Von Neumann’s War

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.