Von Neumann’s War

by John Ringo

  “Nukes,” Shane said tonelessly. “Nuclear weapons.”

  “Hydrogen bombs,” Cady added. “Teller tea.”

  “What?” Gries and Alan both asked, confused.

  “Sorry,” the master sergeant replied, grinning. “Beverly Hillbillies moment.”

  “Right,” Alan said, still obviously confused. “More like hydrogen bomblets. The W-54 weighed about twenty-five kilograms, could be launched from the man-portable or jeep-portable, Davy Crockett launcher. The mini-nuke warhead would cause an explosion about two hundred times smaller than the Hiroshima bomb or about 5x1011 joules. Still, it’s a hefty bang from such a small weapon. And we think that we can update the launcher, rocket motor, and even the warhead to make it single-man portable to a total mass of about thirty-three kilograms.”

  “Alan, how much is thirty-three kilograms in pounds?” Shane asked sarcastically.

  “Let’s see… uh… about seventy-five pounds.”

  “And, a single troop is going to carry that, his armor, comm gear, ammo, and so on?” Shane smiled. “Ground pounders are tough, but that might be asking a little much.”

  “Oh, I see. Uh, perhaps there would be a dedicated person to carry it and maybe a few others to carry extra warheads?” Alan raised his eyebrows and shrugged.

  “Well, the weapon looks good. Your CONOPS needs work. I’ll get Top to brief you better on what all the troops have to carry and how they do it.”

  “Uh, yeah, that would be good,” Alan said. “Now, I have some more ideas about this. And, actually Alice’s comment about the redneck demonstration of, hey y’all watch this, is what gave me the idea.”

  Shane laughed.

  “All right, now this sounds promising.”

  “Well, you see, I really think that these smaller nuclear bombs might prove useful as the active warhead on the antistarfighter, antihovertank, and antibattleoid, anti-alien-whatever missiles that we should equip our fighter aircraft and ground vehicles with. It’s possible that such compact but high yield explosives may affect the smaller ET crafts’ armor. These antistarfighter missiles most closely resemble the AIM-26A Falcon class of air-to-air missiles, some of which were tipped with the W-54 warhead. Now we’ll update and modernize the sensor and missile designs so that they will be more effective.”

  “Are we going somewhere with this?” Shane asked. “Last I heard, we didn’t have starfighters.”

  “Well, here is the fun part. I was thinking about those Saturn missile batteries that I get at the fireworks stands every Independence Day. You know, the little yellow boxes that have ten, twenty-five, fifty, or a hundred little screaming missiles in them?” Alan explained.

  “Not sure, but keep going.” The major was beginning to see the redneck smile shine through on Alan’s professional face.

  “Oh, well I’m sure you’ve seen them. They come screaming out of the little box one right after the other, yeeeeeaaaak, yeeeeeeaaak, yeeeaaaak,” Alan made screeching sounds as he moved his hands up and down demonstrating how the missiles launch out of the firework.

  “You mean sort of like Katyushas?” Cady asked, smiling.

  Alan frowned.

  “What are those?”

  “Lord he’p me,” the master sergeant replied in his thickest accent. “Ah’s surrounded by ivory tahr intellectuals!”

  “Katyushas are a type of box missile launchers,” Shane said.

  “Oh, you mean like the Multiple Launch Rocket System?”

  “Yeah, MLRS is another example,” Shane agreed.

  “Got that then. We designed most of that system right here in Huntsville at the Missile Command. And the ATACMS before that. In fact, if you go down the road you came in on and turn back north for a few miles you cross ATACMS Road. But, Katyushas? Why does that ring a bell?”

  “They’re the Russian equivalent, sort of.” Shane was thinking he needed to steer Alan back on topic.

  “Oh yeah! Katyushas! Those are the little rockets we shot down with the Tactical High Energy Laser back in the 1990s. I remember seeing the videos.”

  “Uh, Alan, back to the fireworks and the little nuke, how’s that help us?” Shane shook his head, trying not to grin. He thought of Katyushas as “those damned missiles the insurgents keep firing at us.” But Alan’s referent was “those missiles we’re figuring out how to shoot down.” It was times like this that he realized just how sheltered Alan and the rest were.

  “Oh, sure, sorry. I think we could take something like a Bradley and put a battery of a hundred of these modernized W-54 warheads in the back of it. If you set this thing off all at once, you have a distributed discrete explosion the order of the Hiroshima blast. Hoo-weee! Helluva firework!”

  “Uh, yeah,” Shane said, sighing. “First of all, the range of the Davy Crockett was within the blast radius—”

  “That’s an urban legend, sir,” Cady interrupted. “I had a sergeant major when I was a wee lad who’d actually dealt with the system. It wasn’t that bad. But it was pretty damned close. You wanted to duck and cover after you fired.”

  “And the Davy Crockett launcher was pretty big,” Shane pointed out. “I couldn’t see putting more than one or two—”

  “Not the actual missile,” Alan said, sighing in turn. “Smaller missiles, maybe based on Stingers. And the W-54 is old tech; there are much smaller and more powerful warheads now. I was thinking a pack about a meter or two on a side and maybe two meters long.”

  “That might work,” Cady admitted. “Hell of a bang, that’s for sure.”

  “Uh, Alan, if you have this rain of nuclear blasts distributed all around you, how do you expect to get out.”

  “Well, you’re in a Bradley aren’t you?” Alan said, shrugging. “What’s a little radiation between friends?”

  Shane and Cady looked at each other, then at Alan and then back at each other. Finally, Cady shrugged.

  “What can I say, sir?” the master sergeant said, shrugging again. “This is what happens when you let rednecks play with nuclear weapons.”

  Chapter 12

  “This image here was taken when we first noticed the landing tubeway at the Moon.” Traci pushed her glasses back up on her nose and chewed on the end of an ink pen. She had worked so many around-the-clock shifts tracking the lunar invasion over the last ten weeks that her eyes just couldn’t handle her contact lenses anymore. She needed a full eight hours of sleep to get her contacts back. She didn’t foresee getting that anytime soon. In fact, she had slept on a couch in Roger’s office the past two nights and had showered in the fitness facility across the street at least three times a week rather than at her apartment. Her job was monopolizing all of her waking moments.

  “Yes, I’ve seen this image, Traci.” Roger looked over her shoulder at her computer screen.

  “Okay, now look at this one taken two weeks later. See anything interesting?” She waited for Roger to analyze the image for a moment.

  “A dust cloud!” The image now revealed a cloud of lunar dust just large enough for the Hubble imagery to resolve encircling the landing zone. The tubeway was no longer there either.

  “Uh huh, now look at the image at six weeks after the landing.” Traci clicked a button on the mouse and another image popped up.

  “Okay, the cloud is a little bigger.” Roger leaned in closer over Traci’s shoulder to see the screen better. The scent of the former Hooters’ waitress’s perfume wasn’t lost on him. She might not have been home in three days but she still looked and smelled good.

  “And this one taken yesterday at about ten weeks from the landing.” Traci didn’t seem to mind Roger leaning over her shoulder. He was always all business anyway. Damnit.

  “Again, it’s larger than the previous one, but the growth in diameter is smaller.”

  “Yeah, I really need close-up pictures to really track this, but from this data I’ve calculated a growth rate,” Traci said. “The surface area of the moon is about 152,000,000 square kilometers, give or take. So if you turn that
into a circle with that area, then the radius of that circle is about 6,956 kilometers. And at the present growth rate of this cloud it will reach that radius at about five hundred and fifty days from the initial landing.”

  “What is that, let’s see five fifty divided by three sixty-five is… uh… about a year and a half,” Roger muttered.

  “The size of this thing is still only about six hundred kilometers in diameter right now. The big growth starts sometime around nine months to a year.” Traci chewed the pen’s cap reflectively.

  “Good work, Traci. This tells us we still have a few months more than a year to prepare.” Roger patted her on the shoulder. “Hey, why don’t you take a couple days off and get some sleep.”

  “I’m okay. You’re the one who needs to take a break. You’ve been doing this a year or more longer than I have.” She took her glasses off and massaged her nose and eyes.

  “You might be right. But until I get a closer look at these things I don’t see that happening. I wish I could see them with a few centimeters resolution.” Roger mulled the thought over in his mind while at the same time considering sleep.

  “Well, why don’t you just send a telescope up there and orbit the Moon so you can do just that?” Traci put her glasses back on and sighed. “How long would it take to send a probe to the Moon?”

  “Well, rocket-wise we could get a small probe there in a few days. It would take maybe three months to build it and integrate it into a launch system… hmm… and from the Moon we could get basically real-time video — well, maybe a few seconds delayed. That’s a really good plan.”

  “Why haven’t you considered it before?” Traci asked.

  “Think about it and you’ll figure it out,” Roger replied darkly.

  * * *

  “Well, you see, Mr. President,” Ronny explained, “we really had no way of knowing how long these things were going to stay on the Moon and were not sure we had time to go forward with a lunar mission. Fortunately, Dr. Reynolds has surrounded himself with good people. His lead astronomer was able to measure the growth rate of the lunar dust cloud to project the timeline. If we assume they’ll do like at Mars and wait until the planet is mostly covered, that gives us at least fifteen months from today. Also, Dr. Reynolds’ launch team has been working around the clock to get as many launch systems ready and waiting as possible since the beginning of Asymmetric Soldier funding.”

  “Good, Ronny, good. So how long before we can get a better picture of what is going on?” The President looked tired and Ronny could tell he needed to cut this briefing short.

  “Within the next three to four months, sir.”

  * * *

  “Well, Roger, as far as the propulsion part of the mission is concerned it’s relatively simple,” John Fisher was explaining. Tom Powell sat beside John in Roger’s office nodding his head in agreement.

  “Okay, you have the floor.”

  “We’ll launch on a single Delta IV CBC with two solid strap-ons. We use a single standard RL10B-2 to circularize then kick to the Moon and once we get to the Moon we’ll use a bi-propellant thruster, just like on the Clementine mission, to put us in an orbit at about ten kilometers from the lunar surface.” John paused long enough to gauge Roger’s reaction.

  “I’ve already got a team at Ball about two months into a spacecraft bus build that will work. I knew that we would want recon sooner or later so I kept the momentum going after the last mission. All we need are the science instruments and we’ll be ready to go.”

  “Amazing foresight, John. I should have been thinking about this option.” Roger hung his head and exhaled. He felt really tired and dull minded.

  “Rog, you can’t do everything, you know. I mean, that’s why you hired us, right?”

  “I guess you’re right,” Roger said, nodding.

  “One more thing, Tom here has worked out the trajectories so that we’ll come in on the opposite side of the Moon from the landing zone. This might give us a better chance at sneaking up on these things,” John added. “Does that cover everything, Tom?”

  “As near as makes no difference. I would emphasize that we can really make use of the Clementine science instrument package design. It was small and put together in a hurry, just as we need to.” Tom rubbed his beard.

  “Yeah, if we find a telescope in the eight-inch range in the next few days, we could launch in less than three months,” John added.

  “Clementine…” Roger mumbled. “Why is it that is bugging me… Clementine… That’s it!” Roger pulled his laptop closer to him and started scrolling through files until he came across a pdf file labeled “Clementine Lunar Mineral Survey.”

  “What’s it, old boy?” Tom raised an eyebrow.

  “I know why they landed at the Sea of Vapors!” Roger opened the pdf file and scrolled down to a figure in the paper showing the near side and the far side of the Moon side by side. The mineral content was color-shaded on each lunar surface image. The far side of the Moon was mostly blue and light green and had absolutely no red on it. The near side, however, had two big red splotches on it and the brightest one was centered on the Sea of Vapors.

  Roger turned his laptop around for the other two men to see. He pushed it over to the edge of his desk and let them study it for a while.

  “What is the red supposed to be, Roger?” John asked.

  “It’s titanium oxide. Whatever they are, they like titanium!”

  * * *

  The lunar reconnaissance mission development and launch went off without a hitch. The Neighborhood Watch team had just gone through a much harder drill with the design, build, launch, and mission with Percival and the Mars effort. Compared to Mars, a lunar probe was a piece of cake. Having John Fisher pushing the program and the damn near infinite budget didn’t hurt either. The launch went without a hitch and had taken only ninety days to prepare.

  “The deceleration burn just started,” John heard Telemetry report over his headset. He looked up at the big screen display in mission control showing the graphic for the spacecraft entering into a lunar orbit on the opposite side of the Moon as the centroid of the alien dust cloud. The cloud had grown in the past three months to about six hundred kilometers in radius. Traci’s dust cloud growth model was still dead on accurate.

  “Roger that,” John replied. “Lunar insertion is go. Let me know when the burn is complete.”

  Roger Reynolds and Ronny Guerrero sat in the VIP lounge watching and listening as the little lunar probe slowed down and circularized its orbit around the Moon. The low resolution near real-time video — there was actually a three-second delay due to the buffer size and the speed of light limit — was continuously displayed on one of the big screens beside the telemetry and tracking map screen. The probe had three small cameras placed around it for star tracking and with hopes that whatever took Percival apart might get captured by one of the small cameras. One image of the Moon filled a screen. An image of a star field filled another. And an image with Earth in the background filled the third one. Ronny and Roger didn’t take their eyes off those screens until the imagery from the telescope was brought online.

  “Burn is complete! Lunar orbit’s circularized and stable at approximately ten kilometers above the lunar surface,” came over the speaker in the lounge.

  “Okay, the cloud is a little less than half an orbit away so that is about fifty minutes or so. And we’re going into the far side of the Moon now and will lose contact with the probe for that portion of the orbit,” Roger told Ronny although it was a piece of information both of them had known for months. It was something to say in the silence. The silence seemed to increase the stress.

  “It’s okay, Roger; we’ll get a good picture of them,” Ronny assured his junior colleague.

  “Right,” Roger said, sitting back quietly. After about a minute of that, he leaned forward and began clicking his teeth with his tongue.

  “Dr. Reynolds,” Ronny said, softly, not looking up from the report he was reading, �
�if you persist in that annoying noise I will be forced to call in a guard and have you shot dead.”

  “Yes, sir,” Roger said, composing himself and sitting back. After about a minute he began tapping his foot on the floor. Quietly but persistently.

  “Dr. Reynolds…”

  “Sorry, sir,” Roger said, concentrating on the blank screen.

  “Were you diagnosed as ADHD when you were in school?” Ronny asked, still not looking up.

  “No, sir,” Roger replied, trying not to grin.

  “I believe there’s an exercise bike downstairs. Why don’t you come back in, oh, twenty minutes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  * * *

  Roger had just gotten back when the datastream from the probe picked back up. The little lunar spacecraft had made it around the far side of the Moon without a hitch and was sending back plenty of recon data.

  “There is the dust cloud in the low res camera’s field of view,” Traci said over the speaker. “The main high res imagery is coming through now.”

  Ronny and Roger watched as the image with thirty-centimeter resolution downloaded to the central screen. The low resolution video continued to stream on the other three monitors. The high resolution image was showing that the dust cloud was floating and shimmering with glints of larger objects moving around in them.

  “Traci, this is Roger,” he said, donning his headset.

  “Hey, what do you need?”

  “Could you zoom the display magnification on the high res image to maximum so we can see better detail back here?”