Von Neumann’s War

“I’m not sure,” the lieutenant said, shaking his head. “We’ll leave it suspended away from metal and in view. But if it goes live once we’re underway, we’re going to have to take it out. And fast. If that thing eats a hole in the pressure hull or, hell, some of the pipes, we’ll sink for sure.”

“We can destroy it easy enough,” Shane said. “We’ll just leave someone on watch at all times with orders to destroy it if it so much as moves.”

“Hook a mine up by it, sir,” Cady suggested. “That way if it goes back to pulling metal, it’ll pull that. Hopefully. And that will take it out.”

“And someone on watch,” the lieutenant said.

“Agreed,” the major replied. “But not my people; we’ve been on continuous ops for the last few days. The SEALs aren’t much better.”

“We just happen to have a spare platoon,” the lieutenant said, grinning. “I think they’ve got a new mission.”

“Great.” Shane nodding tiredly. “In that case, let’s get my people cleaned up and bunked down. How soon are we going to reach the States?”

“About forty hours,” the lieutenant said. “We’re going into Portsmouth.”

“Wake me up when we get there.”

* * *

“Hail the conquering hero,” General Riggs said, putting a hand on Major Gries’s shoulder as he stepped up behind him.

“You know, sir, if this was a science fiction movie, there’d be all sorts of cool readouts and blinking lights and stuff,” Shane said, shaking his head and waving at the window.

“Sorry, Major, this is as cool as we could make it,” the general replied, smiling.

The room beyond the window looked like a cross between a very messy toy-maker’s cottage and a metal octopus convention. Wires ran everywhere, tools were scattered at apparent random and there wasn’t a cool readout in sight. Well, one. There was a plasma fusion screen with some sort of complicated control screen up. But the rest were mostly monochrome monitors that looked like somebody had raided a museum.

All of this stuff was concentrated on the bits of probe scattered around the room. The “live” one was being kept under careful observation in an underground bunker wired with command and automatically detonating mines. It was still radiating in the RF spectrum but as deep as it was there was no way that radio was getting out. Since being brought off the sub it had been surrounded by Faraday cages to prevent communication. Assuming it didn’t have a secondary “magic” communications system, the probes shouldn’t know where it was located. Whether they would care was another question.

Work on the “live” one could wait. For that matter they weren’t even messing with the “whole” one that Cady had knocked out. The engineers and scientists gathered in the clean room were having a hard enough time with the bits that Shane had brought back.

“You can tell they’re baffled,” Riggs said quietly. The glass was two-way and not particularly thick; he didn’t want them being thrown off by the comment. “They don’t scratch their heads, but they have other tells.”

“Roger tries to stick his hands in his pockets, and he fidgets,” Shane said, nodding. “And Tom rubs his beard. Alan just throws his hands up in the air like…” He waited a moment and then chuckled as the environment-suit clad engineer straightened up and threw his hands up in the air, gesticulating wildly and clearly on the edge of shouting.

“But I’ll say this for them, they just won’t give up. Roger has been in there almost twenty-four hours a day. I’m not even sure he has slept this week. He probably wouldn’t have eaten if his girlfriend, uh, what’s her name… Tami… you know the one with the huge knockers…”

“Traci?” Gries asked.

“Yeah, that’s it, Traci. Anyway, she has brought them food and occasionally makes Roger quit to take a shower or a nap or something,” Riggs grinned.

“Damn, Traci, huh? I had no idea.”

“Anyway, since Roger briefed us on France he’s been… different. Hell, we all have, but Roger… well, I think he thinks it’s his fault somehow.”

“France?” Gries asked.

“Nobody has briefed you?”

“Sir, we’ve been pretty much spinning our wheels since we returned. And like you said, Roger has been busy.”

“Shit. I’ll get somebody to brief you as soon as I can. Europe is… bad.”

Roger looked over his shoulder at the two observers and shrugged. Then he tapped Tom on the shoulder and waved to Alan.

The two soldiers met the engineers at the exit to the clean room and Danny raised an eyebrow.

“Not going well?” he asked neutrally.

“Not at all,” Roger admitted. They’d been studying the probes for a week and hadn’t been able to give one progress report. “We think we’ve found their motivator, the inertialess drive. But supplying power doesn’t get it to work. And we’ve found something that looks like the brain, but it’s a solid mass of silica and metal, mostly metal. And we’ve found what has to be their power source. But it’s…” Roger paused and rubbed his bloodshot eyes.

“Impossible,” Alan said, flatly. “F’n impossible! It’s a ball of hollow metal about the size of a baby’s fist. No fuel, no external supply. Just… a ball of metal.”