Von Neumann’s War

The channel tunnel was a miracle of modern English and French cooperation and engineering. The “Chunnel” in actuality consists of three tunnel-railroad connections that run under the English Channel, connecting Folkestone, England, and Calais, France. When the Chunnel was being constructed both French and English citizens had a fear of being so far beneath the water and there was a popular myth that the North Sea would collapse it and fill it in with disaster-movie effect. That myth was explained away once the public realized that the Chunnel was actually constructed beneath a mostly water-impermeable layer of chalk at 150 feet below the bottom of the English Channel seabed. The odds of water from English Channel leaking into the Chunnel were proven to be basically nill — that is unless structural integrity were lost in the super high density shotcrete reinforced regions of the tunnel.

The tunnels are 31 miles long with two rail tunnels, each 25 feet in diameter, and a central tunnel, 16 feet in diameter. The central tunnel is used for maintenance and ventilation. Two of the tubes are full sized and accommodate the various rail traffic. The smaller service tunnel has several “crossover” passages that allow trains to switch from one track to another. These connecting tunnels serve as emergency escape routes when necessary. In fact, they were used as refuge by thirty-one people as a safe haven during a Chunnel fire back in the late 1990s. The escape route system worked well and all of the trapped people survived. But the Chunnel escape system was designed for fires in sections of it, not for metal-eating alien probes swarming through the entire construct. Most likely, the cross-over escape tubes would only appear as that much more tasty metal for the bots to gather. Shane was considering what would happen to the tunnel’s structural integrity when those bots started yanking metal support from the concrete walls.

The entrance, and indeed the entire track, was walled off by a high metal fence. It was proof positive to Shane that the probes hadn’t gotten there yet that the fence was still standing. It was also a hell of a thing to try to cross.

Others, however, had had the same idea and already holes had been dug under the fence. There was only a trickle of people going through the holes and Shane and the master sergeant, apologetically, pushed their way to the front and through one of the holes.

As soon as they were in the tunnel, they began to run again, weaving in and out amongst the light crowd. There was a two-meter wide walkway on the north wall with a meter-and-a-half drop down to the railbed. About a hundred meters inside the entrance there was a door on the wall with an “exit” sign.

“Take that?” Cady asked.

“Clear enough in here,” Shane said. “I’ve been on this thing, I know where it goes. But there’s a spot up here about five or ten miles on where we’ll have to do some climbing. Some sort of big cavern.”

They saved their breath for running the rest of the way. They were among the few who were steadily running. Most of the rest looked as if they’d run as far as they could and now were just grimly determined to walk the rest of the way. But about a mile into the run, Shane heard the rapid pad of feet behind him and a man in running clothes passed them at a good clip. He was shorter than either of them, but he had long easy strides and easily outstripped them, disappearing back into the crowd ahead.

“Marathoner,” was all Cady said.

“I never thought the Army running program would come in this handy,” Shane replied.

Cady just grunted.

Shane had gotten well into the rhythm of the run. He was feeling good about that if nothing else; there was a mind numbing pleasure to just running. But dodging the people around them, young, old, male, female, mothers carrying their children, was a pain in more ways than one. Shane had seen civilization end in less than an hour. And even if these people made it to England, the Channel wasn’t going to stop this invasion. Nothing would. Most of the people he saw around him were going to die. Of starvation. Of exposure. Of disease. At each other’s hands. The fabric of society was going to crumble and with it everything that had kept these shocked people alive in a technological womb. The law of the jungle was here again and probably here to stay. Unless somebody, and he knew which somebodys he was thinking of, could figure out a way to win. At the moment, he didn’t see one. But that was what the eggheads were for. All he wanted to do was get back to the States and dump it on them. Strykers and Abrams clearly weren’t going to win this one.