John Ringo: Von Neumann’s War

The air tasted and smelled foul with metal so he reached for his gas mask and let out another, quieter, scream when he realized that his left arm was the one that was broken. He reached across his body and got the bag open, then pulled the mask out and fitted it. He had to take off his helmet. This required moving a few bits of probe wreckage.

He finally managed to get the mask fitted and sealed one-handed, then pushed up with his right hand, shoving upwards and shedding off the cloaking layer of metal.

The first thing he noticed was metal. Lots of it. Scattered. Metal. Lots. Ouch. Some of it was still sputtering with electricity.

Looking around he realized why the bots had left. The bunker had been chewed . Either they were using some sort of explosive round or a gee-whiz science-fiction ray that they hadn’t shown off before. It was definitely something explosive; the chunks taken out of it weren’t uniform like they’d been cut out by the probe recycler beam or whatever. They were big, nasty explosive holes.

The line of bodies at the base of the bunker he almost didn’t notice. Apparently the 82nd guys had taken shelter by the bunker. Fat lot of good it did them; it looked like the bunker buster beams or whatever had hit some of them. And the rest had probably been killed by spalling.

“Top?” he croaked, “ ’Torres?” then was shaken by a round of hacking coughing. He managed to get his mask off and spit out the nasty metallic-tasting phlegm, sealed the mask, got a breath of air, unsealed, got a drink, sealed and got another breath. Then another set of coughing, repeat.

“Top? ’Torres? Mahoney?”

“Fug ib,” he heard from under the rubble and then Mahoney slowly pushed his way to the surface. He had a mask on as well. “Fug ibs !”

“Yeah,” Jones replied, looking at where Letorres and Top had been. He wasn’t sure about anyone else. There was a big pile where Top had been and one of the bots…

“Oh… fuck,” he muttered, stumbling towards the spot.

“General, Laser One is down,” the J-3 said. “Forty percent of the defense points on the mountain are out of communication. Penetrations on tunnels four and nine. Penetration halted, temporarily. Forty percent penetration across Phase Line Ugly. And there’s a new wave of bots headed for the mountain. Some of them are configured for antilaser attack and they appear to be vectoring for the discovered tunnels.”

“Play the music,” the general said, leaning back in his chair and steepling his fingers. Like a gambler who has turned his last card, tossed his last chip and thrown his wallet on the pile, all he could do now was see what Lady Luck would turn up in the other player’s hand. He’d keep his poker face on to the end.

Jones looked down into the valley and tried not to throw in the towel. The entire mass of probes had risen up from Huntsville, like a Krystal burger after a late night of drinking, and was headed for the mountain. Clearly, however, the bots “thought” on an operational level; they’d decided that the mountain was the center of the defenses and needed to be eliminated.

He was less worried about them at the moment, though, than the pile of metal around the sergeant major. One of the chunks was most of a bot, and the “wing” had fallen downward, directly onto where he remembered the sergeant major being.

He began digging at the pile frantically, trying to get under the heap as the cloud of probes rose up the mountain like an evil fog.

Shane swore, softly, as most of the bots in view stopped moving. Those that had been screaming through the air towards the mountain drifted to a stop with a certain amount of jostling and then just… hung as if waiting for something.

“IBot is working,” the J-3 called. “Probe advance halted.”

“Open up with lasers three and four,” General Riggs said. “Have them engage all bots in the valley.”

“Yes! Yes!” “Hot Fuckin’ Damn!”

The control center erupted in cheering soldiers as the lasers began tracking across the still probes, blasting them out of the air. Shane, however, still was glued to his seat, unable or unwilling to believe that this was as complete a victory as it appeared. So he was one of the few to hear the J-2 section.

“Increase in traffic,” J-2 reported. “Signal strength increasing. Something’s going—”

Suddenly, the halted bots started moving again. And every bot in the valley was now headed for Weeden Mountain.

“Lidar reports probes lifting off from Chattanooga, Tuscaloosa, Atlanta area — Christ, every damned probe in the Southeast is headed for us!”

Sergeant Simone was pleased that this Megiddo guy, who looked to be a better cracker than it had first appeared, had something useful for Dr. Reynolds. Dick wasn’t sure what it was or how the battle was going; he worked another front. The “Real World” had its warriors and the electronic world had its own. Dick Simone knew where he sat on that divide.

There was a ping from his system as somebody else tried to penetrate the system. As he was bringing up the program to track them, another ping went off, then a series that sounded very much like an alarm.

As far as he could tell, at first, it was a simple Denial of Service attack. A DOS occurred when someone, usually using various controlled remote systems, hammered an ISP’s servers with pings, effectively shutting down service from the server. But this one was different. Every single packet contained some sort of cracking program, most of them things Dick, who thought he had seen them all, had never vaguely encountered. Most had dumped to the honey trap, but they were running rampant through there, while others had managed to hammer past two firewalls and were getting to his final line of defense. Somebody had managed a zero day exploit on Blowfish. And more were coming in!

He barely had time to look as the tracker program popped up with the source of at least one of the attacks, but he was glad that he’d spared it a glance. As soon as he did, he swore, stopped what he was doing and slammed his chair backwards towards the server wall.

“What’s going on?” Lieutenant Gathers asked. The data security officer was a nice guy and pretty good at running the show, but Dick wasn’t going to take the time to answer. Instead, he flipped open the server door, slid to the floor and hurriedly yanked the main cable connecting the system to the Internet then did the same for SIPARNET.

“Sergeant Simone, would you please explain—” the lieutenant started to say then froze as the computer in front of him started to go haywire.

“We’re under attack,” Simone replied, slamming back into place and starting diagnostics on the computer network. It was clear that there were worms in the system; the only question was whether he could get ahead of them and start isolating them.

“I know we’re under attack,” the officer replied, looking at his system. “There are about a billion probes—”

“No, I mean we are under attack , sir!” Dick yelled. “And it’s coming from France !”

“Can we use this?” Roger asked, looking at the code of the program. It was… complicated.

“Megiddo’s not going to send us something that would be harmful,” Traci said definitely. “Everything he’s sent so far has been useful.”

“We ain’t got much choice, Roger,” Alan pointed out. “We’re kinda outnumbered, Kemosabe.”

“Agreed, okay we’ll—”

“Whoa!” Traci said. “We’re under electronic attack. I mean, there’s something in the base system that just hit our internal wall and bounced.”