Von Neumann’s War

The guy was using a fairly simple buffer overflow attack but with a nice little fillip of an encryption packet designed to overcome Blowfish. The point seemed to be to create a zero day exploit, which he didn’t have a chance of managing. So far, nobody had cracked Blowfish. A “zero day exploit” was trying to crack it on the fly. Wasn’t going to happen. The cracker had hit the first firewall and thought he’d made it past. But Dick had set that one up as a trap; when a cracker using any of a thousand or so methods cracked the firewall it set off an alarm. Then Dick could watch them try to crack the second wall. And the second wall, if it detected the cracking, actually sent the cracker into a bypass loop that looked like a computer system but was really a very elaborate ruse, a honey trap. And all the while, Dick could be backtracking the crack and cracking the other guy’s computer.

Dick called up a spider to follow the cracking back and got his first shock of the incident when a message popped up.

“Ah, thank you for detecting me. I need, very very urgently, to contact Dr. Reynolds. Tell him this is Megiddo and I’ve got the codes he needs. This is urgent since I understand that you are under attack.”

* * *

RocketRog: Megiddo?

Megiddo: The same. I have completed a program that I believe will permit you to control the bots. It uses the same frequency spectrum as the IBot program that Dr. Pike developed. However, this one gives you the ability to stop them, have them land and reset their passwords so that you can lock out higher controls. I’m working on further refinements, however this should do for the time.

Rocket Rog: Boss. When can I get it?

Megiddo: The kind sergeant that contacted you gave me a secure point to which I might upload the program. It is currently uploading from a mirror site I placed a trojan on some time ago. And tell the nice sergeant that the tracer bot he just sent goes to one of the few remaining servers in Australia. Good luck.

‹Meggido has signed off›

* * *

“…three! AAAHHH!”

There wasn’t much to do but scream and pull the trigger. As soon as Jones put his head over the edge of the bluff all he saw was a wall of metal. The bots were actually flying through the tops of the trees, which had been sheared off by the laser, just under the beam. And the lead wave was no more than a pickup-truck’s length from the edge of the bluff, headed, as far as he could tell, right for his face.

The exploding rounds were not designed to penetrate armor, and Jones could see even in the split second that he had, that these bots were much heavier than the ones that they’d brought back from Greenland. They were thicker top to bottom and the metal had an odd sheen to it. For some reason a battlefield in Iraq came to mind but he couldn’t figure out why. The thing that went through his head in a flicker was a smell of all things. A hot, metallic stink that he couldn’t quite place in the chaos that was this moment’s existence.

Despite the fact that they were not armor penetrators, the explosive rounds had an effect. Enough small explosives in a small area can sometimes make up for larger explosives, even if in very odd ways. The main thing that they did was throw the bots off course. The probes were packed in wingtip-to-wingtip and running in a narrow gap between the ground and the lasers overhead.

As the rounds, hosing out of the modified paintball guns at over six hundred rounds per minute, began to slam into the packed-together probes it created chaos. For the probes. Probes hit on a wingtip tumbled sideways, slamming into the probe next to them or jinked up or down or knocked even into a spin. Up meant a brief shower of crackling electric metal as the probe, armored as it was, hit a multimegawatt laser at very short range. Down meant slamming into a tree, the ground or the onrushing bluff. Probes crashed into each other in a shower of metal, turning into nearly ton-weight balls of shattered metal and electrical discharge.