John Ringo: Von Neumann’s War

“Lasing, this is Major Gries,” Shane said. “Can you make a bubble to the northeast of the bunker? We’ve got dead ground under your laser. I need to move my troops to cover it.”

“I can give you a bubble,” the lasing officer replied. “Five meters wide and, say, three and a half high call it? That do?”

“Fine, and I’d suggest tightening your fire into that area.”

“Teach your granma to suck eggs, Major,” the lasing officer said, with grim humor in his voice. “Already done. Those things are our main threat at the moment.”

“Any way to point out where it is?” Shane asked.

“They’ll know.”

“Crap, look at that,” Jones said as a small bush directly in front of them exploded.

“Laser,” Mahoney replied over the music. “That’s why you don’t want to go forward. You’ll be the burning bush. There,” he added, waving at what appeared to be thin air. But there was a faint glow as the laser ionized the atmosphere. “That’s what you’ve got to avoid.”

“ Top, move forward ,” the speaker boomed, cutting off the music. “ There’s a hole in the lasing, due northeast of the bunker, five meters wide, two plus high. You should be able to spot it. Move forward to cover the dead ground! You need to stop them before they get to the top of the mountain! ”

It was the first time that Jones had actually seen the sergeant major shocked. Everyone looked over at the NCO and could see him with his jaw wagging up and down, trying to find something to say. Jones wasn’t sure whether to be terrified or laugh out loud. He decided a hysterical chuckle was called for. Okay, cackle.

The, more than one, hysterical cackle seemed to center the big NCO.

“What the fuck are you doing still sitting here with your thumbs up your ass?” Cady roared. “You heard the man! Gregory, take right, I’ll take left. Tighten up and stay low. Forward! ”

Cady swung left and duckwalked forward, keeping one eye on the occasional strikes on the ridgeline and the other over his shoulder, trying to use the two points to get some idea of the line the deadly, and invisible, beams were following. After a brief pause Staff Sergeant Gregory headed right, doing the same.

“Jones, Mahoney, Nelms,” Gregory said, expanding on the sergeant major’s orders. “You three front rank, between the S’maj and me. Crawl it. When you get to the edge, poke your head over. Shag ass.”

Mahoney and Nelms both looked at Jones, who shrugged and grimaced.

“Bugger this for a game of soldiers,” he hissed but then threw himself prone and started fast-crawling forward on elbows and knees with the other two following and then catching up to flank him.

The rest of the platoon followed, more or less in groups of three.

“Second and third ranks,” Cady said, still sidling towards the edge and trying to stay out of the beams, “get ready to fire upwards. When those things come over the edge, just fucking hose it until you’re out of ammo!”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Jones said as he reached the edge of the summit. It had been a fairly abrupt drop to a short bluff. Now it was as perfectly cut as if it had been carved away… well, it had been carved away by a laser. The fact that the laser wasn’t, at the moment , shaving it seemed a minor point. “This is fucking nuts!”

“We gonna do this?” Nelms asked nervously. The normally sanguine sniper seemed unusually perturbed.

“No,” Jones said, then shrugged. “One… two…”

“What the fuck?”

Staff Sergeant Richard Simone was a data security specialist code five, about the highest level available. He’d previously been assigned to the Pentagon after several minor but politically embarassing hacking attacks on secure systems. Dick Simone had been coding at the age of eight and “script kiddying” by the time he was ten. But after a while he realized that it was much more fun trying to stop hacking than actually doing it. He still maintained his connections with the cracker community, if for no other reason than to keep up on the latest slang. A few of the cooler elements even knew that he’d gone “legit;” there was a certain cachet among the really good crackers out there when they found an “enemy” that was their class.

Dick could have made much more money in the civilian world, especially since the military mostly left data security to relatively low-paid noncoms. But he had the “ mentat civitas ,” that sense of honor and duty that was the core of being a soldier. Eventually he’d stop reenlisting and go get a job where he could make some real money.

Well, he had had that as an option until the bots got here. Now, being in Weeden Mountain was about as safe, and well paid, as it got.

But despite the total chaos in the world the Internet was still, more or less, functioning and there was still the occasional jackass that tried to crack the system. And he’d just spotted one.

The guy was using a fairly simple buffer overflow attack but with a nice little fillip of an encryption packet designed to overcome Blowfish. The point seemed to be to create a zero day exploit, which he didn’t have a chance of managing. So far, nobody had cracked Blowfish. A “zero day exploit” was trying to crack it on the fly. Wasn’t going to happen. The cracker had hit the first firewall and thought he’d made it past. But Dick had set that one up as a trap; when a cracker using any of a thousand or so methods cracked the firewall it set off an alarm. Then Dick could watch them try to crack the second wall. And the second wall, if it detected the cracking, actually sent the cracker into a bypass loop that looked like a computer system but was really a very elaborate ruse, a honey trap. And all the while, Dick could be backtracking the crack and cracking the other guy’s computer.

Dick called up a spider to follow the cracking back and got his first shock of the incident when a message popped up.

“ Ah, thank you for detecting me. I need, very very urgently, to contact Dr. Reynolds. Tell him this is Megiddo and I’ve got the codes he needs. This is urgent since I understand that you are under attack. ”

RocketRog: Megiddo?

Megiddo: The same. I have completed a program that I believe will permit you to control the bots. It uses the same frequency spectrum as the IBot program that Dr. Pike developed. However, this one gives you the ability to stop them, have them land and reset their passwords so that you can lock out higher controls. I’m working on further refinements, however this should do for the time.

Rocket Rog: Boss. When can I get it?

Megiddo: The kind sergeant that contacted you gave me a secure point to which I might upload the program. It is currently uploading from a mirror site I placed a trojan on some time ago. And tell the nice sergeant that the tracer bot he just sent goes to one of the few remaining servers in Australia. Good luck.

‹Meggido has signed off›

“…three! AAAHHH!”

There wasn’t much to do but scream and pull the trigger. As soon as Jones put his head over the edge of the bluff all he saw was a wall of metal. The bots were actually flying through the tops of the trees, which had been sheared off by the laser, just under the beam. And the lead wave was no more than a pickup-truck’s length from the edge of the bluff, headed, as far as he could tell, right for his face.

The exploding rounds were not designed to penetrate armor, and Jones could see even in the split second that he had, that these bots were much heavier than the ones that they’d brought back from Greenland. They were thicker top to bottom and the metal had an odd sheen to it. For some reason a battlefield in Iraq came to mind but he couldn’t figure out why . The thing that went through his head in a flicker was a smell of all things. A hot, metallic stink that he couldn’t quite place in the chaos that was this moment’s existence.