John Ringo - Von Neumann’s War

So was the master sergeant, as it turned out, and the Humvee continued forward, still in drive, as five of the probes came up with a thunder of air. The Humvee began to shake and tear apart and the master sergeant let out a curse as he was jerked into the air. The seam on the seat of his pants ripped and his boots came apart as the eyelets were ripped out. Then he dropped through the air to land hard on the asphalt.

“Son of a BITCH!” Cady snarled, looking up at the probe, which was hovering not much above head height. His wallet was firmly attached to the underside.

As Shane watched, the wallet ripped apart and a bit of metal was briefly visible, then the wallet dropped through the air, just another scrap of useless garbage to the probe.

“My COIN!” the master sergeant raged. He looked around for a weapon and finally settled on a timber by the side of the road. “That was my battalion coin you BASTARDS!”

The master sergeant hefted the heavy construction timber and jumped in the air as the hovering probes drifted over them, apparently searching for more scraps of metal. The four by four hit the surface, hard, and rebounded leaving a large dent. The master sergeant cried out in pain as the timber vibrated in his hand and he dropped it.

The probe, however, shuddered for a moment, then drifted sideways. It shuddered again and then there was a brief burst of sparks and it dropped out of the air.

“Congratulations,” Shane said, getting up from his crouch and examining the fallen probe with interest. “You’ve proven they can be killed.”

As the master sergeant hefted the timber again, the remaining four descended on their fallen brethren. Before he could get in another whack they lifted it, whole, into the air and began to strip it apart. Shane could see bits flying off towards the other four probes but as they approached them the bits seemed to dwindle and then disappear. One thing he noticed was that the probes seemed to be getting… fatter. They were sleek boomerang wing shapes but as the fallen probe was disassembled they seemed to be getting more material on their surface.

As soon as the wounded wing was fully disassembled three of them flew away. The last one, however, continued to hover at about ten meters off the ground and Shane watched as it seemed to change shape. The center got thicker, the metal appearing to move inward from the wings towards its middle. Then a dimple appeared and the thing began to twin, joined wings stretching out from the middle, which got flatter and flatter. Finally, all that was left was a small joining between two of the probes and then that separated.

As soon as it did, the two flew away, ducking down to rip apart Shane’s boots and shoulder pocket in passing. The stone from the ring dropped to the ground about fifty meters away, carried in a ballistic arc as the things accelerated to cruising speed in an instant.

“Bastards,” Shane said, walking over to the stone. It was a synthetic ruby, all he could afford on graduation. He buffed it and pocketed it in thought. Rubies were nothing more than pretty aluminum dioxide. Either they didn’t like aluminum or unformed metal… There was a thought there, but he wasn’t sure what it meant.

“You were saying you had a plan for getting out of here?” Shane asked Cady distractedly.

“Well, I was planning on driving back to the airbase at Le Havre,” Cady replied, tossing the four by four back to the roadside. He’d been holding onto it in case the damned things got lower. “But as a last ditch, it’s all lost, go to hell plan, we’re about five miles from where the Channel Tunnel comes out on this side. I figure that might be why they put us here; to defend the tunnel. If they’re not to England, yet, we can run the thirty or so miles from one side to the other. Better than swimming.”

Shane thought about the long tunnel, then about the things eating the very metal out of the walls. Flooding. Refugees. On the other hand…

“I don’t have a better idea,” Shane said. “Where’s this tunnel entrance?”

The Army standard for the five-mile run is forty minutes. Shane figured it had probably taken them somewhat less than thirty to reach the massive entrance. And that was with a stop at a devastated town to pick through a store for running shoes. Ones with no metal in them.

The channel tunnel was a miracle of modern English and French cooperation and engineering. The “Chunnel” in actuality consists of three tunnel-railroad connections that run under the English Channel, connecting Folkestone, England, and Calais, France. When the Chunnel was being constructed both French and English citizens had a fear of being so far beneath the water and there was a popular myth that the North Sea would collapse it and fill it in with disaster-movie effect. That myth was explained away once the public realized that the Chunnel was actually constructed beneath a mostly water-impermeable layer of chalk at 150 feet below the bottom of the English Channel seabed. The odds of water from English Channel leaking into the Chunnel were proven to be basically nill — that is unless structural integrity were lost in the super high density shotcrete reinforced regions of the tunnel.

The tunnels are 31 miles long with two rail tunnels, each 25 feet in diameter, and a central tunnel, 16 feet in diameter. The central tunnel is used for maintenance and ventilation. Two of the tubes are full sized and accommodate the various rail traffic. The smaller service tunnel has several “crossover” passages that allow trains to switch from one track to another. These connecting tunnels serve as emergency escape routes when necessary. In fact, they were used as refuge by thirty-one people as a safe haven during a Chunnel fire back in the late 1990s. The escape route system worked well and all of the trapped people survived. But the Chunnel escape system was designed for fires in sections of it, not for metal-eating alien probes swarming through the entire construct. Most likely, the cross-over escape tubes would only appear as that much more tasty metal for the bots to gather. Shane was considering what would happen to the tunnel’s structural integrity when those bots started yanking metal support from the concrete walls.

The entrance, and indeed the entire track, was walled off by a high metal fence. It was proof positive to Shane that the probes hadn’t gotten there yet that the fence was still standing. It was also a hell of a thing to try to cross.

Others, however, had had the same idea and already holes had been dug under the fence. There was only a trickle of people going through the holes and Shane and the master sergeant, apologetically, pushed their way to the front and through one of the holes.

As soon as they were in the tunnel, they began to run again, weaving in and out amongst the light crowd. There was a two-meter wide walkway on the north wall with a meter-and-a-half drop down to the railbed. About a hundred meters inside the entrance there was a door on the wall with an “exit” sign.

“Take that?” Cady asked.

“Clear enough in here,” Shane said. “I’ve been on this thing, I know where it goes. But there’s a spot up here about five or ten miles on where we’ll have to do some climbing. Some sort of big cavern.”

They saved their breath for running the rest of the way. They were among the few who were steadily running. Most of the rest looked as if they’d run as far as they could and now were just grimly determined to walk the rest of the way. But about a mile into the run, Shane heard the rapid pad of feet behind him and a man in running clothes passed them at a good clip. He was shorter than either of them, but he had long easy strides and easily outstripped them, disappearing back into the crowd ahead.