John Ringo - Von Neumann’s War

The view on the screen was of a map of the North American continent. The tube, big as it was, wouldn’t have been visible, but there was a large karat over it as well as smaller ones over the lesser tubes spreading along the eastern seaboard.

“There goes Baltimore,” the President said. “I don’t know if I’m grateful or hate the fact that we’ve got real-time information. Not much we can do about it, is there?”

“Something coming in on Fox,” Vicki said nodding to an aide. The screen was changed to a view of a reporter trying to describe what was going on behind him. The sound was off, but they didn’t really need it.

Two ships, liners by the looks of them, were visible at sea. A swarm of bots was in pursuit, but even as they headed for the undefended ships another, larger, ship came into view. It was a carrier, from the perspective on the shot it wasn’t clear which, that was interposing its bulk between the fleeing cruise ships and the bot swarm.

Flickers of tracers from the carrier’s Phalanx guns reached out towards the bot swarm but the depleted uranium rounds were swallowed to no effect. Then the swarm reached the carrier and began to cover it. And the ship began to disintegrate.

The last shot was of the carrier’s island slumping off and splashing into the sea. By that time the ship had been eaten down below the flight deck, and fires from ruptured fuel bunkers had turned it into an inferno from which small, burning, figures could be seen falling. But the liners were well out to sea, probably beyond the range of the bots’ interest.

“That was the Carl Vinson ,” General Mitchell said to the hushed room. “Five thousand men and women. Those liners are filled with the last refugees from Washington and Baltimore. They’re headed for Bermuda. For all the good it will do them.”

“Turn it off,” the President said quietly. “We’re just eating ourselves up watching it. But as soon as they know where that main tube is going, get me the information. And tell Dr. Reynolds that we need more than just cool toys. We need to stop them.”

The frequency spectrum analysis the government had made was just what Richard needed to find the key to the encryption. He generated an algorithm that would set his spectrum analyzer to follow the hopping frequency of the bots’ transmissions at maximum frequency resolution. After days of listening to the bots at those hopping frequencies he finally picked up two signals that must have been close enough for his system to pull out of the noise floor.

As plain as day he watched the frequency modulation of each of the individual frequency spikes jitter up and down the band around the main center spike. It was that jittering signal, that frequency modulated signal embedded in the hopping frequencies that was the handshaking key.

Richard watched as the frequency modulated signal looped and repeated a few times and then a stream of different modulations were sent. He figured that this was the exchange of encryption data between the communicating bots. He ran this data through his credit card hacking code and there was the crypt key. Richard programmed in the algorithm to implement the key and decrypt the signals real time. He then watched a string of ones and zeroes fill the computer screen.

He had broken the bots’ communication scheme. Now he just needed to figure out what the hell all that binary code meant. What were the alien things saying to each other? He decided to upload his data to the government with hopes that they could do something with it. Besides, he wanted to play around with the flying bot that he and Helena had caught. There was bound to be a use for it. The damaged bot was still propelling itself in the forward direction and had yet to completely fail or stop its propulsion. Richard had made some preliminary scans of the bot and could tell its communications tube was working, so he kept the thing wrapped in aluminum foil and at the lowest point of the mineshaft at the bottom of the underground river when he wasn’t analyzing it.

Major Shane Gries and Sergeant Major Thomas Cady stood guard around the wheeled cart. The wounded but still functional bot they had captured in Greenland was being moved down one floor of the Huntsville redoubt from where it had been stored. The thing’s propulsion unit was shot but it was still broadcasting, so they had to store it at least three stories down below the surface. Measurements of the bot emissions showed that three stories of concrete was plenty to shield the thing from its friends.

Other than bot topography, initial analyses had only led to minimal breakthroughs in the alien mechanisms. But since Dr. Richard Horton had been in continuous contact with Dr. Alice Pike the momentum had changed for the better.

Alice had been right all along. The program had needed Dr. Horton’s unique perspective on things. He had taken the frequency sequence discovered by Roger’s ELINT team and then used it to crack the encryption key for the alien bot’s handshaking protocols. He had e-mailed that data to her with a prospect strawman design for a bot communication device. But he had yet to figure out what to communicate to the bots that would be useful. Alice was working on that herself, but wasn’t quite there yet. She was thinking and hopefully an idea would come.

Alice pushed the cart forward while Gries and Cady walked carefully along each side of the cart with both eyes on the alien boomerang-shaped menace and both eyes scanning the hallway for unforeseen events.

“Surprise is in the mind of the combat commander,” Gries muttered to himself, thumbing the safety of his HE paintball machine gun.

“Sir,” Cady nodded keeping one hand on his HE gun and one on his handmade war club.

“I don’t know why you two are so edgy. We’re three stories underground. What could happen?” Alice shrugged, stopped the cart in front of the elevator door and pressed the down button.

“Anything,” Cady grunted.

“What?” Alice asked.

“The sergeant major means that anything could happen at any time. If you fixate on specific likelihoods, you’re going to be surprised by the un likelihood that actually happens. So be ready for anything . If you expect anything , Dr. Pike, then you are prepared for it. And if nothing happens, well, I’m prepared for that too. In fact would prefer it that way,” Shane said.

“Elevator is clear, sir. But nothing is boring, sir,” Top said.

Gries nodded at Alice to push the cart in and then he followed in behind her. Cady was standing with his back to the far wall of the elevator scanning for trouble.

The doors to the elevator closed and elevator music began playing. The song was familiar to Alice and she started humming along with the tune. She seemed to recall it being an old sixties or seventies song about a transvestite. Gries seemed to relax and lean his left shoulder against the elevator wall, but he still kept a watchful eye. The sergeant major was lightly nodding his head up and down with the tune but other than the slight nodding he was solid as a rock. Alice relaxed a little more as the elevator came to a stop.

The doors opened and immediately the major was standing alert and Top worked his way in front of the cart, the elevator music no longer even a memory to him. Then the idea hit Alice like a dam bursting and flooding a valley below it. Her eyes widened and she was caught up in the idea that flooded her mind.

“Elevator music!”

“So what is it?” Alan Davis held the tiny circular shaped circuit board in his hand. The tiny printed circuit board was about the size of five pennies stacked on top of each other with several small chips and components soldered to it. There was a membrane switch on one side and what appeared to be a small watch battery on the other.