Von Neumann’s War

by John Ringo

  * * *

  “No, sir, it doesn’t sound good,” the medic replied to Ridley and Rene’s questions. “Everything I’ve heard so far is that all communications have been lost with the troops as soon as they make contact with the aliens. You two are the first survivors I’ve come across yet.” Fortunately, the two of them had stumbled across a highway and decided to follow it. Before long, an evac convoy heading north to Calais came along and rescued them.

  “That sounds about right, Specialist. We lost contact with the AWACS long before we ever made contact with the boomerangs,” Rene said.

  “Boomerangs, sir?”

  “That’s what they look like,” Ridley grunted. “Shiny, metal, and the shape of a fat boomerang about a meter or so across. The damn things ate our entire flight squadron of F-16s. The two of us are, as far as we can tell, all that’s left of the NATO-Euro Falcons.”

  “Just sit tight, sir,” the medic said, tying a last bandage in place. “They’ll take care of you in London. I wouldn’t want to mess with that stick if I didn’t have to.”

  * * *

  “There,” Specialist Werry said, waving at the treeline. “What was that dot?”

  Werry was twenty-two, with light brown hair cropped to stubble on the side, fair skin that refused to brown no matter how much time he spent under searing desert skies, and a scar on his cheek courtesy of an Iraqi improvised explosive device. His unit had been one of the last to leave Iraq and he found it odd that they’d been chosen to “show the flag” in France. Couldn’t somebody else have been chosen to help out the French? Preferably somebody that didn’t still, literally, have desert sand in his boots?

  “What dot?” Sergeant Cordette asked. The light-brown infantry sergeant wasn’t much older than the specialist but he had two extra tours of being shot at and blown up. In about a month he would have been trying to decide whether to end his second hitch and try the college and civvie route or reup and become a “lifer.” But with the state of emergency the choice had been made for him. One less stress in life was fine by Eshraka Cordette. He was looking north and looked to the east as the specialist waved in that direction.

  The two soldiers were forward of their company, holding down a look-out point a hundred meters towards the treeline. It could have been worse, but Cordette wasn’t sure how.

  “There was a dot,” Werry said. “At about eleven o’clock. It just popped up then back down.”

  “I don’t see,” the sergeant said, shielding his eyes. Then he did. Everyone did.

  His mind immediately identified it as a flock of starlings; that was sort of what it looked like climbing up over the trees. But it wasn’t; starlings didn’t fly like that. Starlings swooped and whorled as they flew. These things moved around within the… flock but their movements were erratic or responding to some pattern he couldn’t identify. And the… swarm wasn’t swirling as such at all. It was flying in a straight line for their position.

  “Contact!” Cordette bellowed, dropping into the belly of the Stryker and swiveling the M240B towards the swarm of probes. “Open fire!”

  * * *

  Shane saw them even before the lead units, because of his slight elevation over them. He listened to the familiar rattle of M-4s and machine guns start up and watched for a moment to gauge their effect. Not damned much.

  “You watching the tracers, sir?” Cady asked, not taking his eyes off the approaching swarm.

  “Yeah,” Shane replied quietly. You couldn’t see bullets, of course, but you could follow the red lines of the tracers. They were approaching the swarm, and the probes were tight packed enough that some of them were going to be hit, but they would just… disappear.

  And there wasn’t much time to fire. The probes had seemed to be moving slow but they weren’t. They were on the lead unit in less than a second after it had opened fire and they swarmed around the Strykers like bees attacking a wasp. Shane could see portions of the armor flying off and as it approached the probes it would… deform and then just vanish. Six or seven of the probes had stopped in the air over each of the Abrams and as he watched, the refractory metal, mostly depleted uranium, of the powerful tanks was peeling away like skin from a grape. A soldier, probably a medic, was running across the battle, if this massacre could be called a battle. As he did so a probe swooped down and he was suddenly decapitated then levitated into the air. His rucksack seemed to explode outward, his weapon flying up towards the probe along with bits from the ruck and LBE. Then the sodden corpse fell thirty feet through the air to slump to the ground.

  Shane had only gotten a brief glimpse of all of this, fragmentary images, when one of the probes dropped right on the command Humvee. It had broken away from the swarm and seemed to ignore most of the vehicles around the Humvee, making a beeline for it. It was followed by a handful more. He saw Colonel Schon and Major Forrester along with the Humvee driver all similarly decapitated and levitated as the Humvee shuddered and began to dissolve.

  Surprise is a function of the mind of the commander…

  “Get us out of here,” Shane said. “NOW!”

  “What?” Cady asked, looking over at him.

  “GO! Go west! Now!”

  Cady put the Humvee in reverse, made a flying three-point turn, and headed down the road through the light industrial park.

  “You know where we’re going?” Shane asked, pulling off his dogtags and tossing them out the window.

  “I don’t know why they sent us here,” Cady said, looking over at him as the captain similarly began tossing ammunition magazines out of the window. “But there’s a… What are you doing?”

  “I’ll take the wheel,” Shane said. “Start getting rid of every scrap of metal you have on your body, starting with your dog tags. Right NOW!”

  Cady blinked, then relinquished the wheel with a blurted: “Holy shit!”

  “Those things eat formed metal,” Shane said, trying to steer the Humvee down the twisty road. “They ripped the dog tags off the colonel so fast his head went with them. We need to get rid of everything. As soon as one gets to us, we’re going to unass this vehicle, too.”

  “We should call in,” Cady said.

  “They zeroed in on the command track,” Shane replied tightly, as Cady took the wheel back and started tossing magazines out the window one handed. “Why?”

  “I dunno,” Cady said. “You’re the brains of this outfit, sir.”

  “Radios,” Shane snapped. “They eat metal but they zero in on radios. Unless you’re radio silent you’re just a big metal popsicle to those things.” He popped open the hatch for the gun mount and climbed through.

  “Keep pulling metal off your body!” he yelled, pulling off his watch and tossing it away. “Rings, necklaces, bracelets, watches. Like you’re going through a scanner at security!”

  “Coins!” Cady yelled back. “What are you doing?”

  “Keeping an eye out for them,” Shane yelled, emptying his pockets by the roadside. He thought about what other metal he had and then looked at his West Point ring. Graduates were disparagingly referred to as “ring knockers” because you weren’t anybody unless you had “the ring.” He contemplated losing it. Then contemplated losing a finger. The finger won. But instead of tossing it aside, he put it in the shoulder pocket of his digi-cam uniform. Even if they ripped it out, all he’d lose was a pocket.

  The battalion had been obscured by the buildings but Shane could see a few of the probes up over them in the air now. As he watched, a building collapsed and he couldn’t figure out why until he realized the damned things were ripping the rebar right out of the concrete walls.

  Nails. Wiring. Cars. It was all going into those damned probes. Every damned scrap of metal. They didn’t seem to be killing people except as a byproduct. But they would. Metal was civilization. And… one… three… more were headed for them.

  “Pull over and unass!” Shane yelled, dropping into the Humvee and opening his door. He was rolling on the road before it was at a
full halt.

  So was the master sergeant, as it turned out, and the Humvee continued forward, still in drive, as five of the probes came up with a thunder of air. The Humvee began to shake and tear apart and the master sergeant let out a curse as he was jerked into the air. The seam on the seat of his pants ripped and his boots came apart as the eyelets were ripped out. Then he dropped through the air to land hard on the asphalt.

  “Son of a BITCH!” Cady snarled, looking up at the probe, which was hovering not much above head height. His wallet was firmly attached to the underside.

  As Shane watched, the wallet ripped apart and a bit of metal was briefly visible, then the wallet dropped through the air, just another scrap of useless garbage to the probe.

  “My COIN!” the master sergeant raged. He looked around for a weapon and finally settled on a timber by the side of the road. “That was my battalion coin you BASTARDS!”

  The master sergeant hefted the heavy construction timber and jumped in the air as the hovering probes drifted over them, apparently searching for more scraps of metal. The four by four hit the surface, hard, and rebounded leaving a large dent. The master sergeant cried out in pain as the timber vibrated in his hand and he dropped it.

  The probe, however, shuddered for a moment, then drifted sideways. It shuddered again and then there was a brief burst of sparks and it dropped out of the air.

  “Congratulations,” Shane said, getting up from his crouch and examining the fallen probe with interest. “You’ve proven they can be killed.”

  As the master sergeant hefted the timber again, the remaining four descended on their fallen brethren. Before he could get in another whack they lifted it, whole, into the air and began to strip it apart. Shane could see bits flying off towards the other four probes but as they approached them the bits seemed to dwindle and then disappear. One thing he noticed was that the probes seemed to be getting… fatter. They were sleek boomerang wing shapes but as the fallen probe was disassembled they seemed to be getting more material on their surface.

  As soon as the wounded wing was fully disassembled three of them flew away. The last one, however, continued to hover at about ten meters off the ground and Shane watched as it seemed to change shape. The center got thicker, the metal appearing to move inward from the wings towards its middle. Then a dimple appeared and the thing began to twin, joined wings stretching out from the middle, which got flatter and flatter. Finally, all that was left was a small joining between two of the probes and then that separated.

  As soon as it did, the two flew away, ducking down to rip apart Shane’s boots and shoulder pocket in passing. The stone from the ring dropped to the ground about fifty meters away, carried in a ballistic arc as the things accelerated to cruising speed in an instant.

  “Bastards,” Shane said, walking over to the stone. It was a synthetic ruby, all he could afford on graduation. He buffed it and pocketed it in thought. Rubies were nothing more than pretty aluminum dioxide. Either they didn’t like aluminum or unformed metal… There was a thought there, but he wasn’t sure what it meant.

  “You were saying you had a plan for getting out of here?” Shane asked Cady distractedly.

  “Well, I was planning on driving back to the airbase at Le Havre,” Cady replied, tossing the four by four back to the roadside. He’d been holding onto it in case the damned things got lower. “But as a last ditch, it’s all lost, go to hell plan, we’re about five miles from where the Channel Tunnel comes out on this side. I figure that might be why they put us here; to defend the tunnel. If they’re not to England, yet, we can run the thirty or so miles from one side to the other. Better than swimming.”

  Shane thought about the long tunnel, then about the things eating the very metal out of the walls. Flooding. Refugees. On the other hand…

  “I don’t have a better idea,” Shane said. “Where’s this tunnel entrance?”

  Chapter 15

  The Army standard for the five-mile run is forty minutes. Shane figured it had probably taken them somewhat less than thirty to reach the massive entrance. And that was with a stop at a devastated town to pick through a store for running shoes. Ones with no metal in them.

  The channel tunnel was a miracle of modern English and French cooperation and engineering. The “Chunnel” in actuality consists of three tunnel-railroad connections that run under the English Channel, connecting Folkestone, England, and Calais, France. When the Chunnel was being constructed both French and English citizens had a fear of being so far beneath the water and there was a popular myth that the North Sea would collapse it and fill it in with disaster-movie effect. That myth was explained away once the public realized that the Chunnel was actually constructed beneath a mostly water-impermeable layer of chalk at 150 feet below the bottom of the English Channel seabed. The odds of water from English Channel leaking into the Chunnel were proven to be basically nill — that is unless structural integrity were lost in the super high density shotcrete reinforced regions of the tunnel.

  The tunnels are 31 miles long with two rail tunnels, each 25 feet in diameter, and a central tunnel, 16 feet in diameter. The central tunnel is used for maintenance and ventilation. Two of the tubes are full sized and accommodate the various rail traffic. The smaller service tunnel has several “crossover” passages that allow trains to switch from one track to another. These connecting tunnels serve as emergency escape routes when necessary. In fact, they were used as refuge by thirty-one people as a safe haven during a Chunnel fire back in the late 1990s. The escape route system worked well and all of the trapped people survived. But the Chunnel escape system was designed for fires in sections of it, not for metal-eating alien probes swarming through the entire construct. Most likely, the cross-over escape tubes would only appear as that much more tasty metal for the bots to gather. Shane was considering what would happen to the tunnel’s structural integrity when those bots started yanking metal support from the concrete walls.

  The entrance, and indeed the entire track, was walled off by a high metal fence. It was proof positive to Shane that the probes hadn’t gotten there yet that the fence was still standing. It was also a hell of a thing to try to cross.

  Others, however, had had the same idea and already holes had been dug under the fence. There was only a trickle of people going through the holes and Shane and the master sergeant, apologetically, pushed their way to the front and through one of the holes.

  As soon as they were in the tunnel, they began to run again, weaving in and out amongst the light crowd. There was a two-meter wide walkway on the north wall with a meter-and-a-half drop down to the railbed. About a hundred meters inside the entrance there was a door on the wall with an “exit” sign.

  “Take that?” Cady asked.

  “Clear enough in here,” Shane said. “I’ve been on this thing, I know where it goes. But there’s a spot up here about five or ten miles on where we’ll have to do some climbing. Some sort of big cavern.”

  They saved their breath for running the rest of the way. They were among the few who were steadily running. Most of the rest looked as if they’d run as far as they could and now were just grimly determined to walk the rest of the way. But about a mile into the run, Shane heard the rapid pad of feet behind him and a man in running clothes passed them at a good clip. He was shorter than either of them, but he had long easy strides and easily outstripped them, disappearing back into the crowd ahead.

  “Marathoner,” was all Cady said.

  “I never thought the Army running program would come in this handy,” Shane replied.

  Cady just grunted.

  Shane had gotten well into the rhythm of the run. He was feeling good about that if nothing else; there was a mind numbing pleasure to just running. But dodging the people around them, young, old, male, female, mothers carrying their children, was a pain in more ways than one. Shane had seen civilization end in less than an hour. And even if these people made it to England, the Channel wasn’t going to stop this inva
sion. Nothing would. Most of the people he saw around him were going to die. Of starvation. Of exposure. Of disease. At each other’s hands. The fabric of society was going to crumble and with it everything that had kept these shocked people alive in a technological womb. The law of the jungle was here again and probably here to stay. Unless somebody, and he knew which somebodys he was thinking of, could figure out a way to win. At the moment, he didn’t see one. But that was what the eggheads were for. All he wanted to do was get back to the States and dump it on them. Strykers and Abrams clearly weren’t going to win this one.

  As they got deeper into the tunnel they began to see vast condensation-covered pipes lining the walls, which radiated cold. Shane glanced at them and then at Cady and shrugged. He wasn’t sure, but he thought they probably went through to the ocean high above. The pipes were steel and the concrete in the walls most undoubtedly had steel rebar in them. That was all he needed to know.

  They passed through the French crossover tunnel, which was a bit of a pain, though uneventful. They had to hop over the train rails of the scissors crossing at the crossover point, which slowed their pace. The slowing of their pace and the widening of the crossover cavern allowed the few runners who were still pushing through to spread out a bit. It also gave Gries and Cady the opportunity to isolate themselves a bit from some of the other runners. Not that they did not want to help, but their mission was more important on the scale of helping humanity survive as opposed to helping a few humans survive.

  Shortly after they’d gotten back into the rhythm of running, they began to see the first signs of organization since the battalion had been wiped out. A group of English soldiers in camouflage dress were clustered around one of the pipes, rigging it with explosives. The group of sappers were surrounded by guards who directed the hurrying refugees into the exit doors rather than let them continue down the walkway.