Von Neumann’s War

“Well, all you need is a lot of heat, right?” Cady asked. “You sort of melt it and roll it out—”

“He means how the atoms are made,” Roger said, smiling slightly. “Not how you form the metal. You know how atoms are made?”

“No,” Shane admitted. “Does it matter?”

“If they need heavy metals it might,” Roger admitted. “All atoms except hydrogen are formed by fusion. Two hydrogen nuclei fuse in a star to form a proton, a neutron, a positron, and a neutrino. This picks up another hydrogen nucleus running around and there you have it — helium. Our sun is currently in the proton-proton cycle. The lower weight stuff, up to iron, is formed just like that in other still fairly common regular stars that are in the CNO cycle. Uh, that is for carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. These CNO stars are more massive than our sun. Above iron, though, it takes a supernova. So, the heavier the metal, the less likely it is to be produced. Some of them are more likely, on a quantum level, than others as well. But it makes sense that if they have to use certain materials in their production, reproduction whatever, that they’d concentrate on heavy metals.”

“They like it,” Shane said. “But they seem to go for everything. I mean, they stole the sergeant major’s battalion coin and my ring. They left the stone, though. It was a synthetic ruby.”

“And that doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Alan pointed out. “Ruby’s aluminum oxide. They were working with titanium oxide on the moon. Why use ores there and not here? I mean, there’s iron in blood, lots of it. Why not rip that right out of our bodies?”

“They’ve got all this formed metal,” Tom said, shrugging. “Why bother? And there’s as much concentration of iron in soil as in blood. They might get around to strip mining iron out of the very soil in time, it sounds like they have the ability, but why bother? There’s more iron in a knife than in the human body. They fed on the damaged probe?”

“Yeah,” Shane said, nodding.

“And another one,” the sergeant major interjected. “I don’t know what happened with that. It was right after we were leaving the town. I don’t think you saw it, Major. There were two of them attacking another one. Happened so quick I didn’t bother to point it out and we were sort of hurrying at the time.”

“Why?” Roger asked, a crease appearing between his eyes.

“Well, we’d just gotten new shoes…” Cady said, his face sober as a judge.

“No,” Roger said with a sigh. “Why were they attacking it? Was it damaged?”

“It didn’t look that way,” Cady replied, smiling at having gotten a yank in on the eggheads. “They were all three flying along, but they took it apart like a lobster.”

“That’s odd,” Tom said, frowning.

“That’s what I thought,” the sergeant major said, shrugging. “But they ate it.”

“And they appear to be ignoring carbon,” Roger said, making a note on the sergeant major’s observation. “They need that for steel at least.”

“It’s everywhere,” Tom said, shrugging. “And they don’t need much since they don’t appear to be using composites or plastics. They also appear to be ignoring silica. You mentioned broken windows scattered on the street.”

“In the town where we got the shoes,” Shane said, nodding. “They didn’t really touch most of our gear. It was all screwed up, mind you. They’d even ripped open the MRE pouches, which kind of confused me until I remembered they had metal in them. But the plastic and cloth was all there.”

“So how do we attack them?” Roger asked.

“Sticks,” Cady said. “I’m getting me one of those staff things.”

“Not a winning option, I fear,” Shane pointed out.

“Bullets don’t work,” Cady said. “I think what was happening was they were just eating them out of the air. I don’t know how, bullets go damned fast.”

“They intercepted the Mars probe at somewhere around fifteen kps,” Tom replied dryly. “That’s much faster than any bullet, Sergeant Major.”

“You know, that is interesting because Ridley said that the Sidewinders were somewhat effective and that the probes didn’t pluck them out of the air as easy. He also said their guns were ineffective. Why would that be?” Gries asked.

“Don’t know, we need to talk to him. But you know bullets don’t maneuver and missiles do… hmmm?” Tom pondered and rubbed his beard.

“But they don’t go for plastics,” Alan said. “And they don’t appear to… see a threat to them. The sergeant major hit them with a stick. Rubber bullets?”

“That’s an idea,” Roger said, making another note. “More.”

“I was thinking about the sergeant major’s wallet…” Shane said, then paused uncertainly.

“Go on,” Roger said, his eyes narrowing.

“They picked it up,” Shane went on, his eyes unfocussed. “Because there was metal in it. And I remembered thinking I wished it was a bomb…”

“They’d just rip out the detonator,” the sergeant major said. “They’re made of metal.”