Von Neumann’s War

Shane looked at the truck, turning it over and over in his hands. They were starting to use trucks like this for recon, especially urban recon. He thought about the ambush he’d been in and running a couple of these, suitably loaded with explosives, up the walls and into the rooms the rifs had been using. If the stuff was really durable, it would be useful for way more than just climbing. Hell, it was a replacement for Velcro. Zippers even. Natick was the Army’s clothing and gear development center and Natick would go nuts playing with this stuff. Furthermore, they didn’t always have to jump through all the acquisition hoops for experimental stuff. This would require a start-up investment, though, and Natick couldn’t swing that. DARPA, maybe. What Gecko-Man really needed was a venture capitalist to jump-start the company. And somebody to actually run it, for that matter. Keep the spackling on the walls, make sure people made appointments.

“I’m just one step in the process,” Shane said, slowly, still turning the truck over and over as he thought, “but you have my support. I’m going to recommend this for an acquisition investment, but you’ll probably get more money, faster, if you could get a private investor.” He looked up at the man’s suddenly fallen face and grinned. Even frowning Forrester looked funny, like a clown wearing a frowny face.

“Hey, it’s never easy,” Shane said, still grinning. “But, yeah, this stuff is major interesting and I’m going to push for a fast track. But fast-track is usually for acquisition of stuff that’s off-the-shelf. I know a guy on the DARPA side, though, the Tactical Technologies Office or TTO. They might be able to fund you, I dunno. I’ll talk to my boss and DARPA when I get back; that’s all I can promise.”

“I appreciate that,” Forrester said, almost seriously. “I’ve been trying and trying to find an investor for this, but nobody can see the possibilities.”

“Then they’re blind,” Shane said, still turning the truck over and over.

* * *

The telescope sensors came online and began to slew the telescope’s axis. Location information from the star trackers fed into the pointing software and realized that the planet was outside the slewing capability of the telescope mount, so a subroutine triggered the attitude control system of Percival to fire the ACS thrusters and spin the reaction control wheels to align the spacecraft axis with a Mars line of sight. Then the software guided the telescope to bring Mars into the field of view.

The shiny gray planet was centered on the telescope guidance sensor array and the software then activated the ACS and RCS systems to maintain center field of view lock on the little planet. The locations of Phobos and Deimos were mapped to the pixel location on the wide field focal plane camera and the software subroutine began a continuous track on the small moons.

A similar acquisition and tracking routine was completed with the high gain antenna and Earth line of sight. Feedback between Earth and Percival was fed through the omnidirectional low gain antenna until signal lock was obtained with the HGA. Testing of the HGA and the telescope sensors was conducted by ordering the spacecraft to capture images and spectral data of the distant planet and download the data through the HGA-to-Earth link.

After an exhaustive checkout procedure it was determined that all of Percival’s systems functioned properly. Neighborhood Watch was operational.

* * *

“So, what is it you think we should be doing, Ronny?” Roger looked out Dr. Guerrero’s second floor window at the front entrance to NRO that they always showed on the news when referring to the nation’s space reconnaissance office. He’d been in the building before but never in so rareified an environment.

“I don’t know, Roger. But we should be doing something.” Ronny’s Cuban accent was still obvious after a life of living in the United States. Sometimes that caused people to automatically assume he was a bit dim, a mistake they rarely made twice.

“The President and his advisors agree that we shouldn’t just sit on our… butts for the next four months,” Dr. Fines, added, frowning and looking at the wall rather than at the engineer. “We’ve assembled a team of the nation’s most brilliant DOD and NASA engineers, so the President wants them to continue preparing for… whatever is to come.”

Fines had been in multiple meetings with the President, the national security advisor, the secretary of defense, and the Joint Chiefs since the launch of Neighborhood Watch and everyone had been in agreement with that basic statement. The President had been particularly… blunt.