"Von Neumann’s War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ringo John, Taylor Travis S.)

Chapter 23

“We have lost all contact with Manhattan Island, Mr. President,” Dr. Vicki Johnson said calmly. The National Security Advisor had been with the current administration since before the President was governor of Oklahoma and they were good friends. Vicki feared that even speaking candidly as his friend now would not be enough to convince him what they should do. “General Mitchell and I think it’s time to—”

“No! We’re not going to nuke New York City!” The President pounded the conference table in the War Room. He looked at his friend in the eyes and shook his head. “I don’t care if that entire map of the world turns red. We’re not nuking our own cities.” He pointed to the continuously updated world map that showed the occupied areas in red. All of New York City including the outer boroughs were under bot control.

“Sir,” General Mitchell sighed. “It might slow them down. We laced the major cities with enough HE, fuel air bombs, and nukes to vaporize them. We might wipe out millions of the bots. But we would have to do it now before we lost communications with the bombs or before the bots eat them or render them useless.”

“What about our new fighters and bombers?” the President asked.

General Mitchell shrugged. “Sir, it’s likely that there are nowhere near enough to support an all-out attack against the bots. There are just not enough of them. We will use them to support evacs and defense of the redoubts.”

“Did it slow them down in China and in Russia and across the Asian continent? No, it didn’t. If we ever take back our country, I don’t want it to be so radioactive that we can’t move back in.”

“Then, uh, sir, what are your orders?” the general asked.

“We wait.” President Colby hung his head and then leaned back in his chair. “That is all we do. We wait and hope the redoubt scientists figure out what to do.”

Ronny Guerrero and Roger Reynolds were poring over the current intel data on the New York invasion hoping for some insight into stopping the alien machines. They were having very little luck. The two men had once only known each other through brief customer-to-contractor acquaintance and interaction. But over the last three years they had become coworkers, then friends, and now refugee scientists in a redoubt city hoping to find a way to stop the Von Neumann probes.

“I don’t see any patterns, Rog. But what I do see is more of the same,” Ronny said in his soft Cuban accent.

“What do you mean, Ronny?” Roger looked up from his laptop for a second.

“They land in a tubule and spread. Nothing different. We can expect a tubule to jump from New York City to some other major city soon.” Ronny scribbled some notes on a pad in front of him and tapped wildly at a calculator. “See, following exponential growth, I’d say in a few more days we’ll lose another city.”

“Yeah, I was guessing that but hadn’t run the simulation yet. I’ll get Traci to work out the sims for the President in a bit.”

“Good idea. But, what to do now? We need a strategy at least.”

“Well, I guess we sort of have a strategy. I mean hide and survive as long as we can until we can figure out a way to stop them is a strategy. It’s a tactical approach that we’re completely lacking.”

“Ah, yes. Should we try to defend the cities, blow them up, or let them fall?” Ronny nodded in agreement.

“Yeah. Well, of course the President’s tactic is to let them fall. Perhaps he’s right.”

“I hate it, but you’re goddamned right we should let the cities be.” Sergeant Cady wiped the sweat off his forehead and continued loading the ceramic ammo into the composite troop buggy. “What the hell does it matter if they’re evacuated?”

“I agree, Top.” Shane Gries nodded. “We aren’t gonna beat them by shooting them one on one. There ain’t enough bullets. I think the President is doing the right thing here.”

“Yeah, but I still hate it.”

“Me, too.”

The pickup truck loaded with what appeared to be everything the family owned had barely made it up the old logging road. The recon bots had stolen the gate weeks before so there was nothing stopping them from driving up the hill to the cabin or to the mine entrance.

It beat all Richard had ever seen. Were these people living in a vacuum? The Internet was all abuzz about how the bots eat metal and how you should stay away from metal and so on. But here was a young man in his late twenties, his wife of about the same age, a toddler maybe three years old, and an infant parading around in an old beat-up extended cab Toyota Tundra that was loaded down with everything from camping gear, mountain bikes, and firearms to strollers, baby gear and kitchen utensils, and cases and cases of canned goods, bottled water, baby food. Even a microwave and television set. There was probably a kitchen sink in it somewhere.

Their approach had tripped some of the fiber-optic sensor cable Richard had stretched out down the road for early warning of visitors, so he and Helena had walked up the mine shaft main tunnel to meet them. Richard hoped he could convince them to leave. He didn’t need any liabilities or distractions from his work. His hope was that they were just lost and needed directions. The fact that these two adults were driving around with these kids and knowing those bots were out there made his skin crawl with fear and anger. He scratched at the nape of his neck and then just shook his head. Helena made no particular telltale signs of being upset that anybody except the man who had been living with her for the past couple of years would notice. She was pissed.

The young man parked the truck about twenty meters from the mine entrance and seemed a little nervous when he saw the odd couple coming out of the mine shaft entrance. To the young man, the old man approaching them appeared to be in his late forties to early fifties, was average size and had a wiry build with graying hair and graying beard. He guessed the woman was in her early to mid-twenties, could tell she had a light complexion since she was wearing cut-off jeans and a tank top; her milky white arms and legs revealed she spent little time in the sun, and her long dark hair suggested a slight “gothic” appearance. What frightened him most was the fact that the young woman was carrying a large homemade club in her left hand and from the looks of the dings in it she had used it on something before.

“Don’t worry honey, I’ll take care of this,” he told his wife.

“Well, whatever. I’ve got to mix the baby a bottle. It’s been nearly three hours since she’s eaten anything.” She shushed the baby and bounced her in her arms. The toddler was strapped in a car seat in the back of the pickup’s extended cab. He was screaming bloody murder.

“Hello.” The young man approached Richard and Helena and smiled timidly.

“ ’Ello,” Helena smiled and nodded at the children. “Look Richard, dey have a beebee with dem,” she said rolling the “r” in Richard.

“Uh huh. Hello, what can I do for you? You are on private property, you know,” Richard didn’t like where this was going. Why weren’t these idiots at a shelter?

“I’m Jeff and that’s my wife Sara Jo. The one in the back screamin’ there is little Jeff, Jr. and the one screamin’ in the front is Precious Anne. We’ve been traveling for a long time. All the way down from Myrtle Beach and we haven’t seen anybody. I took a wrong turn a few miles back, I guess. Where are we?” He offered Richard his hand.

“You are outside Spartanburg about twenty miles or so.” Richard shook his hand guardedly. “You must be really lost to have wound up here. Where you headed?”

“Uh, we were headed to the national park down west of Greenville. Heard there was a campsite for refugees down there. I took that cutoff road at the bottom of the mountain thinking it would make the trip shorter. Guess not,” Jeff said.

“Vwhy you vait til now to go to a shelter? Goddamned bots in New York and dem lovely babies don need in dat truck.” Helena seemed concerned about the truck and from her experience she had every reason to be. “Don you know de tings eat trucks!”

“What, eat trucks…” Jeff looked confused. “Hey, you ain’t from around here are you?”

“Da. I fuckin’ live here.”

“Sorry, uh, I’m just uh… tired… lost and…” He yawned and covered his mouth. Then he stretched. “Oh man, and the guy on the C.B. a while ago said…”

“C.B.!” Richard noticed the antenna on the truck. “You been talking on that thing!?”

“Uh, mostly I just listen to it, but I just told this fella that I was lost and nearly out of gas and—”

“Goddamn dummies don listen to de news.” Helena looked at Richard who was already in a sprint to the truck. She followed him, “Right! De babies.”

“Hey! Wait a minute!” Jeff said, startled and angry.

“Miss, you have to get these kids out of this vehicle right now. If you just used that radio they’ll be coming.” He held the rear door open and started unstrapping the screaming and kicking toddler. Jeff ran behind Richard and started to grab him around the neck in a barroom chokehold but Helena poked him pretty hard in the stomach with her club. Jeff let go of Richard’s neck and gasped for air as he fell backwards on his ass.

“Hey!” Sara Jo screamed.

“Lady, you must get out of de damn truck now or dose goddamn tings’ll eat it with you and your babies in it.”

With a hundred thuds and the sound of screeching metal on metal, alien robotic machines attached themselves to the truck like a swarm of angry bees. Helena pulled Sara Jo and Precious through the passenger side doorway of the vehicle just as the seat cushion springs flew through the windshield into the underbelly of a cloud of bots. Metal fragments, plastic, rubber, vinyl, glass, automotive fluids of all sorts, and dirt and leaves were flung around them in a whirlwind of debris and noise. Once, the truck’s horn even honked. The metal from the canned goods popped open and the various foodstuffs contained within them were flung aside as discarded useless waste to the bots. The gooey mess flew around them, splattering everything in the whirlwind’s path.

Richard held the toddler under his bodyweight although the little tyke was kicking, screaming, and biting at him. But he was afraid if the kid got up a piece of flying debris would decapitate the little guy. Helena and Sara Jo used their bodies to shield Precious, who was also screaming the most gut-wrenching screeches. Between the children’s screams and the hellacious noise the bots made destroying the truck, it was difficult to concentrate on anything but holding still. And the horrific sound was something along the lines of crossing an overcrowded preschool at recess with a monster truck rally.

As quickly as the bots had appeared they were flying away. Two of the bots were lagging behind and hovering about two feet above the ground flying sluggishly and waiting for something. They had both gathered enough raw materials from the truck and now were both twinning.

“Helena! Look!” Richard pointed to the twinning probe nearest to her.

Helena rose to her feet quickly, grabbing her club in a homerun hitter’s stance, and knocked the boomerang-shaped probe skittering in a shower of sparks across the ground like a stone skipping on a pond. The boomerang-shaped machine twisted and twirled across the road as it bounced and landed in a briar patch on the far side. She spun and jumped the six feet or so over a pile of truck rubble to the second twinning probe and commenced smashing it.

“Goddamn alien tings coulda killed dese babies!” She bashed it again. That particular bot was for certain dead. “Goddamn it you all to hell!”

The first bot she had batted out of the park was skittering around and around, tangled up in the thick briars on the side of the old logging road and could not seem to break free. She started toward it to pound it some more.

“No! Helena, wait. I want it alive!” Richard grabbed a torn canvas duffle bag and some other material made of nylon that was left over from the remains of Jeff’s tent. Richard rushed across the road, tossing the material in front of him, and tackled the bot, wrapping it in the bag. That didn’t work worth a damn. The bot threw him and the bag head over heels deeper into the briar patch, scratching him from head to toe. “Shit!”

“Hold on, I’ll get it!” Helena grabbed another large piece of the tent material that had been slung out of the bot’s metal-eating whirlwind and she popped it like a bed sheet over the briars and the bot. “Grab de goddamn end!”

Richard forced his way up through the briars ignoring the pain of being cut and pricked by the briars just in time to snag the middle of the light green nylon material with his left hand. He pulled it to him and got purchase with both hands and then rolled over onto it and the wildly spinning bot. Helena fell face first into the back of his head, busting her lip and cussing with every breath. She shook her head twice and raised up pushup style so she could put her knees in the middle of the tent material and on top of the boomerang. She punched at it several times through the material, never once missing a chance to use an obscenity.

“Goddamn fuckin’ sonovabitch ting!” She kicked at it. “It von’t fuckin stop, Richard!”

“Good! Let’s wrap it up more if we can and tie it off to something inside.” He bear-hugged the boomerang and the wad of tent and duffel bag and rolled with it out of the briars. Helena grabbed at the other side when Richard came to a stop. Richard and Helena fought with the bot and it looked to Sara Jo and Jeff like two idiots wrestling a cougar in burlap sack. A cougar might have been easier.

The two held tight to both sides of the wad of bot and nylon and carefully moved toward the entrance to the mine. The propulsion system of the bot even in its damaged state was strong enough to lift both of them off the ground a few feet at a time, but it was no longer strong enough to get away from them. But it tossed them to and fro quite readily and was beating the two of them together, pushing them to their physical limits. Helena cursed some more.

They made it into the mine about thirty feet and tied the bot to the nearest support beam they came to that Richard thought could hold it. He pulled the tent material around the backside of the twelve-by-twelve beam between it and the rock wall of the mine shaft. He looped it through several times and tied it in a large knot. The wad of nylon and canvas material rose upward toward the ceiling of the shaft and pulled the material tight, looking like an odd shaped helium balloon tied off to the post — a helium balloon with a cougar trapped inside it. But it was holding.

Jeff and his family sat huddled together sobbing and hugging one another and trying to shush the infant. They were covered from head to toe in canned goods and radiator water. Fortunately, Jeff had about run out of gasoline or they’d have been covered in that, too. There was little left of his truck but there was a pile of supplies that were dried or powdered goods in plastic or cardboard containers strewn about. And things like pinto beans, creamed corn, baby food from jars, baby formula powder, and various other food stuffs all mixed up.

“Helena, stay with them. I’ll be right back. Find out if they’re hurt.”

“Poor poor babies! De goddamn mean robots scare you? Don vorry, dey gone now.” She knelt beside Sara Jo and put her hand on the baby girl’s head. The baby was still crying. “I tink she needs feeding?” Helena looked at Sara Jo.

“I need a bottle and the formula is all smashed!” Sara Jo cried. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she panicked.

“Don you worry, baby. Can you breastfeed her?”

“I can’t produce enough milk,” Sara Jo cried.

Helena looked at Jeff as she stood. He was still holding the toddler to him. Both of them were covered in a gooey mess but they seemed unharmed. “You okay?”

“Yes.”

“De baby?”

“Yes.”

Helena picked up an empty torn baby formula container. The cylindrical shaped container was cardboard but it had a metal top and bottom, both of which were gone. The coffee-can-sized container lay in a pile of white powder. She scooped it up with the cardboard container, holding it sideways so as not to spill. Sara Jo realized what she was doing and started scanning the pile of debris.

“There — the diaper bag. There’s a bottle in it.” Sara Jo pointed.

Helena rummaged through the little blue and white cloth bag until she found a clear plastic bottle with a nipple on the end. She unscrewed the nipple from the top of the bottle and then looked at the side of the formula container.

“It takes one scoop for two ounces of water.”

“How much is a scoop? Dere is no scoop.” Helena looked around the pile of foodstuffs for a scooper but did not see anything useful.

“Uh, about a heaping tablespoon. Shhh, Precious… it’s all right, honey.”

Helena found a bottle of water amongst the debris and mixed the formula per Sara Jo’s instructions. She guessed at the amount of powder in a scoop by pouring the powder into her cupped hand. She handed the bottle to Sara Jo and watched as the little infant took to the bottle and almost immediately stopped crying.

“Thank you,” Sara Jo sobbed.

“Told you. Fuckin’ crazy you have dese babies out with dose goddamned aliens about.”

Richard walked out of the mine shaft entranceway with an armload of things. He set a five gallon bucket in front of Jeff and handed him a ladle and a dustpan.

“These will have to do. Collect up all the foodstuffs you can. Beans, peas, creamed corn, all of it and dump it in this bucket. If it looks like it got any fluids from the truck on it don’t take it.”

“We can’t eat this! It’s, uh, it’s ruined.” Jeff looked confused.

“It hasn’t been ruined. Oh, it has been exposed to the air. We’ll have to cook it and can it or vacuum seal it, but we can save a lot of it. Believe me, from what I’ve been reading about the rest of the world there will come a day when this mess will look like a feast.”

“Yuck, that is just gross.” Jeff turned up his nose. It was all Helena could take.

“Listen here ya goddamn idiot.” Helena stood in front of Jeff looking down at him. She could not help but think how badly her family in St. Petersburg must have suffered once the aliens took over. Thanks to Richard, she might be the only member of her family still alive.

She cocked her head and leaned on her war club. “We’re tirty or fordy miles up de goddamned mountain and don have no way to get back. Where we gonna go anyway, huh? You should have taken dese babies to a shelter months ago you fuckin’ dumbass hick. Goddamn if you don listen to Dr. Richard now. He de only ting gonna save your babies, your wife, and your goddamn dumb ass. So shut your fuckin’ mouth and go an do what de fuck he says.”

“Just do it, Jeff.” Sara Jo frowned at her husband but kept her voice low so she wouldn’t upset Precious.

Richard took a smaller three-gallon pail from inside the larger bucket and handed it to Helena. “See how much of the baby formula you can salvage. If you get a little dirt in it, so what, don’t worry about it. We’ll sift it later.” Richard looked at the small amount of the white powder scattered throughout the pile. There couldn’t be more than three gallons of it. He was not quite sure how much of it got mixed with water but he knew damned well it was a long way from being enough to feed that little baby for more than maybe a month. These two fools had no idea how bad a situation they had put themselves and their helpless children in.

He reached in the smaller pail and pulled out a roll of heavy-duty garbage bags. “Mommy, when you are done feeding the baby start gathering up everything you can find that is still useful or might be salvaged.”

“We… we can’t stay here!” Jeff said looking around for more of the alien machines.

“You can stay in the old cabin up the road if you want,” Richard grunted. He didn’t much care for these two stupid adults or at least the male.

“Richard!” Helena stamped her right foot into the ground. “Dey will do no such a fucking ting and you goddamn know it.”

“But Helena dear—”

“Don you goddamned ‘Helena dear’ me. No way dese babies gonna stay up dere in dat drafty old cabin with no lectricity and water.”

“But—”

“You’re being an asshole. Dey stay down de hole with us and dat is goddamn dat!”

“So you are absolutely certain this is the frequency distribution of the alien transmissions?” Roger Reynolds turned and glanced at Ronny Guerrero excitedly and then back to the NSA MASINT specialist giving the briefing.

“Absolutely, Mr. Deputy Secretary. We have verified it against the bots currently occupying recon herds in this area. This is the sequence of frequencies they’re using.”

“Then are you saying we can understand their communications?” Ronny asked.

“No. They’re high-bit encrypted, over 256, and we haven’t cracked that. For that matter, they seem to cycle their encryption with higher encryption bursts. But it’s at least a start. We now know exactly what the frequency spectrum of their transmissions is. Without that, decryption would never be possible.” The technician pointed out the several spikes of the transmission frequencies and continued to explain how they hopped based on a fractal basis across the spectrum. But, and it was the big but, they still needed the decryption key.

“All right. Post all this on the website immediately,” Roger ordered.

“Mr. President,” General Mitchell said, looking around the War Room Advisory Committee, “latest intel shows that the bots have jumped tubes from NYC to Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore as well as all the smaller cities in between. We’re still in communication with the MIT redoubt at Hanscomb Air Force Base, but we’re hearing that the battle is not going well. They anticipate being overrun within the hour.”

“The cities have been evacuated and the loss of civilian lives should be basically nill, sir.” Vicki reminded him. “There were holdouts, but less than ten percent of the population. And, of course, the forces in the redoubt.”

“We can’t maintain people in those refugee camps forever, Vicki. There simply isn’t enough food and supplies. What’s the time frame we’re looking at?”

“Sixty days,” the director of FEMA replied. “And those tent cities aren’t entirely metal free. If the bots hit them, there is going to be reduced impact but not zero impact. Among other things, any large population requires security forces. The security is provided by National Guard at the moment, but if you rip away their weapons they’re just a bunch of kids with uniforms.”

“We anticipated that issue,” General Mitchell replied, smiling faintly. “We’re implementing training in nonprojectile and zero-metal projectile weapons.”

“Care to translate that for me?” the President asked, frowning.

“The units are being rearmed with staffs, quarterstaffs, and bows,” General Mitchell said, shrugging. “We’re also falling back on historical communications models.” He looked over at the aide de camp at his shoulder and then back.

“The original purpose of an aide de camp was to carry messages, and messengers were a primary communications method as late as the First World War. We’ve established cavalry messenger posts across a large area and we’re slowly expanding that area. Even if the Internet goes down entirely we should be able to maintain communications across the U.S. Slow communications, but communications. The Army has extensive experience in continuing under rather odd conditions, Mr. President. I mean, we’ve got manuals that cover most of the conditions we’re going to be running into. As long as the food holds out, we’re going to stay an Army.”

“Good to hear that at least one thing is working,” the President said, nodding. “Any projections as to what cities might be next?”

“Not at this time,” General Mitchell said. “So far they’re hitting the East Coast and seem to be working south and east. We’ve established lidar sites across the country hooked into the internet and SIPARNET.”

“Lidar is…” the President said, holding up a hand to forestall response. “That’s using lasers as radar, right?”

“Yes, Mr. President,” Mitchell said, trying not to grin. “Close enough. The problem is that it’s limited as hell. But, on the other hand, the bots don’t seem to detect low-power laser. The lidar is where we’re getting some of the data on spread. We got the idea from the satellites that NRO managed to field.” He paused as an aide entered the room and handed him a message. He looked at it for a moment and then frowned.

“Speaking of lidar, we just picked up a… call it one of the ‘main’ tubes lifting off from near where Trenton used to be. The other attacks came in on relatively low vectors, that is they didn’t get very high since the other cities were relatively close. This one is heading for altitude.”

“Where’s it headed?” the President asked, frowning.

“Unknown at this time,” the general said. “West. But that’s the rest of the country. Chicago? St. Louis? Here? The West Coast? Unknown at this time.”

Another aide came in and gestured at the plasma screen on the wall.

“We’ve finally gotten the lidar software working, sir,” the female aide said in a soft voice. “Channel ninety-two should give you a view. It’s controlled from the battle center; if you—”

The view on the screen was of a map of the North American continent. The tube, big as it was, wouldn’t have been visible, but there was a large karat over it as well as smaller ones over the lesser tubes spreading along the eastern seaboard.

“There goes Baltimore,” the President said. “I don’t know if I’m grateful or hate the fact that we’ve got real-time information. Not much we can do about it, is there?”

“Something coming in on Fox,” Vicki said nodding to an aide. The screen was changed to a view of a reporter trying to describe what was going on behind him. The sound was off, but they didn’t really need it.

Two ships, liners by the looks of them, were visible at sea. A swarm of bots was in pursuit, but even as they headed for the undefended ships another, larger, ship came into view. It was a carrier, from the perspective on the shot it wasn’t clear which, that was interposing its bulk between the fleeing cruise ships and the bot swarm.

Flickers of tracers from the carrier’s Phalanx guns reached out towards the bot swarm but the depleted uranium rounds were swallowed to no effect. Then the swarm reached the carrier and began to cover it. And the ship began to disintegrate.

The last shot was of the carrier’s island slumping off and splashing into the sea. By that time the ship had been eaten down below the flight deck, and fires from ruptured fuel bunkers had turned it into an inferno from which small, burning, figures could be seen falling. But the liners were well out to sea, probably beyond the range of the bots’ interest.

“That was the Carl Vinson,” General Mitchell said to the hushed room. “Five thousand men and women. Those liners are filled with the last refugees from Washington and Baltimore. They’re headed for Bermuda. For all the good it will do them.”

“Turn it off,” the President said quietly. “We’re just eating ourselves up watching it. But as soon as they know where that main tube is going, get me the information. And tell Dr. Reynolds that we need more than just cool toys. We need to stop them.”

The frequency spectrum analysis the government had made was just what Richard needed to find the key to the encryption. He generated an algorithm that would set his spectrum analyzer to follow the hopping frequency of the bots’ transmissions at maximum frequency resolution. After days of listening to the bots at those hopping frequencies he finally picked up two signals that must have been close enough for his system to pull out of the noise floor.

As plain as day he watched the frequency modulation of each of the individual frequency spikes jitter up and down the band around the main center spike. It was that jittering signal, that frequency modulated signal embedded in the hopping frequencies that was the handshaking key.

Richard watched as the frequency modulated signal looped and repeated a few times and then a stream of different modulations were sent. He figured that this was the exchange of encryption data between the communicating bots. He ran this data through his credit card hacking code and there was the crypt key. Richard programmed in the algorithm to implement the key and decrypt the signals real time. He then watched a string of ones and zeroes fill the computer screen.

He had broken the bots’ communication scheme. Now he just needed to figure out what the hell all that binary code meant. What were the alien things saying to each other? He decided to upload his data to the government with hopes that they could do something with it. Besides, he wanted to play around with the flying bot that he and Helena had caught. There was bound to be a use for it. The damaged bot was still propelling itself in the forward direction and had yet to completely fail or stop its propulsion. Richard had made some preliminary scans of the bot and could tell its communications tube was working, so he kept the thing wrapped in aluminum foil and at the lowest point of the mineshaft at the bottom of the underground river when he wasn’t analyzing it.

Major Shane Gries and Sergeant Major Thomas Cady stood guard around the wheeled cart. The wounded but still functional bot they had captured in Greenland was being moved down one floor of the Huntsville redoubt from where it had been stored. The thing’s propulsion unit was shot but it was still broadcasting, so they had to store it at least three stories down below the surface. Measurements of the bot emissions showed that three stories of concrete was plenty to shield the thing from its friends.

Other than bot topography, initial analyses had only led to minimal breakthroughs in the alien mechanisms. But since Dr. Richard Horton had been in continuous contact with Dr. Alice Pike the momentum had changed for the better.

Alice had been right all along. The program had needed Dr. Horton’s unique perspective on things. He had taken the frequency sequence discovered by Roger’s ELINT team and then used it to crack the encryption key for the alien bot’s handshaking protocols. He had e-mailed that data to her with a prospect strawman design for a bot communication device. But he had yet to figure out what to communicate to the bots that would be useful. Alice was working on that herself, but wasn’t quite there yet. She was thinking and hopefully an idea would come.

Alice pushed the cart forward while Gries and Cady walked carefully along each side of the cart with both eyes on the alien boomerang-shaped menace and both eyes scanning the hallway for unforeseen events.

“Surprise is in the mind of the combat commander,” Gries muttered to himself, thumbing the safety of his HE paintball machine gun.

“Sir,” Cady nodded keeping one hand on his HE gun and one on his handmade war club.

“I don’t know why you two are so edgy. We’re three stories underground. What could happen?” Alice shrugged, stopped the cart in front of the elevator door and pressed the down button.

“Anything,” Cady grunted.

“What?” Alice asked.

“The sergeant major means that anything could happen at any time. If you fixate on specific likelihoods, you’re going to be surprised by the unlikelihood that actually happens. So be ready for anything. If you expect anything, Dr. Pike, then you are prepared for it. And if nothing happens, well, I’m prepared for that too. In fact would prefer it that way,” Shane said.

“Elevator is clear, sir. But nothing is boring, sir,” Top said.

Gries nodded at Alice to push the cart in and then he followed in behind her. Cady was standing with his back to the far wall of the elevator scanning for trouble.

The doors to the elevator closed and elevator music began playing. The song was familiar to Alice and she started humming along with the tune. She seemed to recall it being an old sixties or seventies song about a transvestite. Gries seemed to relax and lean his left shoulder against the elevator wall, but he still kept a watchful eye. The sergeant major was lightly nodding his head up and down with the tune but other than the slight nodding he was solid as a rock. Alice relaxed a little more as the elevator came to a stop.

The doors opened and immediately the major was standing alert and Top worked his way in front of the cart, the elevator music no longer even a memory to him. Then the idea hit Alice like a dam bursting and flooding a valley below it. Her eyes widened and she was caught up in the idea that flooded her mind.

“Elevator music!”

“So what is it?” Alan Davis held the tiny circular shaped circuit board in his hand. The tiny printed circuit board was about the size of five pennies stacked on top of each other with several small chips and components soldered to it. There was a membrane switch on one side and what appeared to be a small watch battery on the other.

Alice smiled. “I call it an IBot.”

“An IBot?” Roger took the device from Alan and looked closer at it.

“You mean like an IPod?” Traci asked, nudging up closer to Roger to get a better look at the thing and to be closer to Roger.

“Bingo, Hooters Girl.” Alice continued to be impressed by the former Hooters waitress. “Using the codekey and the bot handshaking protocol that Dr. Horton discovered and the frequency modulation your guys found, Roger, I constructed a little music box for the bots. Any bot that gets within ten or twenty meters of this thing, the range is depending on terrain of course, will try to handshake with it. The IBot will respond with the proper codekey for the handshaking protocol and send the ‘prepare to receive’ code that I isolated from the decrypted data Dr. Horton sent us.

“Ah, and then you play it a song?” Roger scratched his head.

“Yes. And since the little memory chip on board the IBot is only large enough to store about one song, I programmed it to continually loop.”

“Ha! So the damned things get a song stuck in their head?” Alan laughed. “That is freakin’ brilliant.”

“But what does that do for us?” Roger asked, pretty sure he understood but he wanted to be positive.

“Well, the data we have on the bots tells us that while they’re handshaking and downloading they stop other activities.” Alice explained. “It’s like getting in the elevator and hearing the elevator music. You are a captive audience so you stop what you are doing and listen to it.”

“Have you tried it on our bot yet?” Roger asked.

“Oh yes. Watch this.” Alice tapped a few keys on her laptop and pressed a button on the overhead projector. The projector displayed what her laptop monitor displayed on a blank wall of the lab. “See, this is the output from the spectrum analyzer box connected to my USB port. Here around 1.4 gigahertz you see the com signal from the bot hopping around. Now watch this.” Alice took the IBot from Roger and pressed the membrane on-switch of the IBot and a second signal appeared on the screen. Then the bot’s signal began to shift and change and the handshaking protocol appeared.

Alice tapped another window open that displayed the decrypted datalink between the bot and the IBot. Strings of ones and zeroes scrolled down the window.

“It’s working!” Alan said. “Look, this string here. That is the song right? And the bot is just humming along with it. Check out the mimicking signal.”

“Yeah, I haven’t figured that part out yet, but who cares. Maybe it really is getting stuck in the thing’s head. Who knows?” Alice shrugged and smiled. “The main thing is—”

“It works!” Roger rubbed his hands together.

“What song are you playing them, Alice?” Traci asked.

“ ‘Lola.’ You know, ‘We drank champagne and danced all night…’ That one.”

Alan laughed. “Goddamned hippie stuff. Why couldn’t y’all used some Skynyrd or some Guns’n’Roses or something?”

“Well, you could program it however you want—” Alice started.

“No! Leave it just the way it is and get the blueprints to every redoubt left. Alan, figure out a way to harden it. I want as many of these things as the human race can manufacture. Put everybody making them.” Roger went into deputy secretary of defense mode. “I have to call the President. Traci, go find Ronny and Danny and have them meet me in the red-phone conference room.”

“Sure.” She nodded and left.

“Alan, get Top and Gries down here and get them thinking of a plan.”

“Let’s get on this!”

“So why not broadcast it worldwide and shut them all down at once?” the President asked.

“The problem, Mr. President, is that this type of communication signal is not like standard radio. It’s more like a broadband wireless connection. You see, you can pump out a lot of data over the link, but due to the physics of how they work even higher power transceivers are limited to a few hundred meters or so.” Of course it was more complicated even than the most sophisticated human broadband technologies, but the principle and the physics were the same. This wasn’t the final answer to ridding humanity of the alien Von Neumann probes but it was a start and Roger wanted to get this information out to the President as soon as he could. Which was why they were using an Internet video call.

“So, could we set up safe zones the way the airports and cybercafés used to have wifi zones?” the NSA asked.

“Absolutely. And I’m even thinking we could mount them on vehicles and they might work,” Ronny Guerrero added. “We’re effectively spoofing the bots’ IFF capabilities.”

“That’s right, Ronny. I’ve got my team modifying some broadband wireless routers to transmit the signal. It should work. We have to hope the bots don’t get wise to our plan.”

Roger had finally done something that might help. Oh, he knew he didn’t do it himself. But his project had. He had put the right team together, found the right experts when they needed them, and acquired the right resources. It had worked at least enough to offer some hope. The first hope he had felt in the months since he saw the intel on what was left of Europe and how people were living — no, surviving — there.

“We should use this IBot thing and start a plan of action and go after these things,” General Mitchell suggested.

“Well, we can’t mass produce them fast enough for an all-out invasion. But we believe we can produce enough to set up a perimeter over four or five redoubt areas within the next month,” Roger said.

“A month! Those things will have eaten more than a hundred cities by then!” the secretary of defense shouted. “We found out where the major tube was headed; it dropped square on Oakland. Now they’re spreading on the west coast as well!”

“Actually, a hundred and twenty-five cities at the current rate of growth,” Roger replied. “But I’m sorry, sir, that is best we can do for now. We can choose the redoubts and start evacuating everybody to them now.”

“Then how long will it take to manufacture enough of these, uh, IBots did you call them? How long will it take to make enough of them to go after the invaders?”

“Current rate of growth versus our manufacturing capabilities suggest perhaps a few years, sir,” Roger admitted with a sigh. “We’re behind the eight ball. But it will help with local defense. Just getting the darn things to slow down is a miracle.”

“Don’t forget, Mr. President, that this is a defense mechanism and we just now learned how the bots communicate,” Ronnie added. “We might develop new technologies and strategies sooner. But right now, this is the best chance we’ve got to slow them down.”

“I guess this is something. So, Kevin, you and Jim and Vicki get the rest of the Joint Chiefs together and determine which are the most strategic redoubts and let’s get this move started now.” For so long he had been sitting idle with little hope and no plan of action. At least now they had something. It wasn’t much, but not-zero was entirely different from zero.

“Richard.” Jeff handed him the last of the strapping material. “I can’t tell you how grateful Sara Jo and I are to you and Helena. We… uh… we would…”

“You’d be dead, Jeff,” Richard said emotionlessly. “You’d be dead, your wife would be dead and your kids would be dead. Hand me the RoboGrips… uh, no the big ones.” Jeff handed him the grips, trying not to shake his head over Richard’s entire lack of tact. Richard tightened down the last of the lag bolts through the bot’s midsection to the waterwheel and then he tightened the strapping material down. “There. That should just about do it.” He crawled back down the ladder to the platform below the waterwheel. The cool mist of the waterfall soaked his skin refreshingly.

“Well, we’re running out of baby formula for Precious. I know there is some canned milk here but I don’t know if that’s good enough for a baby.” Jeff backed down the steps off the platform looking at Richard, who was paying him little attention.

“Okay let’s see if this works,” Richard said, ignoring the problem of Jeff’s baby. He tapped a few keys on his laptop and stopped the IBot transmission to the bot. The damaged bot stopped handshaking with the IBot and resumed its functions. Its damaged propulsion drive kicked on.

The waterwheel that Richard and Jeff had strapped the bot to began to whirl forward as the bot propelled itself. Richard watched the torque encoders and rotation speed on his laptop to make sure the bot’s propulsion was not too much for the waterwheel. The wheel kicked up to several hundred revolutions per minute and then its speed topped out against the gear and bearing friction. The generator was now producing power at about an order of magnitude higher level than it did with just the underground river turning the wheel. Richard was pleased.

“That was clever, Richard,” Jeff said watching the man in awe.

“Yes, I know. I am very clever. I am not friendly, I am not a people-person. But I am very clever.”

“So what do you think about Precious?” Jeff asked.

“Precious? Oh, the infant. Yes, yes. I calculated weeks ago that you would be out of formula about a week ago. I’m surprised it lasted this long,” Richard said nonchalantly.

“Uh, we’ve been mixing it weaker than normal.” Jeff said embarrassed and nervous.

“Jesus Christ, you idiot,” Richard snapped. “This is the most important part of an infant’s development and you could be doing major harm by not feeding it properly! It would have made more sense to use it all up at full strength! You’re making the sort of mistake I’d expect out of some third world moron!”

Richard looked at his laptop one last time and checked the parameters of the generator and the waterwheel. He looked up at the wheel that was now just a blur. The water from the fall was spraying forward off the top of it each time the bot or the counterweight on the other side of the wheel splashed through it.

“Good.”

“What?” Jeff could never tell if Richard was talking to himself or addressing him.

“Come on.” He led Jeff back up the mine shaft to the edge of the corridor where most of the long duration dry goods and foodstuffs were stored. “Here, take these. And grow up.”

He handed Jeff a large storage box with a printout taped to the top of it. The printout was a list of the nutritional information from the back of one of the destroyed baby formula canisters with an arrow from each to an ingredient in the box. At the bottom of the page was the recipe and cooking instructions for the homemade baby formula.

Jeff looked in the box, shaking his head at the ingredients. There was a twenty pound bag of long grain dried rice, a quart bottle of sunflower cooking oil, about a hundred single-serving containers of pancake syrup from several different restaurants and hotels, two large Ziploc bags full of sun-dried persimmons, two Ziploc bags of shelled pecans, a restaurant salt shaker full of salt, and a ceramic bowl and stick thing that Jeff assumed must be the mortar and pestle described in the cooking instructions.

“This will work?” Jeff looked from the box back to Richard several times.

“Of course it will. It’s just simple cooking and no chemistry. Even you should be able to understand it. I started to add a yeast culture but you’d screw it up and poison that poor baby.” Richard looked annoyed. “She’ll do fine with what you have there.”

“Amazing,” Jeff whispered to himself and hefted the box with both arms. “Thank you.”

“You should ask for things when you need them or learn to do things for yourself. Now leave me alone I have work to do.”

“Richard, you gonna be up all de goddamn night again?” Helena startled him as she put her hand on his shoulder and looked over it at the computer screen. Since he had gotten the generator going at bot power, the X ray and electron microscope machines were up and running and Richard hadn’t slept much in at least a week. Helena was glad though about the better power situation because it also meant they could turn the electric heaters up. The mine stayed a constant sixty-five degrees, which she thought was way too cold for the babies. But having grown up in St. Petersburg it was short-sleeve weather for her, so she was typically wearing nothing but shorts and a tank top around the mine.

“Probably. I think I’m on to something here,” he said, continuing to stare at the X-ray image on the monitor. He had been saying that for the last five days.

“What is dat?”

“I think it’s the replication code of the alien bot.” He stroked his beard and yawned.

“Here, drink dis.” Helena handed him a cup of hot coffee.

“Thanks, dear.” Richard paused and sipped the coffee.

“You did a good ting with de baby’s milk, you know,” she said, sitting down beside him. “Little Precious, she took right to it.”

“Uh,” Richard just grunted.

“You tink you gonna save de world with dis? What are you gonna do with dis replication code thing?” She watched him for a moment silently.

“I dunno,” he said. “But it looks like these things can build almost anything. They can manipulate this invisible force field of theirs down to a molecular level and build, well, anything from the molecule up.”

“What, you mean if dey had a bunch of wood dey could build a goddamn house or something?” Helena asked. “Dat’d be nice.”

“Well, yes I guess so. They would need the blueprints though. The only blueprint the one we caught has is for building a copy of itself.” Richard took another sip of the coffee.

“Well, why don you make de goddamn ting make copies of itself and tell it to go eat all its fuckin’ buddies?” Helena said, angry at the bots.

“Well, the government thought of that, but they don’t know how to reprogram the… Hey that’s it!” Richard finished his coffee. “I think we could do that! Helena you are a genius.”

“Da. And pretty goddamn goodlookin’ too.” She kissed him on the cheek, wrinkling her nose as his beard tickled it, and stood up. “You come to de goddamn bed every now and a fuckin’ den an’ I’ll show you. But take a shower first. You stink.”

Richard took the subtle hint, took a shower and then joined her in bed. But he didn’t sleep. Helena made love to him passionately and like a woman who doesn’t see the man she loves as often as she would like. They lay silently in their bed for a few moments after and Helena drifted happily off to sleep. Once Richard was certain she was sleeping soundly, he eased himself out of bed, pulled up his shorts, and slipped out of their bedchamber, through the main shaft living room, and back to his laboratory. He tapped the computer on and booted up the work he had been looking at before.

“Now let me see. How would you wipe the mind of the bot and change its programming… hmmm? You will be mine, little robots, for I am very clever and you are not.”

“We just got word from Atlanta,” General Riggs said as Roger walked into the command center. “Last word, that is. Tech’s redoubt put in a last call and then went off the air. The laser station on Stone Mountain was still in operation, but they expected to get overwhelmed shortly. And lidar reports that the swarm is already twinning. One group seems to be headed our way.”

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.

“What the hell is that?” Roger asked, dazzled, confused and awed. They had created this… this… wonderful, glorious nightmare.

“Excited gas,” Tom said after a moment. “It’s a good thing there aren’t people up there or they’d be choking to death. The laser shoots a probe. Probe breaks up. Falls towards projector. Laser cuts it again. And again. Before long you’ve mostly got gaseous metal. That blocks the laser. We should have thought of that. Not sure what we could have done.”

“Wind generators,” Shane said instantly. “Big damned fans. Blow it away. Maybe something like ceramic jet engines.”

“See, this is why I wanted to stay,” Roger said. “To watch. Not just for kicks, mind you. But… Damn, this is…”

“Apocalyptic?” Tom finished for him. “Certainly awesome. But… ah…”

Suddenly, the laser stopped tracking. And in seconds, the video went dead.

“And that’s that,” Tom said, sounding almost satisfied to have the laser finally die. “At some point, the oxygen level was going to drop too low for the generators—”

“Told you we should have used nukes,” Alan pointed out. “No problem there.”

“And so it goes,” Shane added. “Monte Sano Mountain falls at last.”

“Yeah, but those aren’t the only projectors we have,” Roger said, smiling faintly. “Here comes… Weeden.”

Monte Sano Mountain had two projectors. Atop Weeden Mountain, which sat in the middle of the Arsenal, there were nine.

There were actually three peaks to the ridge that ran down the center of the arsenal: Weeden Mountain, Madkin Mountain and Ward Mountain. None of them technically met the definition of a mountain, since none of them rose to more than six hundred feet over the surrounding terrain and barely 1200 feet above sea level. On the north was Ward, the lowest at barely 900 feet, then Weeden then Madkin, both at 1200 feet. Ward had one battery of one thousand “mine” rockets and a laser projector. Ditto Madkin. The rockets on Ward Mountain faced north, the rockets on Madkin faced south. On Weeden, centermost, there were two batteries, east and west, and seven projectors. These three peaks, overlooking NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, the Arsenal and Huntsville itself, held the hopes and dreams of the survival of the human race.

Most of the critical equipment for Asymmetric Soldier had been moved into newly dug tunnels in Weeden Mountain. But the major facilities, the buildings and shops scattered across the Arsenal, were nearly impossible to replace. Holding the probes at the line of the Arsenal border was, therefore, a high priority.

The main defense command center was located in Weeden as well, in a heavily reinforced bunker buried in the heart of the mountain. Since the day when General Riggs had pointed out that “we’re not part of FORCECOM,” things had changed. Besides commanding the Arsenal he now had under his direct control a brigade of light infantry from the 82nd Airborne Division. And, of course, Shane Gries’s “special security detail.” The brigade was scattered around the mountain, holding critical positions in the hopes that they could stop the probes if they broke through the main defense line. But the main doors to the command center were held by the short platoon under Major Gries.

Which was why Jones and Mahoney were watching the fun from a bunker just to the north of the main entrance.

“Security Team,” Gries said over the speaker behind them. “Listen up. Probes have hit the Monte Sano Mountain defenses. Expect to have them in sight over the mountain in about five minutes. Out.”

“It’s gonna be dark soon,” Jones growsed. “How the hell are we suppose to shoot these things in the dark?”

“All life is the darkness of the cave through which we, as searchers, must stumble using only the reflected reality of truth as, as such, a figure shown upon the wall,” Mahoney intoned.

“You’ve been reading again, haven’t you?” Jones said, sighing. “What is it this time?”

“Plato,” Mahoney admitted. “But he’s got a point. What is Truth? Is it, in fact, truth that we will see the enemy in a bare five minutes? Are they even reality?”

“The reality is that you’re going to have a carbon ceramic knife cut your throat if you don’t quit reading philosophy,” Jones snapped. “The reality is that if these things take out the mountain we’re gonna be walking to the next redoubt. So pay attention to your sector.”

“Don’t I always?” Mahoney said. “And, in fact, it turns out that the captain’s estimate was illusion.”

“Huh?” Jones said, leaning towards the firing slit to get a glimpse in the direction Mahoney faced. Mahoney’s position faced northeast whereas his faced due east. And there, to the northeast, was a glittering wall of metal shining above the distant mountain in the light of the dying sun, a red cloud of an approaching storm as pregnant with menace as any hurricane wall. “Damn.”

“Couldn’t have put it better myself,” Mahoney said, cocking his M-240R. The R version of the machine gun was a special modification of the local machine shops. A water-filled shroud surrounded the barrel for the purpose of cooling. The fire rate of most modern machine guns was limited by the fact that when fired at high rates the barrel and breech would overheat. This caused various unpleasant effects from jamming to “cookoff” of the ammunition as it touched the super-hot breech to barrel warping, which could cause an explosion. Modern machine guns were, by and large, designed to be mobile and thus were “air-cooled.” But since the defense of the mountain had become a matter of bunkers and holding position, the machine guns had been retrofitted with the water-cooling shrouds. They could, effectively, be fired indefinitely without the need to use carefully controlled bursts and constant barrel replacements.

Thus the machine gun itself was set up on a box of ammunition the size of a large motorcycle. Jones figured if he ended up firing the whole box he should be able to take the rest of the day off. He watched the swarming horde for a moment as it crossed the mountain and dropped onto the city below. At the very top there was a plume of strange smoke, as if the mountain had suddenly erupted. That, too, was caught in the red light of the sun, making it appear to be lava spewing into the air.

“I think it’s time that the Greyhound started playing our song,” Mahoney muttered.

“Nah, it’s not that bad,” Jones replied. “Yet.”

“If that’s not a tempest at the gates I don’t know what is.”

“I got it,” Jones added after a moment. “I got it.”

“Got what, the clap?” Mahoney asked. He might be introspective when the enemy was out of sight, but when the probes were in view he was all business.

“What you were saying before,” Jones replied, excitedly. “We’re like, in a cave, right? Sort of. A bunker anyway. And the light’s shining on the probes, reflecting off of them. That was what you were talking about, right?”

Mahoney sighed. “I am surrounded by Philistines.”

“Now that I just don’t get,” Jones said, frowning. “I mean, we’re not even surrounded, yet, and those are like… alien probes. Is whatever you just said something like that?”

“Interesting,” Shane mused, tapping his mouse to bring up a readout.

“What?” Cady asked, leaning over from his own position.

Shane was much more used to leading from the front than from deep in the heart of a mountain. But any modern infantry officer was more than well versed on using computer networks for what the military termed “C3I,” communications, control, command and intelligence.

Technically Shane should have been using the C3I system in the command post to maintain control over the troops in his area. That area was defined as the distance of the weapons that he had at his command. Since all long-range weapons were at General Riggs’s command, that area wasn’t much. But he had Sergeant Major Cady to handle that and when all was said and done he had less than a platoon to manage. It didn’t take up a lot of his time. So he’d “expanded” the area, both informationally and terrain-wise, that he was viewing. In other words, he wasn’t just looking at the remaining sensors, visual and lidar, that were telling the general what the probes were doing, he was monitoring the whole spectrum.

“General,” the electronic warfare officer said, “probe transmissions have just picked up by fifteen percent. Pretty much across the board.”

“That,” Shane said, quietly, in response to Cady. “They’re generating like mad.”

“What does that mean?” the general asked, spinning in his chair to look over at the EWO.

The command center had been designed by a local firm. It turned out to be the firm that had also designed every NASA control center since the Mercury capsules. So there was a very similar feel. The general’s position was two thirds of the way towards the back at a terminal with various other controlling officers and enlisted men scattered around. Shane, as one of the lowest priority positions, was towards the back and rear. On the other hand, it gave him a great view of the forward information screens and everyone else’s positions.

“Don’t know, sir,” the EWO admitted. “We don’t have a hard fix on how they talk, so we can’t exactly translate it.”

“Updating,” Shane said to Cady. He’d meant for it to be a quiet and personal conversation with his NCO. But it hit one of those dead silences that sometimes fall over a group and it rebounded around the room.

“Say again?” the general said, looking around. “Who said that?”

“Me, sir,” Shane replied, cursing himself. He wasn’t supposed to be looking at signal data at all. The glare that he got from Colonel Summers, the commander of the 82nd brigade, said it all. But he’d already stepped on his hooter; might as well jam it into the ground. “The signals picked up by about five percent when they got close to the lasers. They stayed that way until just a moment ago, then they really picked up. They got some information processed, probably what to do about lasers if they hit them again, and passed it around. Signal level is now back to nearly normal.”

“Good possibility,” the general said, spinning around to look over at the major. “Extrapolate.”

Damn, damn, damn. Surprise is in the mind of the commander, even the surprise of trying to answer a question. What was the update?

“Somewhere they have a higher level battle processor, sir,” Shane replied, after keying the controls so that he was talking directly to the general. He noticed right away that the general had keyed it for general distribution so he might as well have just yelled. “It might be distributed in the probes or it might be one of those big cities over in Europe. That processor told them that they had to do something about the lasers. So far we’ve only seen them tear stuff apart. There’s no reason that they wouldn’t have a higher level ability than we’ve seen. In Greenland we saw them begin destroying carbon to escape traps. Perhaps they’ll use a longer range weapon we haven’t seen before.” He paused for a moment as his mind raced.

“They’ll want to keep most of their systems as extractors. To change will take time. I would look for a group that falls away from the main body to modify itself and then goes for the first laser that fires.”

“Good possibility,” Riggs said, spinning back around. “Hammond,” he continued, looking over at the Information and Intelligence section, “keep an eye on that.”

“Roger,” the J-2 replied. “We won’t be able to code for it. We’ll have to use eyeballs.”

“Do it,” the general replied.

“Probes have entered Huntsville city limits,” the J-3 reporter said. “Approaching Phase Line Deadite.”

Shane smiled at that. When he’d seen the op-plan for the engagement, he laughed his butt off and wondered which staff weenie was an Army of Darkness fan and how they had gotten the codes past the general. A little digging turned up that it was General Riggs who was an Army of Darkness fan.

“Initiate Op-plan Ash when ten percent of the probes have crossed Phase Line Deadite,” Riggs said. “And may God be with the just.”

“Hmmm…” Richard mused, watching the alien probe slow down and then speed up as he tapped the keys of the laptop. “That seems… to have done it.”

“Dat’s nice,” Helena said. “But don’t you want it runnin’ full speed?”

“Absolutely,” Richard replied. “But if I can control one bot I can control many. Or, rather, the military can. Much as I hate giving my secrets to the military-industrial complex, this is one area where they are a utility. And this Dr. Reynolds who is a deputy secretary of defense seems to be an honorable man.”

“Dat’s da guy in Huntsville, right?” Helena said, raising an eyebrow.

“The same,” Richard replied, shutting down the laptop. “I finally determined that he was working with Dr. Alice Pike, which explains many things. She was a bright girl, Alice.”

“Well, if you wanna tell Huntsville somet’ing, you better hurry,” Helena said. “Dey’re under attack.”

“Good Lord,” Richard said, picking up the laptop and hurrying towards the laboratory. “You could have told me!”

“I jus’ did,” Helena pointed out.

“Ten percent and climbing past Phase Line Deadite,” the J-3 tac NCO said.

“Fire rockets,” General Riggs responded.

“Firing.”

Jones slapped his hand over his ears as one thousand J-type rockets launched with near simultaneity.

“Jeeze that was loud!” he yelled over the ringing in his ears. “They could have warned us!”

“Go baby go,” Mahoney said, ignoring his bunker mate.

“I wonder how they’ll…” Jones said and then paused. “Aw… shit.”

“Oh, yeah, and updating their defenses against the rockets,” Shane added to himself, grimacing.

The mass of probes was rapidly spreading across Huntsville and on the vids it was easy to see the buildings crumbling as they passed. The wide-angle vid had a great shot of the rockets flying towards their mass, currently passing over and spreading out along South Memorial Parkway, or “Phase Line Deadite.” It also had a great view of the odd… tubes that extended from the mass, spreading out around the incoming rockets. The tubes were about ten meters across, probes making up the wall of the tubes, and extended along the ballistic flight path of the rockets so that the rockets had to fly down the center. As he watched, the rockets also began to shred and then disappear, without so much as the slightest explosion.

“Major Gries,” the general said quietly over his headset. “Comments?”

“We can now anticipate some reaction against the lasers, sir,” Shane replied tightly. “They didn’t hit the mines on this attack, so those might have an immediate effect. And they haven’t run into IBot yet.”

“Concur,” General Riggs said. “On the eventuality that they will attempt to close with the lasers, I want you to pull your platoon and redeploy them around the East Weeden laser site. Make sure they carry breath-masks.”

“Yes, sir,” Shane said, starting to stand up.

“Turn over control to your sergeant major,” Riggs interjected quickly. “I want you here.”

“Yes, sir,” Shane said with a grimace.

“On it,” Cady added, keying his mike. “Platoon, unass your positions. Move to the armory. Draw nonmetallic weaponry and masks. You got two minutes. Haul!” He reached under the console and pulled out his war-stick. “Time to go swat some bugs.”

Fortunately there were elevators to the summit position where the lasers were mounted. Just as fortunately, the probes were taking their time stripping Huntsville of all its useable metal. But the troops were still panting by the time they got to the summit.

“Top, now that we’re here, what are we doing here?” Mahoney asked as the platoon spread out from the flush-mounted stairwell by the laser bunker. The same guys who had designed the whole mountain complex had designed the laser position and, in keeping with the NASA theme, Mahoney recognized the design from a trip to Kennedy Space Center. It was the same sort of massive structure as the ones used for observers of the Apollo launches. The two-story structure consisted mostly of very large concrete-filled sandbags. More and stronger seemed to be the idea. The tiny projector was mostly hidden on the very top, a glittering ball of crystal catching the last rays of the sun.

“The Old Man and the general think the probes are gonna go for the laser as soon as it opens up,” Cady answered. “Our job is to make sure they don’t get here.”

“Top,” Jones argued, “if they can take out the laser, we’re not going to be able to do much.”

“That’s to be seen,” Cady answered equanimably. “There’s a dead zone here under where the lasers can fire. That’s our priority. You let the big boys handle the rest. For now, spread out around the laser. Everybody gets a zone. If a probe comes into your zone, kill it. It’s that simple.”

“Simple,” Jones muttered as Cady and Staff Sergeant Gregory spread the short platoon around the perimeter.

“Very,” Mahoney said from his position. He and Jones had managed to snag the best view, which also meant they were probably going to be the first hit. “Very simple. But important point, keep your head down.” Mahoney was leaning up against the concrete bunker, apparently enjoying the view of Huntsville being chewed to bits. The laser bunker was mounted on the very summit of Mount Weeden. Off to their left was a lower bit with, of all things, a small swamp. It was an odd feature to see on the top of a mountain.

“Why?” Jones asked.

“Because, if your head gets too high…” the other specialist said and then thumbed over his shoulder. “Those lasers don’t have target discriminators. They’ll shoot you just as soon as one of the probes. And it’ll go through you easier.”

“Ouch,” Jones said, glancing nervously over his shoulder. “I don’t like being out here; we’re exposed as hell.”

“Tell me about it,” Mahoney replied as Sergeant Gregory came back around.

“Listen up,” Gregory said, waving them over to huddle around him. “Couple of safety points. Top was watching the video from Monte Sano Mountain. First point, watch where you move. The laser’s not going to miss you if you get in its path—”

“I already pointed that out to Jones,” Mahoney said.

“Right, good…” the staff sergeant replied. “Stay close into the bunker. The laser is set to skim the edge of this ridge. If you’re close into the bunker, you’re out of its line of fire. Second point, when the laser hits these things it chops them up. When they get close, we’re going to have pieces of probe slamming into the ground all around here. And into us. Keep your damned helmets and armor on. It might keep the damage down. When they get real close, the air starts getting filled with burned up metal. It’ll rip up your lungs. When they close with us, go to MOPP one, mask only. The mask will keep you alive. Clear?”

“Clear,” Jones said. “How’d we draw this shit detail, Sergeant?”

“Somebody’s got to do it,” Gregory replied with a grin. “You don’t expect them wind-dummies to get their berets all dirty, now do you?”

“Got it,” Shane said, keying the com for the intel section. “Sir, would you take a look at the group of probes located at 5413 by 3845? That’s right by the Oak Park athletic field. Looks like about… hell, maybe a thousand of them. I don’t have backtrack, but it looks as if they stopped there and are just… sitting.”

“Good eye, Major,” the J-2 colonel said. “Let me get a couple of people to eyeball them.”

“Over fifty percent across Phase Line Groovy,” J-3 reported.

“Prepare to lase—” General Riggs said and then stopped, holding his hand to his earbud. “Roger.” He looked up and then clicked a control, zooming the main viewscreen into the group that Shane had spotted. With the zoom cranked up, it was apparent that the probes had changed shape slightly. There was now a circular opening that looked very much like a cannon mouth on the front of the probes.

“Laser targeting, Weeden East only, designate that group of modified probes as high priority.”

“Roger,” Lasing called. “Slewing. We have the group targeted.”

“Initiate lase,” General Riggs said.

There were a few probes between the laser and the presumed “anti-laser” group. They didn’t really pose much of a problem except for creating small clouds of gaseous metal. But as soon as the lasers hit the first probe, the modified group began to move, dropping down to the deck and accelerating towards Weeden Mountain.

They also began jinking in and out of the shadow of the remaining buildings, flying down roads not much off the ground. There were enough buildings, and enough rubble from buildings, that the group was able to an extent to avoid the lasers. For that matter, it was hard to tell, but it appeared that some of the laser-killers might have taken brief hits and kept going. And they weren’t the only group headed for the mountain. It seemed as if the lasers were the signal for most of the probes to drop what they were doing and head for the Arsenal.

“That got their attention,” General Riggs said. “Where’d the killer group go?”

“Disappeared into the mass,” J-3 responded.

“We’re trying to pick them up again,” Lasing called.

“Negative,” General Riggs replied. “Open up full lasing across the area. Engage at will.”

“Roger.”

“There they are,” Shane called as the killer probes exited a corporate park and started crossing the “no-man’s land” that had been established around the perimeter of the Arsenal. Among other things, the “no-man’s land” was the first line of anti-probe mines. But those mines depended on the probes pulling the metal out of them to function. And the “killer bots” weren’t interested in metal, just lasers.

The inner edge of the no-man’s land was also where the lasing stopped. Once the probes crossed it, and more than half made it across since the lasers were targeting the whole sky, they were under the fire basket of the lasers. The only thing between them and the lasers were the few troops on the mountain and the platoon around the laser site.

“Vampire, vampire,” Shane called on the platoon net. “Approximately four hundred bots with unknown weapon approaching from the northeast, coming in low. Top, shift to heavy on the northeast.”

“Sir,” the EWO officer said over the channel to the general, “we can initiate IBot at any time.”

“Hold it,” Riggs said, nodding. “If we can stop them from getting the lasers and let more of them come into the basket I’d prefer it. I don’t want them outside the basket and passing on that we’re spoofing them.”

“Roger.”

“Start broadcasting.”

Weeden Mountain had long been known to the general Arsenal public as “Antenna Hill.” It had a vast array of antennas on it used for everything from cell phones to satellite uplinks. And the probes liked radio.

On command, every single antenna started broadcasting. And those few probes that were still eating Huntsville dropped what they were doing and headed for the redoubt.

Private First Class Jason Soldiers had lived with his name his whole life. But despite his name, he had enlisted in the 82nd Airborne at the ripe age of eighteen. One of the few books he had ever read, and enjoyed, was called Starship Troopers. In it he ran across a point that really resonated with him. The main character had just joined the military in that book and, much to his chagrin, had ended up as a simple infantryman. He had told this to the one NCO he had met, the recruiting NCO, and gotten a very odd, to him, reaction. The recruiting NCO, a former infantryman missing a couple of limbs, had told him that “the infantry’s the only really important arm. Everybody else supports us. Because we’re where the rubber meets the road.”

That was what he’d told the recruiter when he signed up. He wanted to be where the rubber meets the road.

At the moment, though, he really wished he’d gone in for radar technician or computer repair. He’d gotten the word that there was a group of bots headed for the lasers. And they had orders to take them out.

The only problem being that it seemed like every single one was headed for his bunker. There seemed to be a million of them and they were coming in very low, very fast, and very very hard.

There seemed to be only one thing to do, so he toggled off the safety on the M-240R, picked a point in space over the bots and pulled the trigger.

The remaining problem of the M-240R, after it was cooled, was ammunition. The best choice would have been the ramjet rounds demonstrated by Dr. Reynolds and Alan Davis. However, producing enough of them in any reasonable time had proved to be impossible. Instead, a modified sabot round was the best that could be created. Since the probes ate metal as it flew towards them, the new round consisted of a plastic outer “shoe,” or sabot, with an inner ceramic round. As the round left the machine gun, the plastic sabot fell away, leaving the ceramic round to do the damage, however the relatively low-density ceramic round tended to tumble beyond about four hundred yards and lost velocity rapidly.

The probes, on the other hand, had a momentum of their own. And the ceramic rounds, while lightweight, could still shatter the metal facing of the probes in tests.

Against the killer probes, however, things did not go as well as planned. Soldiers watched in disbelief as the rounds sparked and crashed into the probes, but seemed to have little or no effect. A few of the probes lost control and slammed into the mountainside in a shower of sparks. But the majority, even when they were struck by the ceramic rounds, continued on as if nothing had happened.

Soldiers stopped firing and spun around, pressing a button he had been told not to use under any circumstances. It was the button that put him through directly to the brigade commander in the bunker.

“This is Soldiers, Bunker One-Niner-Five. Sir, the killer probes are armored, repeat armored. Ceramic rounds have no effect, repeat no effect.”

“Move it!” Cady yelled, redeploying the platoon so that most of them were on the northeast side. “Shag ass!”

“Sergeant Major!”

Cady looked up in surprise as the voice of the major boomed out of the sky and then realized there must be a PA system on the laser bunker.

“Platoon! The killer bots are armored, repeat armored. Try to hit them on the underside and see if that works.”

“Oh, this just gets better and better,” Jones said, taking a knee and hefting his rifle. The platoon had been armed with the latest version of the sergeant major’s “super-gun.” Thanks to Alan, Lurch and a local paintball company, the gun was capable of firing more powerful rounds, faster.

“Time to cue the music, sir,” Cady muttered. As he did the speakers began to crackle with the sound of thunder and lightning.

“What are you doing, Major?” the general asked quietly.

“I hope you don’t mind, sir,” Shane said, gulping. “It’s something we would do in Iraq when we knew we were in the deep. Motivational material, sir. Just a song one of the troops liked and we picked it up as a unit thing.”

“ ‘Citadel’ by Crüxshadows,” the general said, smiling faintly. “You do think we’re in the deep.”

“I see a citadel alone,” Shane replied. “Clinging brave, defying fate. Not sure there’s a better description. Sir, permission to speak to Lasing?”

“Do it. Out here.”

“Lasing, this is Major Gries,” Shane said. “Can you make a bubble to the northeast of the bunker? We’ve got dead ground under your laser. I need to move my troops to cover it.”

“I can give you a bubble,” the lasing officer replied. “Five meters wide and, say, three and a half high call it? That do?”

“Fine, and I’d suggest tightening your fire into that area.”

“Teach your granma to suck eggs, Major,” the lasing officer said, with grim humor in his voice. “Already done. Those things are our main threat at the moment.”

“Any way to point out where it is?” Shane asked.

“They’ll know.”

“Crap, look at that,” Jones said as a small bush directly in front of them exploded.

“Laser,” Mahoney replied over the music. “That’s why you don’t want to go forward. You’ll be the burning bush. There,” he added, waving at what appeared to be thin air. But there was a faint glow as the laser ionized the atmosphere. “That’s what you’ve got to avoid.”

“Top, move forward,” the speaker boomed, cutting off the music. “There’s a hole in the lasing, due northeast of the bunker, five meters wide, two plus high. You should be able to spot it. Move forward to cover the dead ground! You need to stop them before they get to the top of the mountain!”

It was the first time that Jones had actually seen the sergeant major shocked. Everyone looked over at the NCO and could see him with his jaw wagging up and down, trying to find something to say. Jones wasn’t sure whether to be terrified or laugh out loud. He decided a hysterical chuckle was called for. Okay, cackle.

The, more than one, hysterical cackle seemed to center the big NCO.

“What the fuck are you doing still sitting here with your thumbs up your ass?” Cady roared. “You heard the man! Gregory, take right, I’ll take left. Tighten up and stay low. Forward!”

Cady swung left and duckwalked forward, keeping one eye on the occasional strikes on the ridgeline and the other over his shoulder, trying to use the two points to get some idea of the line the deadly, and invisible, beams were following. After a brief pause Staff Sergeant Gregory headed right, doing the same.

“Jones, Mahoney, Nelms,” Gregory said, expanding on the sergeant major’s orders. “You three front rank, between the S’maj and me. Crawl it. When you get to the edge, poke your head over. Shag ass.”

Mahoney and Nelms both looked at Jones, who shrugged and grimaced.

“Bugger this for a game of soldiers,” he hissed but then threw himself prone and started fast-crawling forward on elbows and knees with the other two following and then catching up to flank him.

The rest of the platoon followed, more or less in groups of three.

“Second and third ranks,” Cady said, still sidling towards the edge and trying to stay out of the beams, “get ready to fire upwards. When those things come over the edge, just fucking hose it until you’re out of ammo!”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Jones said as he reached the edge of the summit. It had been a fairly abrupt drop to a short bluff. Now it was as perfectly cut as if it had been carved away… well, it had been carved away by a laser. The fact that the laser wasn’t, at the moment, shaving it seemed a minor point. “This is fucking nuts!”

“We gonna do this?” Nelms asked nervously. The normally sanguine sniper seemed unusually perturbed.

“No,” Jones said, then shrugged. “One… two…”

“What the fuck?”

Staff Sergeant Richard Simone was a data security specialist code five, about the highest level available. He’d previously been assigned to the Pentagon after several minor but politically embarassing hacking attacks on secure systems. Dick Simone had been coding at the age of eight and “script kiddying” by the time he was ten. But after a while he realized that it was much more fun trying to stop hacking than actually doing it. He still maintained his connections with the cracker community, if for no other reason than to keep up on the latest slang. A few of the cooler elements even knew that he’d gone “legit;” there was a certain cachet among the really good crackers out there when they found an “enemy” that was their class.

Dick could have made much more money in the civilian world, especially since the military mostly left data security to relatively low-paid noncoms. But he had the “mentat civitas,” that sense of honor and duty that was the core of being a soldier. Eventually he’d stop reenlisting and go get a job where he could make some real money.

Well, he had had that as an option until the bots got here. Now, being in Weeden Mountain was about as safe, and well paid, as it got.

But despite the total chaos in the world the Internet was still, more or less, functioning and there was still the occasional jackass that tried to crack the system. And he’d just spotted one.

The guy was using a fairly simple buffer overflow attack but with a nice little fillip of an encryption packet designed to overcome Blowfish. The point seemed to be to create a zero day exploit, which he didn’t have a chance of managing. So far, nobody had cracked Blowfish. A “zero day exploit” was trying to crack it on the fly. Wasn’t going to happen. The cracker had hit the first firewall and thought he’d made it past. But Dick had set that one up as a trap; when a cracker using any of a thousand or so methods cracked the firewall it set off an alarm. Then Dick could watch them try to crack the second wall. And the second wall, if it detected the cracking, actually sent the cracker into a bypass loop that looked like a computer system but was really a very elaborate ruse, a honey trap. And all the while, Dick could be backtracking the crack and cracking the other guy’s computer.

Dick called up a spider to follow the cracking back and got his first shock of the incident when a message popped up.

“Ah, thank you for detecting me. I need, very very urgently, to contact Dr. Reynolds. Tell him this is Megiddo and I’ve got the codes he needs. This is urgent since I understand that you are under attack.”

RocketRog: Megiddo?

Megiddo: The same. I have completed a program that I believe will permit you to control the bots. It uses the same frequency spectrum as the IBot program that Dr. Pike developed. However, this one gives you the ability to stop them, have them land and reset their passwords so that you can lock out higher controls. I’m working on further refinements, however this should do for the time.

Rocket Rog: Boss. When can I get it?

Megiddo: The kind sergeant that contacted you gave me a secure point to which I might upload the program. It is currently uploading from a mirror site I placed a trojan on some time ago. And tell the nice sergeant that the tracer bot he just sent goes to one of the few remaining servers in Australia. Good luck.

‹Meggido has signed off›

“…three! AAAHHH!”

There wasn’t much to do but scream and pull the trigger. As soon as Jones put his head over the edge of the bluff all he saw was a wall of metal. The bots were actually flying through the tops of the trees, which had been sheared off by the laser, just under the beam. And the lead wave was no more than a pickup-truck’s length from the edge of the bluff, headed, as far as he could tell, right for his face.

The exploding rounds were not designed to penetrate armor, and Jones could see even in the split second that he had, that these bots were much heavier than the ones that they’d brought back from Greenland. They were thicker top to bottom and the metal had an odd sheen to it. For some reason a battlefield in Iraq came to mind but he couldn’t figure out why. The thing that went through his head in a flicker was a smell of all things. A hot, metallic stink that he couldn’t quite place in the chaos that was this moment’s existence.

Despite the fact that they were not armor penetrators, the explosive rounds had an effect. Enough small explosives in a small area can sometimes make up for larger explosives, even if in very odd ways. The main thing that they did was throw the bots off course. The probes were packed in wingtip-to-wingtip and running in a narrow gap between the ground and the lasers overhead.

As the rounds, hosing out of the modified paintball guns at over six hundred rounds per minute, began to slam into the packed-together probes it created chaos. For the probes. Probes hit on a wingtip tumbled sideways, slamming into the probe next to them or jinked up or down or knocked even into a spin. Up meant a brief shower of crackling electric metal as the probe, armored as it was, hit a multimegawatt laser at very short range. Down meant slamming into a tree, the ground or the onrushing bluff. Probes crashed into each other in a shower of metal, turning into nearly ton-weight balls of shattered metal and electrical discharge.

But momentum wins every time, and the probes had been headed for the cliff. Which meant that all that shattered metal was headed for the five people lining the cliff-top.

Jones couldn’t look sideways as he saw a chunk of probe the size of a large bicycle pass through the space to his right but he didn’t really have to; there was a sudden spray of arterial blood that wasn’t really survivable. Whatever had happened to Nelms, the sniper wasn’t going to be going home to Des Moines, Iowa.

Top was next to him, hosing just as he was and screaming just as loud. There was just something about the situation, a seemingly unstoppable wall of metal winging towards them at four hundred miles per hour with only a wall of very small exploding rounds keeping the metal from hitting them, that called for one primal scream after another. Top’s was just a lot deeper than everyone else’s.

One of the vids on the laser bunker had a good shot of the firefight going on at the edge of the cliff and Shane nodded to himself as he watched. There was only one thing wrong with the picture from his perspective. Too many of the probes were getting too high before being hit by the laser. Two had made it over the edge of the bluff but the backup team had managed to hit them before they did whatever they intended to do to the laser bunker. So he keyed his mike.

“Platoon, get lower. The laser is coming down.”

Jones didn’t really hear the CO. He could only focus on the onrushing wall of metal. But he did notice when the probes started exploding much closer overhead.

This led to louder screaming. But he kept his finger firmly planted on the trigger.

Two thousand rounds. Six hundred rounds per minute. Three and a half minutes. How long as this been going on? It seems like about a year… I think I’m already in hell.

“Colonel,” Shane said over the link to the 82nd Brigade commander. “I very much need someone to get some ammo up to my platoon, sir.”

“Already on it, Major.”

Suddenly the gun stopped spitting little plastic death and Jones pulled the trigger in shock. His extensive experience told him there should be more rounds in the massive box he was carrying.

He quickly looked right and realized that Letorres had replaced Nelms. On the other side of Letorres a trooper he didn’t recognize was holding one of the big ammo boxes and preparing to replace the one on Mahoney’s back. A quick check back and he realized that another troop, from the 82nd by his shoulder patch, and Private Gibson were both working to replace his. The 82nd trooper grinned at him and tapped him on the shoulder.

“You’re up,” the trooper said, standing up.

Jones jerked his head around in time to keep the splash of superheated fluids out of his face, but he heard the thump and felt something warm and very wet land on his legs as part of the trooper’s helmet, and some skull, landed next to him.

The scream he let out segued nicely into opening fire.

“Damn,” Shane muttered.

The probes attacking the laser site seemed to realize they were losing. Or, at least, were very close to stalemated. So they’d changed tactics. He’d always suspected that at the top of the slope they would sacrifice the lead ranks to cover for the followers. As he watched, they started doing just that, but created two cover groups, one against the fire at the top of the hill and one against the lasers. About fifty meters downslope, the probes began rotating their bodies so that their upper portion was pointed towards the fire. They also began to slow, perhaps as a function of air resistance but more likely as deliberation. The combination of the laser and the troopers on the ridgeline hammered this wall of metal, but the upper portion, at least, of the probes was armored. And in this more deliberate formation they were no longer slamming into each other catastrophically. Probes were dying, but not faster than the overall group was making it up the mountain.

“Major,” one of the intelligence NCO’s said over the link. “You might want to know that we now have four groups spotted that have stopped assimilation of Huntsville and appear to be reconfiguring.”

And they had plenty of probes to throw away.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUUUUCK!” Jones shouted as the wall of flipped up probes rode over his position. At that point they were taking the direct fire of the laser, which had been narrowed down to only fire on the vector the probes were attacking from.

The laser was destroying rank after rank of the probes, but the result was air full of melted metal showering down on the few survivors of the platoon.

The sound was indescribable, a screaming maelstrom of shrieking metal unlike anything Jones had ever heard. He was being continuously pounded with chunks of metal falling on his arms, his head, his legs. He tucked into a ball, trying to take as much of the impacts on his armor and helmet as possible, his hands tucked into his stomach and legs drawn up under him. But some of the “chunks” were spitting enough electricity to supply a large home and much of it was arching into the bodies of the survivors. He was continuously jolted with lighting bolts. If he survived this he swore he would never come near anything electrical again. Other chunks were nearly full sized probes and when one of those slammed into him he felt at least one bone in his arm crack, which elicited another scream.

Life had become trying to survive the clash of two behemoths of destruction. There was nothing to do but try to live through it.

Corporal Zirnheld can kiss my ass. I just want a nice quiet house someplace with a garden and pool…

The scenario on Monte Sano Mountain was being repeated. But this time his troops were caught in the maelstrom and Shane could see them being covered in chunks of metal. They hadn’t had time to get their masks on so even if they survived, they were liable to die from the gaseous metal they were breathing.

The worst part was, the probes were now over the rim and they were starting to flip upwards. Most of them were being killed but he watched as one group finally managed to flip so that those cannon-like projectors faced the bunker.

And then the screen went blank.

With a final series of rending crashes, all the sound stopped.

Jones just lay still for a moment wishing that whoever was screaming in pain right by his ear would just stop for the love of God. Then he realized that it was him. The sound was being reflected back by the piles of melted bots covering him.

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.”

“Huh?” Roger said. The Asymetric Soldier group used a network separate from the main base network. They used the same physical systems for accessing SIPARNET and the Internet, but their internal working server was of a higher classification than the standard base system, so it was internally sealed off from most of the base systems.

“We’re getting more hits,” Traci said. “Something’s in the internal base system and trying to get through to ours. Damn,” she added, clicking a pop-up. “Add that it nearly made it. I just cut us off from the main base system.”

“We can’t upload this to the base computers, now,” Tom pointed out. “Even if it worked.”

“The hell we can’t,” Roger said. “The computer controlling the IBot program is up in the antenna farm. All we have to do is run this program up and load it to it.”

“Roger, that’s the top of the damned mountain,” Traci pointed out, hitting another key. “I didn’t even know we had that connection. What the hell is this thing?”

“Pull the physical connections,” Roger said, sliding a USB memory card into the side of the laptop he’d moved the Megiddo program to. “I’ll give you two guesses where that attack is coming from, and only one counts.”

Shane blinked as the lights in the room went off then back on, then off, leaving the room lit only by red safety lights. His monitor flickered as well, changing views without command several times then went off. He looked over to the general just as a heavyset Air Force officer burst through the doors to the command center and stumbled down to the J-2 desk.

Most of the officers and NCOs in the room were muttering or questioning what had happened but Shane leaned back in his chair to watch the general. The major knew that there wasn’t anything in his area of control, or expertise, to be done about whatever was happening. All he could do was wait a few moments to see if things calmed down. And he wanted to watch what Riggs was going to do.

The J-2 listened to the heavyset lieutenant and then swore and got up and headed for the general. Other senior officers were closing in around the commander but the J-2, despite being a shrimp and outranked by most of them, shoved his way through and leaned over to whisper in Riggs’s ear. Given that a colonel was whispering in the other ear at the same time, Riggs seemed to be taking both conversations in.

Riggs nodded for a moment, then waved the J-2 and the colonel away and stood up.

“Listen up,” the general said. “We just got hammered, electronically, by the enemy. They got past most of our electronic defenses. They’ve got trojans and worms in the system which is why everything is shut down: what wasn’t corrupted by the attack has been taken off-line to prevent them getting into it. Data Security has most of it isolated and stopped the attack from the outside. Which is good: given that these things are ahead of us technologically and they are, after all, flying computers, the fact that we could stop them at all is surprising.

“Lasing. Your remotes have been physically pulled to prevent the machines from taking over the lasers. Data Security did that first thing. Get up there, physically, and take control of the lasers. I’ll set up runners to manage control. Colonel Guthrie! Your troops and those lasers are all that stands between this mountain and those probes, if they get going again. Get out there with your unit. Tell them: Hold The Line. J-3. I want paper maps and markers up on the walls in two minutes. We’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way. Everyone else, we are shut down electronically. Get manual commo in place. Runners. Field phones. I don’t care if you’re using two tin cans and a string. Try to coordinate through the commo officer but get us commo until DS can get the systems back up. Go.”

Dick was pretty sure he had gotten ahead of the tide.

At the first sign that a worm or trojan had gotten into the base system, he had set up a program he’d named “Babel Blaster” that shut down every link in the network. Dealing with the various worms and trojans like the MS Blaster had taught him that. As soon as the first trigger on the internal system went off, Blaster went on and began operating automatically. While Babel Blaster was running, he went into the server room and physically pulled every single cable connecting the entire base. Getting everything back in place would be a bastard. But he had written bots to manage that, as well.

Fortunately, the worms hadn’t managed to penetrate his master controls. Those were on a 256 bit encryption. The weakness of encryption was usually at the password level. If you used a high numeric encryption scheme and then used a simple four alphanumeric password, say your birth year and month, the attacker only had to break the password. And there were only so many children’s names and so many birthdays to go around.

Dick’s master control password was a 196 character string of random high ascii. And he never wrote it down. He may have just been a staff sergeant, but that didn’t interfere with having an eidetic memory.

When he was sure that his master server was safe, he stopped and sat, elbow on table, chin in hand, looking at his screen. He wasn’t sure what he was dealing with but he had certain verities in life. He watched science fiction movies and TV, so he had those to go on. But he disagreed with some of it, based on his personal knowledge and training. One thing that he could simply not believe was that you could cram a full, functional, artificial intelligence into a tiny data packet. No matter how compressed the information, you still were dealing with a limited number of ones and zeros. And all the data packets that got through were small. Ergo, what he was dealing with were fucking viruses, worms and trojans. And he’d been writing those, and fighting those, for twenty years. He couldn’t say that he knew all the tricks, but he did know how to think about the tricks, how they could and could not work. How they could and could not hide.

The problem being that most viruses, trojans and worms were detectable by “signatures,” bits of code that were really variants of earlier versions. But he was pretty sure these weren’t going to use legacy code. And he was the only person who was looking at them: Symantec’s facilities were trashed. Ditto the National Information Security site. Even “heuristic” checking wasn’t going to do it.

He’d have to start from scratch. Okay, he could do that. And he could do more.

“Simone, what the hell are you doing!” Lieutenant Gathers asked as he hurried into the server room. “Everybody else is running around trying to work the problem. What the hell are you doing just sitting there?”

“Working the problem, Lieutenant,” the sergeant said, not bothering to look up. “And I gotta start somewhere. So gimme your laptop.”

Richard frowned at the incoming packet. The packet alleged to be a jpg, but it was clearly corrupted. However, when the “corruption” was analyzed, it turned out to be a short communique from the nice sergeant in Huntsville. The nice, apparently very clever, sergeant.

Richard finished reading the data and then smiled. Any of his former students who had seen that smile would have dropped his class abruptly. And probably left town, taken an assumed name in a foreign country and tried very hard never to be noticed.

Richard had never considered being a soldier. But it appeared that he had just been recruited.

On the other hand, it was a war that he was both predisposed to and capable of fighting.

He flexed his fingers and for just a moment wondered how clever he really was.

He finally decided that he was clever enough. And if not, there was always the brute force approach. There were other clever people left in the world. Presumably a computer could not disconnect itself.

Dick looked up as a harried Dr. Reynolds ran into the room.

“IBot transmitter computer?” Roger asked.

“Clean as far as I know,” Simone replied. “I pulled the connections before the server that it’s hooked to got corrupted. Is it still transmitting?”

“I think so,” Roger said.

“It’s still clean,” Dick replied. “If these bastards got in it it wouldn’t be transmitting.”

“Good,” Roger said, running out of the room.

“Everyone rushing about,” Dick said, shaking his head. “Don’t they know there’s a war on?” He hit “Enter” and leaned back. All four of the attacking programs that he’d found so far had certain bits of data loaded into them. Most of the data was what to do in the event that they were discovered. But they also were supposed to report back on what they found. As far as Simone could tell, he’d prevented that. However, the data told them where to report back.

Intelligence flows two ways. And there were still lots of people on Earth who could do something with things like the electronic location of one of the probes’ master computers and information on what protocols it expected when information was being sent in. And the difference between information and sabotage in the computer world was… very, very small.

With one click of a keystoke, Dick had just sent the data to all of them.

“You wanna play games, motherfucker? I’m a master of playing games.”

“General, the probes are coming live again,” the lieutenant said, breathlessly. “Not all of them, but quite a few. We’re engaging them as they approach, but we can’t get all of them. Some of them are headed for the antenna farm. Others are hitting places further down the mountain.”

“They’re taking out the IBot transmitters,” the J-2 said. “At a guess. We’ve got transmitters lower down the slopes as well as the main transmitter up on the hill. And bots scattered in the minefield.”

“Some of them are blowing up down there, but not all,” the lieutenant added.

“The big brains on their side are overcoming the IBot transmission, somehow,” Riggs said, shaking his head. “We need somebody down here who understands the electronic assault field. Can we jam them?”

“I can try,” the J-2 said. “But if they’re working from short range we might not be able to step on their signal. And if they’re using contact it won’t work at all. I’ll have to physically go up to the antenna park and set it to jam.”

“Go,” the general said. “Run.”

Roger stopped at the top of the stairs and panted for just a second. Among other things, the elevators were out. And what with everything that had been going on the last few months, he hadn’t gotten much time to work out.

The antenna farm had a small maintenance shed with its own computer for local testing and maintenance. It was padlocked, but Roger had brought a skeleton key in the form of a crowbar. In a few seconds he was sitting at the computer. He jacked in the USB drive and pulled out the program, then went looking for the Lola program.

The Lola system was hooked into the 1.4 Ghz transmitter program. Roger frowned for a moment, then simply pulled it out and dropped in the Megiddo program.

As he was initializing the transmission, the J-2 burst through the door.

“Who the hell pulled the lock off the door?” the angry lieutenant colonel asked.

“Me?” Roger replied, spinning around in the chair. “Deputy Secretary of Defense Reynolds?”

“Oh,” the colonel replied, abashed. “Sorry, sir. But the general wants me to start jamming the bots. They’re beating the IBot system.”

“I just replaced it,” Roger replied, looking out the window. “As a deputy secretary of defense, I know that I’m not supposed to be involved in something directly operational. But as Dr. Reynolds, would you mind if I overrode the general’s order temporarily to see if this works?

“Uh…” the colonel said then paused. “Go for it.”

“Going for it,” Roger said, smiling.

Four bots were in view through the door, hanging over the mountain. Roger pulled up the Megiddo program and tapped a key. All four started drifting downward until they impacted the ground. He tapped another key and they started to rise up.

“And now…” he continued, looking over the transmitter system. “Ah, power increase. That should cover most of the valley.”

“What the fuck?”

Soldiers had found that the machine gun worked just fine on the regular bots. He’d shot up most of the ones in range from his position but shooting the ones more than about five hundred meters away hadn’t done a damned thing. However, he took his finger off the machine gun as the probes started acting funny. First they drifted down to the ground, then up, then down and finally landed and stayed there.

“Okay, would somebody please tell me what the fuck is going on around here?”

Shane sat back down at his computer just as the power came back on. General Riggs appeared to be listening to his earbud for a second and then nodded and hit a key.

“Attention,” the general said through the room’s PA system. “Data Security has our systems back online. We don’t have access outside the base, yet, but they tell us that reports from lidar stations indicate that the probe waves headed for us have turned around. And the probes in our area now appear to be under our control due to Dr. Reynolds’ team.”

Instead of the earlier cheering he got a round of skeptical faces.

“Agreed,” he said to the unspoken majority opinion. “Colonel Guthrie, have your boys get out of the bunkers. Destroy every probe along the mountainside. Lasing, you have every probe that’s to the north and south, but use manual aiming and don’t shoot the colonel’s soldiers. Keep a few functional, but get them under wraps. Get with Major Gries to cover those protocols. I think we won. Let’s make sure that we hold onto that win.”

“Major Gries?” the general continued on the direct link.

“Sir?” Shane said. He’d almost taken off the headset and was already on his feet.

“I’m sorry to hear about your loss.”

Shane started to answer and then simply nodded, taking off the headset and shutting down his station.