Von Neumann’s War

by John Ringo

  “What are you doing?” Gibson asked, pitching his own finished entrée out the window.

  “Trying to pick out the stronger signal,” Mahoney said. “And get a direction and maybe a location. I don’t want them to have moved on us and have us run right into them.”

  “That would be bad,” Cady admitted, opening up the door and stepping out to look around the tundra. Overcast had moved in, turning the land into shades of gray.

  “Yeah. Sir?”

  “Go,” Shane said, turning around in his seat to watch the specialist.

  “We’ve got a large amount of noise to the southwest of us, sir,” Mahoney said, nervously.

  “Shit,” Gibson said, opening up his own door and getting out.

  “And I think it’s moving…”

  “Top!” Staff Sergeant Gregory yelled.

  “I see ’em,” Cady called. “Sir, we’ve got probes inbound from the direction of God’s Thumb!”

  * * *

  “No word from the bot recovery mission yet sir, and uh, there is more, Mr. President,” Vicki hesitated.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “Well sir, SEAL Team Six has returned from the French Riviera and have some very… disturbing photos.”

  “Disturbing?” the President said, shaking his head. “Vicki, alien metal-eating probes are taking over the world. We’re evacuating every major city in the U.S. My daughter just started sniffing around boys. Try to up the ante, Vicki. Feel free.”

  “Yes sir. If you recall we sent in a team along the periphery and into the occupied zones with hopes of conducting recon on the areas with an emphasis on determining what happened to the people in the occupied territories. Well, Alpha Platoon SEAL Team Six was the only platoon that returned. And they suffered two casualties.”

  “Yes, Vicki, quit beating around the bush about it.” The President was getting tired and was ready for this nightmare to end. He didn’t expect that to happen anytime soon — if ever.

  “Right, here.” Vicki set a folder in front of him and then sat quietly.

  President Colby looked at the folder and at first was almost afraid to touch it — as if it were tainted with something bad. He glanced around the room at his top advisors and realized that they had all seen the pictures in the folder and they were nervous about letting him see it. He sighed, opened the folder, and spread the pictures out before him.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  * * *

  Roger sat in his office looking at the photos that had been e-mailed to him from the SecDef’s aide. He topped his glass off with a little more Old Number Seven and then thought about adding some Coke to it — but it was a passing thought. The Tennessee whiskey was nowhere near strong enough to make him forget the images in the photos. At first he had thrown up in his garbage can, then he cried, then he started drinking.

  He couldn’t believe that the human race had been reduced to what he was seeing. But, seeing is believing. The thousand words these photos told were alarming, disturbing, very sad, and… grotesque.

  “Roger, do you have a minute?” Alice Pike tapped on his office door.

  “Uh,” Roger looked up and tried to compose himself but Alice had already noticed the open whiskey bottle on his desk.

  “Is this a bad time?” Alice asked.

  “I guess the answer to that is yes. But they’re all bad times now, aren’t they…” Roger shook his head and then capped the whiskey bottle and put it back in his desk drawer. “I’d offer you a drink but I know you don’t really like the hard stuff.”

  “What’s happening, Roger?” She could tell he had been crying or sick or maybe both. “Is it Major Gries and Sergeant Cady? Are you okay?”

  “There is no word from the bot recovery team yet. But that ain’t it. Shane and Thomas can… will… take care of themselves. If worse comes to worse, they’ll kill a walrus, tan the hide and make a kayak to get back.” Roger rubbed his chin, then pulled up his Crimson Tide ball cap and ran his fingers through his unruly hair.

  “Sit down for a minute. I need to tell somebody this… I guess I need to tell everybody but I just don’t know where to start.”

  “Tell everybody what?” Alice sat.

  “This.” He slid his laptop around for her to see the scanned photos.

  “Jesus!” Alice gasped at the sight of a naked, lifelessly pale, and bloodied little girl or what was left of her hanging from a metal spike on a metallic wall. The spike protruded from her chest between her breasts where blood had dried around the impaling shiny metallic stake. Her left leg had been cut off above the knee and her right arm was missing. Her abdomen was open and her entrails were hanging out.

  Alan toggled the image viewer and a second image with a wider field of view showed several such bodies. The bodies ranged in age and sex and some were dismembered and naked. Some looked as if they had been butchered, their bodies carved open and their organs removed. And there were two healthy bodies still clothed in military attire reminiscent of SEALs or other recon forces uniforms — American uniforms. One of the SEALs had a spike protruding from his throat and the other was leaned against the wall beneath him with his forehead bashed in and bloodied. His head leaned limply to the left.

  “God, what is that!” Alice turned away.

  “This is France.” Roger toggled the images again.

  “She can’t be much younger than Tina…” Alice turned pale.

  The third photo showed an even wider field of view. The background appeared as a vast metal landscape. There were obvious engineered structures and there were piles of junk — metal junk. There was a large metallic box the size of a coliseum hanging effortlessly above the metalscape. The fourth and fifth images zoomed in below the floating object to a group of humans in rags and all of whom looked as if they had been starved to near death. Their bodies looked like something from a World War II film of the Nazi concentration camps.

  The starved humans were gathered around the wall where they were hanging bodies. Others were milling around with metal shards, scraping the bodies clean of skin, flesh, and muscle. The wall was a butchery block and the meat was human.

  “Cannibals?” Alice whispered.

  “Cannibals.” Roger nodded.

  * * *

  “We’ve got a problem,” Riggs said over the video link. He was clearly unhappy about whatever information he was about to impart.

  “Are they on their way already?” Roger asked, frowning.

  “No, but God’s Thumb’s been taken down,” Riggs said. “About an hour after the nuke attacks, a probe group hit the base. The base sent out a distress call over the land-lines and then went silent. They’re working on getting somebody in there right now.”

  “Does it appear to be related to Shane’s mission?” Roger asked.

  “Might be, might not,” Riggs said. “But we have to assume that Major Gries’s team has been lost. We’ll try to get some recon assets in there to see if they can be recovered but… it doesn’t look good.”

  “It ain’t over ’til it’s over,” Roger said, unsmiling. “Like I told Alice, I’m sure that Shane and Cady will make it through. They’re… resourceful.”

  * * *

  “This is so not good,” Gibson moaned.

  Surprise happens in the mind of the commander, Shane thought. And you never know what the hell you’re doing. So do something.

  “Unass the vehicles,” Shane yelled, watching the approaching probe swarm. There were at least a hundred probes in the swarm, but they didn’t appear to have detected the team, yet. They were just tooling along at about a thousand feet above ground level and headed vaguely northwest. They might even head right by. Then again, they might not. But if they acted per normal probe SOP, they were going to home in on the Humvees. He looked around and nodded. There was a very small promontory off to the left, about fifty meters away. Perfect. “Grab the samples and all the spare ammo and mines, including the scatterables! Head for the hill!” He gave Gibson a shove towards the rear of t
he Humvee. As soon as the p.f.c. was moving, it seemed to break everyone else out of their frozen immobility.

  The major hefted his potato gun and started hastily pulling gear out of the back of the Humvee. They had brought far more ordnance than they could pack into the ambush for reasons Shane hadn’t considered at the time. Included in it was the scatterable “probe killer” mines designed to be picked up.

  “Leave the emplaced mines,” Cady yelled, expanding on the commander’s intentions. “Take the catcher grenades for the potato guns! Leave the food! Mahoney, grab as much of your gear as you can carry! Concentrate on the data you’ve gotten and anything that can let us track!” He grabbed his minigun and two spare ammo canisters, then picked up the intact probe. “Jones! Forget the glue mines! Grab the case of scatterables and you and Letorres get ready to lay them in along the line to the hilltop. Nelms, grab your BDL and the case of ceramic rounds.”

  All of the gear that wasn’t to be carried was dumped out of the backs of the Humvees in an unmilitary mish-mash. But they had time to unload all the critical items and get most of the way to the hilltop before the probes seemed to notice the cluster of Humvees and turned towards their position, suddenly accelerating.

  “Nelms, get in position right on top of the damned samples,” Cady said, pointing to the three bags of probe parts. “Jones…” he said, looking around.

  “On it, Top,” the specialist said. He and Letorres hadn’t even made it all the way up the hill. They’d stopped about halfway between the Humvees and the hilltop and now had the top off the case of mines. The scatterable mines were fist-sized bright-orange tetrahedrons, packed into the case in a solid mass. He dumped the mass out on the ground and then he and Letorres started spreading them out in a rough crescent around the defensive position. There were sixty of the mines in the case and spreading them took less than two minutes. The last few were tossed away to widen the crescent. They didn’t roll far.

  In the meantime, Top had spread the rest of the troops into a rough cigar-shaped perimeter with the heaviest group in the direction of the Humvees. The troops carrying potato guns were on the outside of the perimeter with the four troops carrying carbines on the inside. He and Shane were in the center with the samples and spare ammo and then Nelms actually sitting on top of the pile of probe parts.

  The probes were stooping onto the Humvees by the time Letorres and Jones were back in the perimeter. The two were hastily pushed into position as the first Humvee started to shake and was lifted off the ground by the probes.

  “Okay,” Shane said softly. “Wait until they’re all down feeding and then open up. Nelms, I’ll designate your targets.”

  Cady had forgotten the case of glue mines in the third Humvee, which had been commanded by Staff Sergeant Gregory. Gregory had heard the sergeant major’s order not to bring glue mines so he’d left them behind. But these weren’t the whip-detonated mines. These were “probe trap” mines that they’d brought along in case there was a chance to test them. The chance occurred by… chance.

  A probe, detecting metal in the plastic case, swooped down and exerted enough pull to rip the case open. The pull on the metal within also released several of the friction pull triggers embedded in the mines. This, in turn, detonated the mines.

  Each of the mines was a quarter kilo charge of Composition B surrounded by about another half kilo of Coyote glue. While not quite as explosive as the more common C-4, Comp B was the standard filler in military rounds and about ten percent more powerful than TNT.

  The case erupted in a titanic explosion that made the Coyote glue within quite redundant and, indeed, virtually all of it was vaporized by the detonation of the twenty rounds in the case.

  The explosion, besides causing the troops to cringe and get a ringing in all their ears, not only vaporized the Coyote glue, it also vaporized the probe that had attacked the case and six others in the immediate area. In addition, fourteen more were rendered hors de combat, tossed away from the explosion to fall to the ground, shuddering and spitting sparks.

  The Coyote mines were not the only ordnance in the back of the Humvee, and the rest detonated in a long series of secondary explosions that threw material all around the area, concussing and impacting on more probes. A Coyote potato round was thrown from that Humvee to Shane’s and detonated a small pile of other potato rounds that cast Coyote glue all over the probes assimilating the Humvee. Another case of “regular” grenades was caught in the explosion and a half dozen detonated sympathetically, killing most of the entrapped probes.

  Two probes, blown away from the series of secondaries, were pushed towards the hill while the soldiers on it were still cowering on the ground and trying to dig into the soil with their fingers. They instantly detected the nearest metal, which happened to be the same scatterable mine, and lifted it in the air.

  The probe on the right of the line of view happened to win the brief tug-of-war and lifted the half pound orange device to its base, ripping the metal from within.

  The metal was glued in place along one of the faces of the tetrahedron. As soon as the mine impacted on the surface of the probe a small packet of super-glue was ruptured, gluing the mine to its surface. The metal, when removed, opened a channel between two otherwise nonreactive chemicals. However, when they came into contact they immediately detonated, causing the surrounding C-4 to detonate in sympathy.

  The explosion tore the winning probe to bits, sending more metal scything in every direction, and the detonation and flying shrapnel ripped apart the wing of the accompanying probe, hurling it to the ground.

  The swarm and the soldiers recovered at about the same time. For just a moment both groups seemed to pause, as if to take stock and a breath. Then Shane opened his mouth.

  “Open fire!”

  Each of the potato gun “catcher” rounds was designed much like the scatterable mines. As they flew through the swarm, the probes, sensing metal, swooped down and caught them, pulling them into their metal embrace and then… died. After a bit of aiming, each of the potato gun firers stopped bothering and just threw the rounds towards the reduced swarm. Those that missed the swarm entirely were often picked up by probes while they lay on the ground, acting much like the scatterable mines.

  The probes were going absolutely frantic. Here was this huge target of metal and… at every turn there was MORE! Of course, the “more” was their fellows being blown to bits, but they didn’t seem to care or even notice. They were flying all over the place, picking up bits of metal, reassimilating probes and… dying.

  Each of the potato-gun firers only had five magazines and they expended them in less than three minutes, reducing the swarm to a bare thirty or so individuals. Of course, the probes were assimilating the metal flying around them very quickly, but it took a bit of time to “twin.” When one started to twin it tended to float upwards away from the fray. Each of these Shane picked out and had Nelms target with his 7.62 BDL sniper rifle. The rifle fired standard ceramic rounds, although he had a packet of “super rounds” if he needed more range. But at this range he was ignoring his scope and firing under it over open sights. The probes entirely ignored the ceramic round but the rounds did not ignore the probes. One round of 7.62 was more than enough to take down a probe. He got most of the “twinners” and those that he missed Cady directed the carbine teams to engage.

  Twenty, then ten, then only six probes were left, all of them trying to breed. The carbine gunners, Nelms, and Cady with his minigun took care of them with only two managing to twin and those two staying in the area to assimilate until blasted apart by the sergeant major.

  With that probe down, there were no more functioning probes in sight. Just a twisted field of shattered metal.

  “Damn,” Jones said, standing up and looking out over the “battlefield.” “We won.” He paused and that didn’t seem to be enough. “WE WON!”

  “Yeah, we did,” Cady said, looking out at the masses of twisted metal scattered around the tundra. “But they
got our wheels.”

  “Alien bastards,” Nelms shouted. “You killed our Humvee!”

  “Boss,” Mahoney said, quietly. He’d set up his laptop, then taken a place in the line, but as soon as the fighting died he’d hurried back to his beloved electronics.

  “What?” Shane asked, somewhat loudly. His ears were still ringing from the detonation of the case of mines.

  “I think we’ve got a live one out there.”

  * * *

  The probe was upside down, lying sideways on another much more damaged boomerang. The only probe was missing the tip of one wing, but the wing looked… odd. The wing narrowed towards the tip, then flared outwards to a jagged break.

  “It was breeding or whatever,” Jones said, bending down and prodding the thing with his carbine. It was shuddering and sparks were shooting off the exposed interior but it couldn’t seem to fly.

  “There’s something seriously wrong with it,” the sergeant major said, frowning.

  “Yeah, Top, it can’t fly,” Jones pointed out.

  “More than that, shit for brains,” Cady replied. “It’s sitting on a big hunk of metal and it’s not tearing it apart.”

  “I guess we’re going to find out if they can repair themselves,” Shane said, his hands on his hips as he surveyed the trophy. “Top, tag and bag this thing. If we’ve got to dump some of the pieces out, we’ll do it. Mahoney!” he yelled.

  “Sir?” the specialist called from the small hill where the rest of the team was still waiting.

  “Any sign of more of ’em?”

  “Negative, sir,” the specialist called back. “There’s some radiating off to the northwest and a lot to the northeast. But it’s all more than twenty klicks off. That one’s radiating, but very weak.”

  “Keep an eye on it,” Shane yelled. “Tag it and bag it — and make sure it’s wrapped so it’s not radiating — and then we’re going to go find out if there’s anything left of the base.”