John Ringo - Von Neumann’s War

“Why do they want to catch one of these damned things?” the President asked.

“It’s Dr. Reynolds’ theory that bullets and bombs might, and he emphasizes might, hold them off for a while,” the NSA answered. “But simulations say that they’ll have a limited long-term effect. The theory within the AS team is that we’ll need something new, some tool that attacks the probes specifically and on a very large scale. To have any chance of doing that, we need one or more to study.”

“As the NSA said, sir.” General Mitchell flipped the slide to a map of Greenland. “We can fly in low and fast to God’s Thumb. The team will go from there to the edge of occupied territory and try to find regions with low concentrations of the probes. The plan is to find a small subswarm of the probes and kill or capture all of them. They intend to bring back any and all debris that can be managed and hopefully one or more full probes. The Huntsville AS team is leading the way on capture methods while the Denver and Boston teams are point units for analysis and countermeasures.”

“Jesus Christ, what if that just pisses them off and makes them follow the team back to the U.S.?” SecDef Stensby asked.

“Well, sir, they’ve been building a pretty extensive underground bunker at both the Huntsville and Denver Redoubt and the plan is to do all of the research as deep underground as possible,” General Mitchell said.

“Okay.” The President held up his left hand. “Peace, gentleman. We can argue this if we want, but the AS and Neighborhood Watch have done their job thus far. Let’s not get in the way of that. Approve the mission, General, with whatever resources it needs.”

“Yes, sir.” Mitchell moved on to the next slide. “One more bit of info from the spysats, sir, shows us that the aliens are doing something other than just creating replicas of themselves.”

“And that is?” The President put his hands on the table and thought to himself, Oh God, what now?

“The Neighborhood Watch scientists took the hot spot data given to them from the NSA analysis and made those points the first targets for the space recon.” Mitchell pointed the mouse at a spot in the center of a picture of Italy and it zoomed in on Rome, specifically the Coliseum. “Here, sir, there is obviously a major construction taking place. Where there used to be ruins there now stands a large metal infrastructure nearly a hundred kilometers across. It’s similar to the images of Mars and now the Moon.”

“That is not good!” NSA said, biting her lower lip nervously. Where Rome used to be looked like one gigantic metal building.

“This is only a small part of the story. The AS analysts have put together a mosaic of the red area from the spysat data and from that you can see that there are major central infrastructure regions tied together with vast pathways.”

The image of Europe showed bright spots where most of the major cities had been and they were all linked together like a giant shiny spider web. The probes were un-terraforming the planet — fast.

“There are four extremely large concentrations of alien activity, Mr. President. The largest is just east of Paris where they first came down. The other three are in Casablanca, Morocco; Cairo, Egypt; and Moscow, Russia. The terraforming of Rome is small compared to what has been done at these other cities.” Mitchell showed slides of each of the metal cities that were now hundreds of kilometers across.

“Holy shit!” resounded through the briefing room.

“Yes, sir, holy shit, sir. Zooming in on Paris we can see even more. In this image we see this big rectangular object here. This object is about a kilometer long and about half that wide. You see this shadow here, sir?” Mitchell paused to see if the President responded.

“Yes?”

“Well, from the angle of the sun at the time the image was taken, the analysts were able to determine that this thing, whatever it is, is about a thousand meters above the ground. It’s flying, sir.”

“Flying?” the SecDef said.

“Yes, sir. And from the data we have so far, there are many such mammoth objects that appear to be just floating in midair above these larger centers. They’re not swarms; they’re flying cities, Mr. President.”

“Hey, Danny,” Roger said as he made his way into the general’s office.

Most of the personnel of Redstone and the Huntsville Redoubt had moved out of the rather cramped “secure” quarters and back into the buildings and offices of the base. Newly promoted Major General Danny Riggs was once again installed in his office in the Sparkman Center. And now was clearly too busy to play golf with any congressmen.

“Hello, Mr. Deputy Secretary,” the general said, grinning.

“Am I the only one who didn’t read the memo?” Roger asked plaintively.

“Apparently,” General Riggs said, still grinning. “I’m not supposed to know there was a pool going on how long it would take you to notice that people were calling you ‘Deputy Secretary.’ ”

“You grow ’em up, you let ’em wear shoes…” Roger said, shaking his head. “Besides, aren’t deputy secretaries supposed to be pushing paper, not electrons?”

“You’ve got some good administrative people around you,” Riggs said seriously. “I made sure of that. And you’re running most of Neighborhood Watch and Asymmetric Soldier. It’s not a small program anymore, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I had,” Roger said, sighing. “And I’m going to see what I have to do to make it larger. We need a probe to study.”

“That’s going to be interesting,” General Riggs said, raising an eyebrow. “But I suppose we can get with SOCOM and see about infiltrating a CAG team into Europe…”

“You sort of lost me past SOCOM,” Roger said, frowning. “CAG?”

“Combat Applications Group,” Danny replied. “Delta.”

“Oh,” Roger said, his brow furrowing. “Do we need to use Delta? I was wondering if we could just get some guys for Shane. He has some guys from his old command he says would be pretty good for it. And he knows the systems we’re working on for it and the mission.”

Riggs leaned back in his chair and looked at the scientist soberly for a moment.

“There’s some operational issues there, Roger,” the general said carefully. “I’m tempted to say ‘Mr. Deputy Secretary’ because, technically, you’re my boss. This base is part of Northern Command, now, but you’re, effectively, calling the shots for us and the rest of the redoubts.”

“I need to read that memo carefully,” Roger said. “So if I am, what’s the problem?”

“Major Gries isn’t part of my command,” the general said, ticking off a list on his fingers. “He’s temporary duty, as is Sergeant Major Cady. I’m not his commander. For that matter, I don’t even know who does his evaluations. Maybe we should get that changed, but that’s the way it is for now. And the base is not part of FORCECOM. I’m not somebody that they put in charge of shooters. Then there’s the authority to perform a combat action in a foreign country—”

“We’re planning on Greenland,” Roger said, sitting down and listening carefully.

“Greenland more or less obviates that,” Riggs said, nodding. “Planning on staging out of God’s Thumb?”

“Yes, sir,” Roger said, nodding.

“I call you ‘sir,’ sir,” General Riggs pointed out. “Okay, but what you’re talking about is forming a direct action group under the control of this base, more or less under your direct control. That’s… not how civilian control of the military is supposed to work and there are actually regulations to prevent it. And then there’s the question of movement priorities, funding and all the rest.”