John Ringo - Von Neumann’s War

“I thought you would get it.” Ronny laughed. “How do we get it up and back?”

“A rocket with completely composite components and mechanically driven guidance systems with no metal, no radios. The satellite takes a couple orbits worth of photos and plummets back to Earth. We use an air pressure gauge to release a chute with all-composite parts and then we just go pick up the film canister.” Roger started running the idea through the design process in his head. The last two missions had made him very sharp with the process and he was already thinking about the mission components.

“Can we do it?” Ronny asked.

“We can do it. I better get to work.” Roger ran out of Ronny’s office, looking for Tom Powell and John Fisher.

“Good lad.” Ronny leaned back in his chair and sighed.

Dr. Richard Horton rummaged through the antechamber of the old copper mine looking for his RJ-45 connector crimping tool. He had sworn that he had set it on top of the spool of Category-5 Ethernet wire that he had brought with them.

“Is dis vat you are looking for?” Helena asked holding up a coaxial cable crimping tool.

Richard paused for a second to take in her sexy thick Russian accent before responding to his very young and very beautiful wife. He had found her a year before on RussianWives.com. It had only cost him sixty-three hundred dollars and a plane ticket to pick Helena Terechenkova from the catalogue and fly her to the States. Getting a lawyer to straighten out the paperwork had taken another two thousand. After staying with Richard Horton for three weeks, Helena decided that he would do and married him. That translated into: living with Dr. Horton was less of a hell than living under the oppressive thumb of the drug lords in the bad part of St. Petersburg. Richard could care less why she stayed; just that she stayed and married him was enough to satisfy him. The occasional treat of sex with Helena made it more than satisfying, at least for him. From Helena’s standpoint, the sex was worth getting out of Russia — but just barely. She knew that Richard Horton meant nobody any harm and that he was a nice person, but besides that he was a crazy conspiracy nut, which meant that they moved around, used assumed names often, and lived in the oddest places. Helena tried to tell herself that his paranoia was just entertainment .

Entertaining or not, he eventually got on her damn nerves. Had aliens not come to take over the world, she would have probably left him. But for now he seemed like her best bet for survival. Who knew, he might even eventually grow on her. That part was unlikely, but Helena was a survivor and she was going to make the best out of the situation — no matter what.

“Sorry, dear. That’s for crimping connectors onto television cable. We’re looking for the crimping tool for putting one of these onto this.” He held up an RJ-45 Ethernet connector and the frayed end of a piece of Ethernet cable.

“Oh, dat one, yes I seen it over dere,” Helena pointed to the tool box sitting on the tailgate of the pickup truck parked in the entrance to the mine.

Richard walked over to the truck, stumbling over several other packs and boxes on the way, and stopped to kiss Helena on the cheek. Helena smiled and squirmed a bit from the roughness of Richard’s long, unruly, graying beard.

“You should shave dat ting.”

Richard ignored her and made his way through the tools in the truck until he found what he had been searching for. The little blue crimping tool was there and finally he could get back to running the network on his equipment. Just in case he needed another tool once he got down to the bottom of the mine shaft he slung the little backpack shaped toolbox over his shoulder and snapped the restraining strap around his waist.

“I’m going back down, you coming?” Richard grabbed the hundred-foot spool of Ethernet wire.

“ Nyet , it’s too dark down dere right now. I tink I’ll drive back up to the cabin and make some dinner. You vant?”

“Maybe in a few hours. I’ve got a lot to do today.”

“I still don’t see vhy you don’t go vireless.” She brushed her long black bangs off her soiled forehead. “I vill go down… go into the cave… when you get finished.”

“Suit yourself, but wireless would probably not be a good idea,” he said.

“Why is dat?”

“The alien probes use it.” Richard shrugged and started the long winding half-mile trek to the bottom of the mine.

Although he had already been working on the mine for months, it was just now becoming a true shelter with real necessities of life. He had lined all the shafts with touch-on battery operated lights — the kind you could buy at the hardware store for a few dollars each. He had placed them about every fifty feet or so and had strung low-voltage rope lights between them to mark the walking path.

He followed the path deeper into the mine for another quarter mile or so before he had to stop and shift the weight of the spool of cable to the other arm. He started rolling off his list of things to do out loud to himself.

“Okay, let’s see, first I need to connect the waterwheel to the torque control circuit and the optical encoders to the laptop. Then I can control the gearing mechanism electronically.” He adjusted his headlamp with his right hand and nearly dropped the cable spool on his foot. “Shit!” He caught the spool just in time.

Several times in the past he had considered buying an electric four-wheeled vehicle to carry equipment up and down the shaft to the shelter, but it was either the four-wheeler or a spectrum analyzer. Then it was either a four-wheeler or a computer-controlled waterwheel — batteries or gas-powered generators just weren’t going to do. It was unlikely that the waterwheel would put out enough power continuously for him to operate the equipment and life-supporting things he needed, but it was his best shot.

Then it was either the four-wheeler or digital microscope setup. Then it was the four-wheeler or a very fast digital oscilloscope card. Then it was the four-wheeler or the Bell jar and vacuum pump. Then he started entertaining the idea of putting together an electron microscope down there, but that would be heavy and he’d probably need the four-wheeler just to haul it down there. The electron microscope would be too expensive just then and would require a more creative funding source — maybe later. So he decided on a mass spectrometer. Then it was a well-equipped chemistry lab, including stills, condensers, centrifuge, and such. And so on. Richard just could not force himself to sacrifice a piece of scientific equipment because he didn’t like the long walk down the shaft. After all, he could only generate so many credit card numbers a month without getting caught. And he didn’t want to get his proverbial red wagon fixed.

But at the same time he wished he had his little red wagon with him. What he had been doing was pulling a beefed up heavy duty RadioFlyer filled with the stuff up and down the mine shaft. But he had forgotten and left it at the bottom of the shaft on the last trip down. He continued to wrestle with the idea of buying that four-wheeler.

“The uninterruptible power sources are already connected to the generator, but the UPS diagnostic is Ethernet and goes from there to the hub.” He continued talking his plan out loud to himself. “Right. Then it goes from each of the computers and the printer to the hub. Let’s see, there’re three computers, a printer, and the scanner, oh and the eight different Internet wires from the river…” He ticked off the list.

Richard had searched for a month to find the most secluded and deep underground Internet service providers in the area that ran close to the river that wound through the mountains. He found one switching hub from the phone network at the edge of the town just below the mountain. He found a server that was operated from a small service provider a few miles up river on the other side of the mountain. He found two different cable/Internet companies that had brought high speed wireless up the mountain along with digital cable. One connection he hacked into ran beneath a power line that ran across the mountain ridge on the other side of the valley. Two ran from Park Ranger stations at either end of the river on each side of the mountain. His final and perhaps most robust connection was to an abandoned SCADA network running the old railroad system that wound through the mountains. Richard expected it to be the most likely system to survive.