Von Neumann’s War

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

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

“Tell everybody what?” Alice sat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Cannibals?” Alice whispered.

“Cannibals.” Roger nodded.

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

“This is so not good,” Gibson moaned.

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

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

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