by John Ringo
Roger nodded and thought about the defenses. Huntsville was the first redoubt to be hit that had everything that had been envisioned. They didn’t have as much of everything as he would have liked, and not all of it was produced within the redoubt, but they were the first redoubt to have a chance of holding out.
“Your transport is spooling up at the field,” Riggs continued. “You’d better hurry.”
“What?” Roger replied, confused by the sudden, to him, nonsequitur. “Like hell. Huntsville’s my home. And my team came up with most of the defenses. I’ll get Alice and the rest out of here — their designated retreat is Denver — but I’m staying.”
“Like hell, as you said,” Riggs replied. “You’re the guy who runs everything. You should have been in Cheyenne days ago.”
“Too bad,” Roger replied. “You can’t order me to leave and by the time you could get ahold of the SecDef it’d be too late. Get the rest out; I’m a stayin’. Besides, I want to see how it all works.”
“Oh, hell,” the general said, shrugging. “Have it your way; I’ve got a war to run.”
* * *
“What the hell are you doing here?” Roger asked as he entered his own “command center.”
Traci spun around in her chair and grinned, shrugging one shoulder as if to say “What are you gonna do?”
“I made sure everybody was on the transport and then… opted out,” she said. “So did Alan and Tom. They said they’d be down in a minute.”
The underground bunker had been highly modified since the first time they sheltered in it. The outer doors were now nonmetallic. Some were carbon composite but most were thick wood assembled with glue and dowels. Even the hinges and locks were composites. The bunker had loads of communications links but even those were nonmetallic fiber-optic cables. The rooms had been upgraded as well and the “command center” for the Neighborhood Watch group was more than comfortable. There were two fold-out couches, recliners and three computer station chairs to control the bank of nine plasma screens on one wall. Currently they were showing views from remote pickups on Monte Sano Mountain, downtown Huntsville, the airfield and Weeden Mountain, which directly overlooked the arsenal, as well as lidar data from the surrounding area.
“They’re almost to Fort Payne,” Traci continued, naming a town halfway between Atlanta and Huntsville in a direct line. “Another group just dropped on Chattanooga.”
“Bull should be rolling,” Roger said, taking a seat at one of the station chairs and toggling for a different view of the airfield. Sure enough, a flight of the new Goshawk composite fighters was rolling out of their bunker. “Go for it, Bull.”
“I’m sure they’ll have fun,” Traci said, toggling a different view from Monte Sano Mountain. The high ridge was directly to the east of Huntsville and had a long view of the area between Huntsville and Atlanta. Faint on the horizon was what looked like a large cloud of birds. “And so it starts.”
* * *
Colonel Ridley loitered at altitude until the last of the Goshawks got into formation and then used hand signals to indicate their direction of flight. The one thing that nobody had managed to do was put a “zero metal” radio into the damned birds. All they could use was hand signals. And forget an automated navigation system. In a way, the Goshawks harkened back to the “good old days” of flying. Gone were complex “fly by wire” controls and automated aiming systems, replaced by manual controls and brute strength. In many ways, except for the fact that they rode a ceramic composite jet engine that was barely tested, the planes were more like flying a Mustang from WWII than a Falcon.
They definitely had the “Burt Rutan Look,” though, with forward canards and fore-swept wings. In tests he’d managed to get them right past supersonic but not by much. That was okay, though, the enemy was subsonic as well. And the birds could loft a fine load of modified Sparrows.
Fortunately, the incoming enemy had waited until late in the day to approach. If they’d hit in the morning, the battle would have been hell since the sun would have been directly in the face of the human pilots.
The plane didn’t even have a compass. So far, nobody had come up with a compass that didn’t have a scrap of metal in it. Instead he had some very detailed aerial, satellite actually, photographs of the area and the sun behind them to find their way home. One sortie to launch the missiles into the bulk of the oncoming enemy and then go home. It was really up to the lasers and mines to stop the probes.
He banked again as they reached Monte Sano Mountain. If they engaged much farther out than the defenses on the mountain, the probes would just pick up their “dead” and continue on. The trick was to hit them so hard they didn’t have time. That was one of the key pieces of data that Shane had picked up in Greenland. The probes stopped to recover their wounded and rebuild from them. If you hit them hard enough while that was going on you could stop the whole process.
When he finally glimpsed the probe swarm, he doubted, though, whether that was going to be possible. It looked like a hurricane on the horizon.
He gave the signal for the group to bank around again, killing time until the probes got into the killzone. They came around to the north, the flight of fighters banking over Huntsville in perfect formation at no more than three thousand feet AGL, then turned back to the east. He powered down, dropping to just above stall speed, giving the probes time to get into the killbox. The lasers and missiles couldn’t fire until his flight engaged. They were, in a way, the signal for the engagement to start. And he had to wait.
He hated waiting.
A flicker out the corner of his eye made him turn. Rene was signaling that they were close enough but he shook his head. Closer. They had to hit them with a solid punch or not at all.
* * *
“Come on,” Alan bitched. “What the hell are they waiting for?”
“They have to get them to the programmed distance,” Roger said, shrugging. He was nervous as well. Even with the magnification dialed all the way back, the cloud of machines filled the sky. “The Sparrows aren’t going to do much against that formation. What they will do is slow some of the probes down. The trick is to get them to trickle in. If that whole mass fell on us, nothing we could do would stop it. But if we can get them to come in in smaller groups, and if we can destroy enough of the smaller groups faster than they can reconstruct, we’ll win. They need to be this side of Gurley for them to have a chance of doing that. We’re figuring we’re going to lose the Monte Sano Mountain defenses. But if they can slow them down, we might have a chance.”
“There,” Tom said, setting down his beer. “There it goes.”
* * *
The missiles weren’t even fired by electricity. Instead, an airtube led to an igniter switch. As he closed, Bull fired off all six Sparrows, then closed with guns. The flight of fighters had moved to a staggered formation and they banked upwards as they closed, cutting a swath across the front of the massive formation of probes. It still was a pinprick, but every pinprick helped.
The cloud of probes wasn’t as solid as it appeared from the distance. There were some probes that had spread out to the front. It was those that the fighters engaged, their ceramic ramjet rounds slamming into the lead probes and tearing them to shreds. It was also a necessity as the swarm got closer and closer. The probes were close enough together that the fighters were, as much as anything, “plowing the road” in an effort to cut through the edges of the cloud.
Bull had more than once started up a flock of birds. Generally, birds couldn’t hurt a fighter. But these birds were made of metal. He triggered his guns desperately as one of the probes lurched into his path, already ravaged by somebody else’s fire. The probe disintegrated in midair but pieces of it still slammed into his wingroot hard enough that he was surprised the jet held together.
Finally they were through the outliers and headed home. Now to see if the wing stayed on. As planned, they poured on the gas and headed for altitude at the same time. They had to get out
of the way of the next line of defense.
* * *
Roger zoomed in Plasma Six on the front of the probe cloud and grunted in satisfaction.
“They’re picking up their wounded,” Shane said, nodding. “Just like I said.”
Some of the probes who had picked up enough metal from their deceased brethren had stopped to twin. They were quickly lost from view but it was apparent what was happening.
“Now to see if a solid punch works better,” Roger said, zooming the magnification back. The video camera was located on the observatory on Monte Sano Mountain and as he zoomed back he got one flash of the fighters screaming by not far overhead. Then it was as if the mountain erupted in fire.
On the 15th of April, 1950, Redstone Arsenal had become the Army’s premier rocket production and design facility. Since that time, every major category of rocket produced in the U.S. had some link to Redstone Arsenal and Huntsville. Huntsville, in fact, was a town of little but “rocket scientists.” Just as L.A. focused on the movie industry and had the byproduct of being filled with out-of-work actors, Huntsville was overrun with people obsessed by things that flew on a pillar of flame. And just as there were dozens, hundreds, of little production companies churning out small movies in L.A., there were dozens of companies that, with a little funding, could make things that went WHOOSH around Huntsville.
Starting with Rocket Ram-Jets, Roger had organized those companies into a minor rocket-building empire. And they had responded. Despite numerous shortages, there was still plenty of potassium nitrate, charcoal, carbon composite materials and resins, and hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTBP) to be had. When specific shortages turned up, here a thermocouple, there a specialized form of paper, the companies had adjusted, adapted and overcome. After all, they were rocket scientists.
And over the course of a few months they had churned out an enormous number of very simple rockets. Those rockets had only one purpose in life: deliver a small payload to a location not very far away and then die.
Therefore when the signal was given, over one thousand K type Estes rockets launched nearly simultaneously. Atop each of them was a small payload consisting of fourteen “metal mines” and a timer. Some of them met “leakers” ahead of the swarm on their way to their rendezvous with destiny. That was okay since every dead bot was a good bot. But most of them penetrated into the edge of the swarm and then “dropped” their payload. However, they weren’t done. The bots seemed to have some sense of their oncoming wrath because a few swerved to avoid the tearing missiles. But the swarm was deep and crowded. It was impossible to move too much within the swarm and just as impossible to miss hitting something. Every single missile, either before dropping their payload or after, managed to hit, and destroy, at least one bot. In many cases they hit more than one before being mangled out of functional existence. When a rocket flying at five hundred kilometers per hour hit a bot, rarely did either escape unscathed.
Of the thousand missiles fired from the Monte Sano Mountain defenses, seven hundred and ninety-two managed to drop their payload. Each of them carried fourteen “metal mines.” Since the rockets themselves had little or no metal content, the bots instantly gravitated to the mines, pulled the little metal bits out of this flying bonanza and then… died.
The effect, being watched from deep underground, was very much like watching fireworks, except by day. There was a small charge in the center of the payload that spread the mines out. This was noticeable by a brief puff of smoke. Then, as the bots pulled the metal tabs out of the mines and detonated them, there was a series of explosions, flowering outward from the smaller puff.
“Damn,” Alan muttered, munching on a handful of potato chips. “That’s cool. I wish it was nighttime.”
“Sun’s going down,” Roger pointed out. “Just in time for the laser light-show.”
With the fighters gone and the rockets having done their job, the lasers could open up.
There were two laser projectors on Monte Sano Mountain, one right by the observatory and another by the Forestry Department lookout tower. Both were powered by nine very large General Electric diesel generators. The combined output of the generators was over seventy megawatts per hour and the vast majority of it was pumped through a massive array of liquid cooled laser diodes.
The laser systems themselves were mostly large laser diode arrays made of semiconductor material mixtures of indium gallium arsenide and phosphate. The individual diode laser measured only a millimeter thick, a few tens of millimeters long, and a few microns wide. Millions of the tiny devices were stacked side by side to create a massive laser array with an optical output in the megawatts of photon energy. The photons were of a wavelength of about 1.3 microns and were therefore infrared and invisible to the naked eye.
Laser power is limited by atmosphere. While there were various ways of reducing the effect, the Redstone group hadn’t had the time to try for finesse. Thus it was a matter of letting the probes get close before the projectors opened fire. The lasers went off when the probes were less than five miles away.
The lasers began to “paint” the sky, tracking back and forth across the entire zone that the probes occupied, moving much faster than the eye could follow. This created “lines” of fire that dithered across the front of the cloud, zooming up and down and up and down across the entire front. The pointing and tracking system for the array steering maintained a centroid lock on the cloud and randomly dithered within the bounds of the cloud. Pinpoint shots could be made to within accuracies of a few centimeters at that range but the beam was a half meter wide by then due to diffraction and there were plenty of targets to shoot at anyway. So accuracy was not a problem.
The powerful lasers tracked back and forth, pumping megawatts of coherent light into the mass of probes.
And the entire front of the cloud of probes began to… fog.
“What the hell is that?” Shane asked. “It looks like a smoke screen. Are they doing that to cut down on the lasers?”
“No, but it’s having that effect,” Roger replied. “That, my friend, is gaseous metal. The lasers are burning the probes apart, but they’re releasing clouds of metal gas in the process. That’s going to be a very unhealthy place to be after this is all done.”
He zoomed in on the cloud and managed to catch a view of a bot just as the laser, which was quite invisible to the eye, cut across it. The laser caught the bot on the edge of one “wing” and sliced upwards. The beam wasn’t powerful enough to cut all the way through but the effect was to cause the bot to begin spiraling downward. Another bot caught it after it had fallen no more than a hundred feet, and along with some others began tearing it apart. But even as Roger watched, the remorseless laser plowed through that group, cutting the four clustered bots apart and causing the whole group to begin spiraling towards the ground.
“It’s slowin’ ’em down, though,” Alan said, looking at Plasma Two, which was carrying lidar data. “Damn if it isn’t slowing them down.”
“But they’re spreading out, too,” Roger pointed out, zooming back the lidar data. The cloud was spreading upward and to the north and south. He wasn’t sure if it was thought out or simply a result of crowding. It was apparent, though, on the remote vids that the laser operators had noticed the spread and had spread their own beams as well. However…
“They’re getting through, now,” Shane said, shaking his head. “The lasers can’t cover that much sky and still keep them back.”
Remorselessly, the mindless bots were advancing through the laser fire. They could barely make headway, but they were forcing their way forward and fanning out the sides and over the defenses. The latter two were the most important and dangerous, through. The bots to the side and top were able to use those between them and the laser projectors as screens and were continuing on towards Huntsville.
The video from Monte Sano Mountain had gotten… dark. The projectors now had probes on every side and had spread their fire to deal with it. That meant
less fire per square meter but despite that there was only so close the probes could get. As they closed, the space between the laser “lines” became smaller and smaller. More of the power was being pushed into a smaller and smaller space, creating a dome of probes trying, now coherently, to get at the projectors and the projectors tearing them apart.
Roger frowned as something dropped past the pickup, then he began noticing more and more objects. But it was dark in the dome, the only light now coming from the occasional flash of lightning as a probe died. In the stroboscopic effect of thousands of the probes flashing their death light, he tried to figure out what was happening. Then, suddenly, the video pickup rocked and then tilted downward, its mounting apparently destroyed. In the dim strobing from dying probes, and now a strange red light from burning metal, he could see pieces of probes littering the ground in every direction. The ground was covered in smashed probes, many of them strobing and adding to the overall lighting effect. Indeed, the quality of the light was improving as more and more of the probes added their death flickers, creating an ambient light that was weird beyond all imagining. Then the camera went dark.
He switched to the last pickup on the mountain that collocated with the laser projector. There was a steam rising in the area, probably from the cooling system that had to be working overtime. And in every direction there was a weird glow from atmospheric breakdown and ionization. The laser itself was infrared, in a band of light that the human eye couldn’t see. Despite that, he could clearly see it tracking across the sky. Close. It was hard to get perspective, the fog of gas around the projector limited the ability to see actual probes, but it looked as if the laser was hitting something no more than fifty meters away. And besides the weird green-white light from the dying probes, the sky over the projector was the strangest purple-orange Roger had ever seen in his life.