John Ringo: Von Neumann’s War

Finally they were through the outliers and headed home. Now to see if the wing stayed on. As planned, they poured on the gas and headed for altitude at the same time. They had to get out of the way of the next line of defense.

Roger zoomed in Plasma Six on the front of the probe cloud and grunted in satisfaction.

“They’re picking up their wounded,” Shane said, nodding. “Just like I said.”

Some of the probes who had picked up enough metal from their deceased brethren had stopped to twin. They were quickly lost from view but it was apparent what was happening.

“Now to see if a solid punch works better,” Roger said, zooming the magnification back. The video camera was located on the observatory on Monte Sano Mountain and as he zoomed back he got one flash of the fighters screaming by not far overhead. Then it was as if the mountain erupted in fire.

On the 15th of April, 1950, Redstone Arsenal had become the Army’s premier rocket production and design facility. Since that time, every major category of rocket produced in the U.S. had some link to Redstone Arsenal and Huntsville. Huntsville, in fact, was a town of little but “rocket scientists.” Just as L.A. focused on the movie industry and had the byproduct of being filled with out-of-work actors, Huntsville was overrun with people obsessed by things that flew on a pillar of flame. And just as there were dozens, hundreds, of little production companies churning out small movies in L.A., there were dozens of companies that, with a little funding, could make things that went WHOOSH around Huntsville.

Starting with Rocket Ram-Jets, Roger had organized those companies into a minor rocket-building empire. And they had responded. Despite numerous shortages, there was still plenty of potassium nitrate, charcoal, carbon composite materials and resins, and hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTBP) to be had. When specific shortages turned up, here a thermocouple, there a specialized form of paper, the companies had adjusted, adapted and overcome. After all, they were rocket scientists.

And over the course of a few months they had churned out an enormous number of very simple rockets. Those rockets had only one purpose in life: deliver a small payload to a location not very far away and then die.

Therefore when the signal was given, over one thousand K type Estes rockets launched nearly simultaneously. Atop each of them was a small payload consisting of fourteen “metal mines” and a timer. Some of them met “leakers” ahead of the swarm on their way to their rendezvous with destiny. That was okay since every dead bot was a good bot. But most of them penetrated into the edge of the swarm and then “dropped” their payload. However, they weren’t done. The bots seemed to have some sense of their oncoming wrath because a few swerved to avoid the tearing missiles. But the swarm was deep and crowded. It was impossible to move too much within the swarm and just as impossible to miss hitting something . Every single missile, either before dropping their payload or after, managed to hit, and destroy, at least one bot. In many cases they hit more than one before being mangled out of functional existence. When a rocket flying at five hundred kilometers per hour hit a bot, rarely did either escape unscathed.

Of the thousand missiles fired from the Monte Sano Mountain defenses, seven hundred and ninety-two managed to drop their payload. Each of them carried fourteen “metal mines.” Since the rockets themselves had little or no metal content, the bots instantly gravitated to the mines, pulled the little metal bits out of this flying bonanza and then… died.

The effect, being watched from deep underground, was very much like watching fireworks, except by day. There was a small charge in the center of the payload that spread the mines out. This was noticeable by a brief puff of smoke. Then, as the bots pulled the metal tabs out of the mines and detonated them, there was a series of explosions, flowering outward from the smaller puff.

“Damn,” Alan muttered, munching on a handful of potato chips. “That’s cool. I wish it was nighttime.”

“Sun’s going down,” Roger pointed out. “Just in time for the laser light-show.”

With the fighters gone and the rockets having done their job, the lasers could open up.

There were two laser projectors on Monte Sano Mountain, one right by the observatory and another by the Forestry Department lookout tower. Both were powered by nine very large General Electric diesel generators. The combined output of the generators was over seventy megawatts per hour and the vast majority of it was pumped through a massive array of liquid cooled laser diodes.

The laser systems themselves were mostly large laser diode arrays made of semiconductor material mixtures of indium gallium arsenide and phosphate. The individual diode laser measured only a millimeter thick, a few tens of millimeters long, and a few microns wide. Millions of the tiny devices were stacked side by side to create a massive laser array with an optical output in the megawatts of photon energy. The photons were of a wavelength of about 1.3 microns and were therefore infrared and invisible to the naked eye.

Laser power is limited by atmosphere. While there were various ways of reducing the effect, the Redstone group hadn’t had the time to try for finesse. Thus it was a matter of letting the probes get close before the projectors opened fire. The lasers went off when the probes were less than five miles away.

The lasers began to “paint” the sky, tracking back and forth across the entire zone that the probes occupied, moving much faster than the eye could follow. This created “lines” of fire that dithered across the front of the cloud, zooming up and down and up and down across the entire front. The pointing and tracking system for the array steering maintained a centroid lock on the cloud and randomly dithered within the bounds of the cloud. Pinpoint shots could be made to within accuracies of a few centimeters at that range but the beam was a half meter wide by then due to diffraction and there were plenty of targets to shoot at anyway. So accuracy was not a problem.

The powerful lasers tracked back and forth, pumping megawatts of coherent light into the mass of probes.

And the entire front of the cloud of probes began to… fog.

“What the hell is that?” Shane asked. “It looks like a smoke screen. Are they doing that to cut down on the lasers?”

“No, but it’s having that effect,” Roger replied. “That, my friend, is gaseous metal. The lasers are burning the probes apart, but they’re releasing clouds of metal gas in the process. That’s going to be a very unhealthy place to be after this is all done.”

He zoomed in on the cloud and managed to catch a view of a bot just as the laser, which was quite invisible to the eye, cut across it. The laser caught the bot on the edge of one “wing” and sliced upwards. The beam wasn’t powerful enough to cut all the way through but the effect was to cause the bot to begin spiraling downward. Another bot caught it after it had fallen no more than a hundred feet, and along with some others began tearing it apart. But even as Roger watched, the remorseless laser plowed through that group, cutting the four clustered bots apart and causing the whole group to begin spiraling towards the ground.

“It’s slowin’ ’em down, though,” Alan said, looking at Plasma Two, which was carrying lidar data. “Damn if it isn’t slowing them down.”

“But they’re spreading out, too,” Roger pointed out, zooming back the lidar data. The cloud was spreading upward and to the north and south. He wasn’t sure if it was thought out or simply a result of crowding. It was apparent, though, on the remote vids that the laser operators had noticed the spread and had spread their own beams as well. However…