can kill them.”

“We don’t have a clue what they’re made of,” Shane admitted. “It could be super unobtainium for all we know. No data at all, Colonel.”

“I guess we’ll have to gather some,” the colonel said. “Major, I’d like to speak to you for a moment.”

He put his hand on Shane’s shoulder and led him a bit away from the staff.