John Ringo - Von Neumann’s War

“Think of it as a free roller coaster ride!” the SEAL yelled against the stronger wind that was blowing in the open ocean. “Once we get out a bit it will get less choppy! We might even be able to use the sail!”

“Sail?”

“Hey, you want me to have to paddle the whole way?”

Through the maelstrom of water Cady saw a spout and at first thought it might be a whale. But when two more came up he realized it was something else.

“Is somebody throwing grenades?” he yelled.

“Right,” the SEAL called back. “Signaling the boat mission accomplished. We’ll head out to sea a ways and then signal them in. It’ll take a few hours. You just sit back and relax.”

The kayak was still pitching around like a live thing, but the SEALs seemed to have things in hand. And he wasn’t getting seasick, which was a blessing. He never seemed to get air-sick, but the one time he’d been in a boat deep-sea fishing with a retired buddy, he’d gotten sick as a dog despite the pills he took. Whatever that patch was they’d put on him, it seemed to work.

Not for Jones, though. He saw the specialist was bent over puking up his guts.

The seat in the kayak was pretty comfortable and there was enough room for his feet. It was also warming up from his body-heat. Since the water was going to be around freezing, it must have been insulated somehow. It was nice and comfy except for the constant up and down, side-to-side motion.

It had been a long damned mission. The sergeant major crossed his arms in front of him, bent his head and went to sleep.

“We’re here!”

Cady lifted his head and rubbed his eyes to get some of the encrusted salt off. Sure enough, there was a submarine on the surface with people up on the conning tower.

“We sure there are no probes around?” Cady asked.

“No,” the SEAL admitted. “But we better hope they ain’t.”

The sub was big. Vast even. And the sides were rounded and looked very slippery. Then there was the fact that the waves were washing over the side.

“How the hell are we going to…” Cady said, then shook his head again as the rear portion of the sub seemed to bulge upwards. In a moment two vast clam-shell doors had opened up and big cranes were lifting into the air.

“They’d been working on this before the probes got here,” the SEAL said. “It’s an Ohio Class converted for covert ops. They changed the design a little for the new missions, but not much.”

One of the kayaks had paddled up to the side and the cranes let down lines that were hooked up to hard points on the front and rear of the kayak. Then the whole thing, kayak, people and gear, was lifted into the air and over the side of the sub to disappear behind the doors.

There were two cranes in operation and before long it was Cady’s turn. He grabbed the swinging line and got the hook attached to the eyelet on the front of the kayak then held on as it was lifted into the air. The kayak was swung over the doors and then hung suspended for a moment over a huge cavernlike hold that must have been three stories deep.

“This is the old missile compartment,” the SEAL said as they were lowered into the hold. “Go ahead and unstrap; we’re going to unass as soon as we hit the bottom.”

Cady got the straps and poncholike arrangement off and as soon as the kayak settled into a cradle he climbed out. Some SEALs and sailors grasped the lines on either side of the kayak and lifted it off the cradle. The lines from the crane started retracting upwards to pick up another boat.

Cady grabbed one of the handholds and helped the group carry the kayak to a rack, setting it on the third tier. Then he and the SEAL opened up the cargo compartment and he retrieved his pack and minigun.

“Nice rig,” the SEAL said, nodding at the weapon. “You’ll want to clear it in here. The armory is on the forward bulkhead. We’re bunked forward, I suppose I’ll see you around.”

Cady wasn’t too sure which way was forward at this point, but he saw the CO in conversation with a Navy guy with captain’s bars. That made him a lieutenant in the Navy and since he was in khakis he must be from the ship.

“The next one is the live one,” the CO was saying as he approached. “How are you going to handle it?”

“I’m not sure,” the lieutenant said, shaking his head. “We’ll leave it suspended away from metal and in view. But if it goes live once we’re underway, we’re going to have to take it out. And fast. If that thing eats a hole in the pressure hull or, hell, some of the pipes, we’ll sink for sure.”

“We can destroy it easy enough,” Shane said. “We’ll just leave someone on watch at all times with orders to destroy it if it so much as moves.”

“Hook a mine up by it, sir,” Cady suggested. “That way if it goes back to pulling metal, it’ll pull that. Hopefully. And that will take it out.”

“And someone on watch,” the lieutenant said.

“Agreed,” the major replied. “But not my people; we’ve been on continuous ops for the last few days. The SEALs aren’t much better.”

“We just happen to have a spare platoon,” the lieutenant said, grinning. “I think they’ve got a new mission.”

“Great.” Shane nodding tiredly. “In that case, let’s get my people cleaned up and bunked down. How soon are we going to reach the States?”

“About forty hours,” the lieutenant said. “We’re going into Portsmouth.”

“Wake me up when we get there.”

“Hail the conquering hero,” General Riggs said, putting a hand on Major Gries’s shoulder as he stepped up behind him.

“You know, sir, if this was a science fiction movie, there’d be all sorts of cool readouts and blinking lights and stuff,” Shane said, shaking his head and waving at the window.

“Sorry, Major, this is as cool as we could make it,” the general replied, smiling.

The room beyond the window looked like a cross between a very messy toy-maker’s cottage and a metal octopus convention. Wires ran everywhere, tools were scattered at apparent random and there wasn’t a cool readout in sight. Well, one. There was a plasma fusion screen with some sort of complicated control screen up. But the rest were mostly monochrome monitors that looked like somebody had raided a museum.

All of this stuff was concentrated on the bits of probe scattered around the room. The “live” one was being kept under careful observation in an underground bunker wired with command and automatically detonating mines. It was still radiating in the RF spectrum but as deep as it was there was no way that radio was getting out. Since being brought off the sub it had been surrounded by Faraday cages to prevent communication. Assuming it didn’t have a secondary “magic” communications system, the probes shouldn’t know where it was located. Whether they would care was another question.

Work on the “live” one could wait. For that matter they weren’t even messing with the “whole” one that Cady had knocked out. The engineers and scientists gathered in the clean room were having a hard enough time with the bits that Shane had brought back.

“You can tell they’re baffled,” Riggs said quietly. The glass was two-way and not particularly thick; he didn’t want them being thrown off by the comment. “They don’t scratch their heads, but they have other tells.”

“Roger tries to stick his hands in his pockets, and he fidgets,” Shane said, nodding. “And Tom rubs his beard. Alan just throws his hands up in the air like…” He waited a moment and then chuckled as the environment-suit clad engineer straightened up and threw his hands up in the air, gesticulating wildly and clearly on the edge of shouting.