John Ringo - Von Neumann’s War

“Can’t be helped,” Roger said. “But I think we’re staying way inside the box. What about directed energy weapons?”

“They’ve experimented with mounting chemical lasers on Falcons,” Bull said dubiously. “But you only get about twenty shots if I recall correctly.”

“Hell with that,” Alan said loudly, then belched. “Use a shit load of dah-odes!”

“Pardon me,” Rene said. “A what ?”

“A diode array laser,” Tom replied, taking a sip of beer as Roger pulled out another napkin and started sketching. “Instead of using chemicals to produce the laser, you use electrical energy and a diode. You can fire for as long as you have power and keep the diode system cooled.”

“Won’t work,” Roger said, shaking his head and looking up from the napkin. “You need at least a hundred kilowatts. The F-16 hasn’t got the juice with all its other systems. And I can’t see a way to shoe-horn in another generation system.”

“It would work for ground defense, though,” Traci pointed out excitedly. “Really really well.”

“Put the diode in a high place,” Alan said, his accent thickening. “Get a bitty nuke generator, one of them pebble-bed thingies from General Atomics. That’d give you all the power you need fer sure. Hell, we could even hook ’em right into the hydroelectric turbines on all the dams up and down the Tennessee!”

“We could cobble together a multi-diode hundred kilowatt system pretty easy,” Roger said, nodding. “Hell, multi mega watt for that matter. Targeting would be a bitch.”

“You’re talking about if they attack, like, here, right?” Casey said.

“Yeah,” Roger admitted. “But, hell, if we could just fix the targeting it would be another good city defense system.”

“This is a laser, like in a laser light show?” Casey asked.

“Well, lots more powerful,” Roger pointed out. He knew that Casey wasn’t up to the smarts level of Traci, but he didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

“And there’s lots of them?” Casey asked, waving her hands as if to get people to see where she was going. “The probes I mean.”

“Yeah,” Bull said, sighing. “They damned well fill the… Oh.”

“So you get one of those things that, like, moves the laser around…” Casey said, as if speaking to a moron.

“And just paint the whole fucking sky,” Roger said, slapping his forehead. “Jesus, you could just use any optical targeting system with cooled optics! Alan, see about getting the design specs for the SEALITE Beam Director off the MIRACL laser. We’re gonna want something like that.”

“They’re going to close fast ,” Bull pointed out. He gestured out the window to the general east. “If they’re closing here, from the east, they’re going to be coming over that big ridge. You won’t have more than a minute from when they come in view and when you’re under attack.”

“Well, we could mount it on top of Monte Sano Mountain; that’s the highest point around here. And we could put one on Madkin Mountain and shit what’s the name of the mountain out in Harvest with those towers on it…” Roger said.

“Rainbow Mountain?” Traci asked.

“We’d have to cut a bunch of trees.” Tom tried another wing — no luck.

“Balloon,” Cady said.

“Airborne, Sergeant Major,” Shane added, grinning.

“Sure,” Alan said, looking up from his chicken wing. “Mount it on one of them barrage balloon sort of things. You’d have to stabil… stab-l… you know…”

“Stabilization’s easy,” Roger said, frowning. “But that won’t be all-weather. Why not just mount it in a plane? One big enough to carry the diode and the generator?”

“C-130 would do,” Bull said, nodding. Then he blanched. “Shit, I’m going to end up fighting from a trash-hauler!”

“You missed something,” Shane said.

“What?” Roger asked. “I think it will work.”

“Back a ways,” Shane replied. “The sparrow-thingy.”

“Sparrow-mines?” Casey asked.

“What you got?” Roger said.

“I was thinking about that nuclear Katyusha Alan was pitching,” Shane said. “What about mounting the mines in some sort of rocket? One that released cluster bomb mines into the swarm?”

“And it would be easy,” Roger said, nodding. “Hell, why use cluster bombs? Mount them on K engine rockets. You can make those like…”

“We could probably get up to about ten an hour, if we were just making K engines,” Casey said, nodding.

“What?” Alan asked blearily.

“That’s where I work, Rocket Ram-Jets, down off James Record Road by the quarry where the divers dive and the boys play paintball and the sheep are nervous,” Casey replied, smiling. “I mean, my day job. And we’ve been really falling off. Not many people are making home-built rockets right now. The K line is about shut down and we’re mostly making Es. They’ve got some sort of military application. But if we hired some people, we could probably make about ten K engines an hour, twenty-four hours a day. Maybe more if we set up another line and could get the raw materials in place.”

“Casey,” Roger said carefully. “Make a note for the… what am I?”

“Deputy Secretary of Defense for Advanced Defense Concepts and Testing,” Traci said, grinning.

“…the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Advanced Defense Concepts and Testing to call your employer and give him a spec contract on full K production and probably upgrade of the line tomorrow. Please. Thank you?”

“Call Rocket Ram-Jets,” Casey said, slowly filling out the napkin. “K engine production. Good news, I even know the number.”

“She’s feeding you beer,” the colonel said, smiling. “Does this fall into the category of lobbying?”

“I’m paying for it,” Roger said, reaching for the pitcher and then pulling back as Casey, without looking up, reached out with her left hand and poured him another beer. “I think I’m covered.”

“Right you are, sir,” Bull said, grinning.

“An ABL,” Roger said, nodding. “I’d say that’s going to give us a throw to about sixty klicks. Inside that we’ve got the Falcons using modified Sparrows and ceramic bullets. Inside that we’ll have the K rockets. They’ll go to six klicks, straight up, so that gives us a linear ballistic of—”

“About a factor of two as near as makes no difference,” Tom replied without thinking. “Fired at a forty-five degree angle.”

“Twelve kilometers then,” Roger said, nodding. “Then inside that we’ve got the probe mines, Gecko mines, Coyote glue, the M240B with ceramic rounds, what have you.”

“And if they get inside of that?” Traci asked.

“Staffs,” Cady, Shane and Alan all chorused. Then Alan hiccupped and slid off his stool onto the floor.

“I think the meeting is adjourned,” Roger said, picking up his glass. “Time to toast my promotion!”

“Mr. President, from these satellite images taken by the Neighborhood Watch’s new birds we can actually determine where the alien machines have spread.” General Mitchell pointed at the flat world map on the flat screen.

“That group down there in Alabama has come through again, sir,” the NSA added. “Those are some very bright rednecks.”

“That’s why I appointed Roger to his position, Vicki,” the President said mildly.

“Well, sir,” Mitchell continued. “We see that the expansion wave has begun to touch into northeastern Greenland and that is getting close, sir. The AS Program has developed a first generation set of weapons that are entirely nonmetallic that they believe will be effective against the probes. Dr. Guerrero and Dr. Reynolds continue to request a recon team to capture and bring back some of the probes to study. I think northeastern Greenland would be the most likely place to make such an attempt.”