Von Neumann’s War

“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.