Von Neumann’s War

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.