John Ringo - Von Neumann’s War

“Concur, Top.” Gries knelt by the dented alien probe and poked at it with the barrel of his potato gun. There was a buzzing like an angry wasp inside and then another brief crackle of static electricity on its surface. It shuddered for a moment and then was still.

“I think maybe we do have a live one,” Gries said musingly.

“Mr. Secretary, after making a quick analysis of the most recent spysat photos and comparing that data with the NSA Internet data as well as the seismograph detections, we believe we can say what is going on now.” Ronny Guerrero’s image came through the T1 datalink in real-time to the President’s underground headquarters in Wyoming.

“Well Ronny don’t keep me hanging,” SecDef Stensby replied. The entire presidential staff had assembled in the War Room of the underground headquarters for this debrief. They all were hoping for good news, but none were expecting it.

“Right, sir. It looks like it was a firewall along the sixty-degree eastward latitude line. We’ve got signs of detonations in Mashhad, Iran; in Turkmenistan; Uzebekistan; Temir, Kazakhstan; Ural, Samara, Ufa, Izhevsk, Perm, Magnitogorsk, Tagil, Ukhta, Ifdel, and many other Russian cities with the first wave of detonations. There were also a few in Yemen, Oman, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. It appears that there were a total on the near order of one hundred and sixty strikes, most of them from multiple reentry vehicles,” Ronny explained.

“My God!” President Colby shook his head. “General, check me if I’m wrong but that’s a significant portion of Russia and China’s nuclear arsenal.”

“About that, sir,” General Mitchell said.

“Are we going to have nuclear winter on top of everything else?” the President asked angrily.

“Uh, sir,” the national security advisor said, then looked at the secretary of defense.

“Mr. President,” the secretary said, carefully but definitely. “Let me state for the record that most secondary analysis of the original nuclear winter scenario indicate that it’s overstated.”

The President frowned for a moment, then shook his head.

“How overstated?” he asked.

“The terms that comes to mind are deliberate ‘political tinkering’ and ‘junk science,’ ” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said bluntly. “Then a descent into urban legend. The total energy output of all of the nuclear weapons in the world at the height of the Cold War is lower than the output of the Mount Saint Helens blast. Even with fudging hard on secondary effects, nobody except the original scientists could come anywhere near a ‘mini-iceage’ scenario from a full-scale nuclear war. Upon review, even most of the physicists involved in the original study repudiated it. What we’ll get from this blast is a slight reduction in temperatures, hardly noticeable except by fine study. As a matter of fact, given the destruction of the worldwide sensory networks, I’m not sure it will be testable at all. Oh, and some spectacular sunrises. And a slight increase in background radiation, but nothing that’s going to cause two-headed babies; possibly a slight increase in cancer rates. Given that if we don’t win, the human race is going to be wiped out, a slight increase in cancer rates is the least of our worries.”

“Point,” the President said, nodding. “Did it work?”

“Not the way they intended, sir.” Ronny paused to flip through his data. “Uh, if you will flip to slide four of the package we just sent you, you’ll see that the second group of detonations that took place a few minutes after the first were located in India, China, North Korea, and the far eastern parts of Russia.”

“Why does that mean that these nukes didn’t work?” the SecDef asked.

“We did not fire on those locations. Ergo, they must have fired upon themselves. We suspect the initial detonations tipped off the Von Neumann probes that the launch sites for these nukes were a threat and then they must have attacked those locations. That is the only explanation for nuking yourself that we can figure, sir,” Ronny finished and waited for a response.

“We were planning a similar tactic,” General Mitchell said quietly. “I hate to say it, but I’m happy as hell that the Chinese and Russians beat us to it.”

“Do we know how effective the bombs were at destroying the probes?” the NSA asked.

“All we know is what is in slide five.” Ronny waited for them to flip to the last slide the Neighborhood Watch had sent over the T1 hotline. It was a slide containing several images from the last ten or so spyphotos they had received. The compilation slide showed multiple tubules of alien probes descending on Nagpur, Calcutta, Chengdu, Si’an, Beijing, Novosibirsk, Bratsk, Omsk, and Chita. The probes were consuming the Eurasian continent.

“One of the most interesting things here is that the probes let the missiles fly and detonate as if they had no clue as to what they were or that they didn’t care if they lost millions of bots. We guess that the missiles were launched from beyond the occupied regions and flew to the edge of the bots’ territory.”

The President nodded. “I see.”

“Until now the bots had only imposed the no-fly zone over the occupied regions with a bit of cushion around it.” Ronny let that sink in for a second and then continued.

“It looks like now from data we’ve been able to gather that they’re imposing a global no-fly zone. This is going to limit operations severely. And, of course, as reported in the media and on the Internet, contact has been lost with most of these areas,” Ronny continued. “The last significant contact was from a blogger in Singapore stating that the probes had been reported approaching across the straits from Malaysia. Internet pings from the National Security Agency indicate that there are no remaining Internet nodes on the Eurasian landmass. With the exception of South America and areas of Africa, we appear to be alone in this fight, Mr. President.”

“Home,” Jones said, sighing as he lowered his end of the mesh “stretcher” to the ground. The bot had turned out to weigh a good two hundred pounds, despite its small size, and they’d taken turns carrying it back to the cached Humvees.

Besides the bot they’d managed to pick up about another two hundred pounds of assorted bits, including one bot that was blown in half, revealing the interior. It was, as far as anyone could tell, just a mish-mash of metal and what looked like glass, damned near solid, which explained the weight. The small team had had a time humping all the bits, and their gear, back to the Humvees.

The bots had been carefully observed by satellite and it was noted that they’d stopped, presumably temporarily, on a strict line. For safety the Humvees had been left twenty kilometers west of the line and the attack point had been set up about two kilometers inside. It had been a long twenty-two klicks humping all those bits over the tundra.

But the Humvees were still there, which meant they didn’t have to hump it the whole hundred and fifty to the Thumb of God.

“Keep moving,” Cady said, grasping the whole bot and lifting it into the bed of the Humvee. “I’m not going to be happy until these things are back in the States. And not very then.”

“They’re not radiating,” Mahoney said. He was the team’s designated electronics and intel geek and already had the devices the scientists had loaded them with out and operating. “No radio signals. No gravitational signals. No apparent subatomic particle stream.”

“Doesn’t mean they’re not talking to somebody,” Cady growled. “Load it up and let’s move.”

He dumped his ruck and the minigun in the back of the Humvee and got in the driver’s seat, picking up the squad radio and donning the headset. The new system they’d been issued had no carrier wave for the bots to home in on and only radiated when used. The system worked over short ranges using the so-called ultrawideband Pulson chip technology and was theoretically too low-level and spread-spectrum a signal to pinpoint. Alan and Roger had really geeked out on them. Hopefully, they wouldn’t have to use it.