John Ringo - Von Neumann’s War

The starved humans were gathered around the wall where they were hanging bodies. Others were milling around with metal shards, scraping the bodies clean of skin, flesh, and muscle. The wall was a butchery block and the meat was human.

“Cannibals?” Alice whispered.

“Cannibals.” Roger nodded.

“We’ve got a problem,” Riggs said over the video link. He was clearly unhappy about whatever information he was about to impart.

“Are they on their way already?” Roger asked, frowning.

“No, but God’s Thumb’s been taken down,” Riggs said. “About an hour after the nuke attacks, a probe group hit the base. The base sent out a distress call over the land-lines and then went silent. They’re working on getting somebody in there right now.”

“Does it appear to be related to Shane’s mission?” Roger asked.

“Might be, might not,” Riggs said. “But we have to assume that Major Gries’s team has been lost. We’ll try to get some recon assets in there to see if they can be recovered but… it doesn’t look good.”

“It ain’t over ’til it’s over,” Roger said, unsmiling. “Like I told Alice, I’m sure that Shane and Cady will make it through. They’re… resourceful.”

“This is so not good,” Gibson moaned.

Surprise happens in the mind of the commander , Shane thought. And you never know what the hell you’re doing. So do something.

“Unass the vehicles,” Shane yelled, watching the approaching probe swarm. There were at least a hundred probes in the swarm, but they didn’t appear to have detected the team, yet. They were just tooling along at about a thousand feet above ground level and headed vaguely northwest. They might even head right by. Then again, they might not. But if they acted per normal probe SOP, they were going to home in on the Humvees. He looked around and nodded. There was a very small promontory off to the left, about fifty meters away. Perfect. “Grab the samples and all the spare ammo and mines, including the scatterables! Head for the hill!” He gave Gibson a shove towards the rear of the Humvee. As soon as the p.f.c. was moving, it seemed to break everyone else out of their frozen immobility.

The major hefted his potato gun and started hastily pulling gear out of the back of the Humvee. They had brought far more ordnance than they could pack into the ambush for reasons Shane hadn’t considered at the time. Included in it was the scatterable “probe killer” mines designed to be picked up.

“Leave the emplaced mines,” Cady yelled, expanding on the commander’s intentions. “Take the catcher grenades for the potato guns! Leave the food! Mahoney, grab as much of your gear as you can carry! Concentrate on the data you’ve gotten and anything that can let us track!” He grabbed his minigun and two spare ammo canisters, then picked up the intact probe. “Jones! Forget the glue mines! Grab the case of scatterables and you and Letorres get ready to lay them in along the line to the hilltop. Nelms, grab your BDL and the case of ceramic rounds.”

All of the gear that wasn’t to be carried was dumped out of the backs of the Humvees in an unmilitary mish-mash. But they had time to unload all the critical items and get most of the way to the hilltop before the probes seemed to notice the cluster of Humvees and turned towards their position, suddenly accelerating.

“Nelms, get in position right on top of the damned samples,” Cady said, pointing to the three bags of probe parts. “Jones…” he said, looking around.

“On it, Top,” the specialist said. He and Letorres hadn’t even made it all the way up the hill. They’d stopped about halfway between the Humvees and the hilltop and now had the top off the case of mines. The scatterable mines were fist-sized bright-orange tetrahedrons, packed into the case in a solid mass. He dumped the mass out on the ground and then he and Letorres started spreading them out in a rough crescent around the defensive position. There were sixty of the mines in the case and spreading them took less than two minutes. The last few were tossed away to widen the crescent. They didn’t roll far.

In the meantime, Top had spread the rest of the troops into a rough cigar-shaped perimeter with the heaviest group in the direction of the Humvees. The troops carrying potato guns were on the outside of the perimeter with the four troops carrying carbines on the inside. He and Shane were in the center with the samples and spare ammo and then Nelms actually sitting on top of the pile of probe parts.

The probes were stooping onto the Humvees by the time Letorres and Jones were back in the perimeter. The two were hastily pushed into position as the first Humvee started to shake and was lifted off the ground by the probes.

“Okay,” Shane said softly. “Wait until they’re all down feeding and then open up. Nelms, I’ll designate your targets.”

Cady had forgotten the case of glue mines in the third Humvee, which had been commanded by Staff Sergeant Gregory. Gregory had heard the sergeant major’s order not to bring glue mines so he’d left them behind. But these weren’t the whip-detonated mines. These were “probe trap” mines that they’d brought along in case there was a chance to test them. The chance occurred by… chance.

A probe, detecting metal in the plastic case, swooped down and exerted enough pull to rip the case open. The pull on the metal within also released several of the friction pull triggers embedded in the mines. This, in turn, detonated the mines.

Each of the mines was a quarter kilo charge of Composition B surrounded by about another half kilo of Coyote glue. While not quite as explosive as the more common C-4, Comp B was the standard filler in military rounds and about ten percent more powerful than TNT.

The case erupted in a titanic explosion that made the Coyote glue within quite redundant and, indeed, virtually all of it was vaporized by the detonation of the twenty rounds in the case.

The explosion, besides causing the troops to cringe and get a ringing in all their ears, not only vaporized the Coyote glue, it also vaporized the probe that had attacked the case and six others in the immediate area. In addition, fourteen more were rendered hors de combat, tossed away from the explosion to fall to the ground, shuddering and spitting sparks.

The Coyote mines were not the only ordnance in the back of the Humvee, and the rest detonated in a long series of secondary explosions that threw material all around the area, concussing and impacting on more probes. A Coyote potato round was thrown from that Humvee to Shane’s and detonated a small pile of other potato rounds that cast Coyote glue all over the probes assimilating the Humvee. Another case of “regular” grenades was caught in the explosion and a half dozen detonated sympathetically, killing most of the entrapped probes.

Two probes, blown away from the series of secondaries, were pushed towards the hill while the soldiers on it were still cowering on the ground and trying to dig into the soil with their fingers. They instantly detected the nearest metal, which happened to be the same scatterable mine, and lifted it in the air.

The probe on the right of the line of view happened to win the brief tug-of-war and lifted the half pound orange device to its base, ripping the metal from within.

The metal was glued in place along one of the faces of the tetrahedron. As soon as the mine impacted on the surface of the probe a small packet of super-glue was ruptured, gluing the mine to its surface. The metal, when removed, opened a channel between two otherwise nonreactive chemicals. However, when they came into contact they immediately detonated, causing the surrounding C-4 to detonate in sympathy.