Von Neumann’s War

“But…” Shane said, still looking at the far wall. “What if you had say a slab of C-4 with a friction detonator in it. All plastic or whatever. Hell, a match with some gunpowder. Attach a sort of pin to it, something solid metal like the sergeant major’s wallet…”

“They pick it up,” Alan said excitedly, “pull the pin for you and… BOOM!”

“Okay, now we have a weapon,” Roger said, making another note. “An anti-probe… mine?”

“Yeah, a mine,” Shane said, nodding.

“You could throw them,” the sergeant major said. “Slingshots…”

“Potato guns,” Alan said, grinning. “I’m not sure you’d want a lot of velocity on them.”

“Proximity detonators,” Tom said. “If your tanks or whatever fired explosive rounds with proximity detonators, the probes would catch them in the air and blow up. You’d have to tinker with the timing, but…”

“Good,” Roger said, making more notes. “This is good.”

“Those super bullets,” Cady said. “You said they were made from ceramic, right?”

“They can be made from metal,” Roger said. “But they’re usually ceramic.”

“They won’t intercept those,” Cady pointed out.

“Put a bit of metal in them and they might fly right into them,” Alan said.

“They’d probably try to match velocity,” Tom pointed out. “Like they did with the probes. Our probes, that is.”

“Be interesting to see them try,” Alan replied. “In atmosphere.”

“Ah,” Tom said, nodding. “Good point. That’s probably why they couldn’t stop the Sidewinders.”

“Directed energy weapons,” Shane said. “Lasers. They’re vulnerable. I don’t see why you couldn’t shoot them down with lasers.”

“Technology hurdle there,” Roger said but made the note. “And we’re going to need a lot of whatever we use. We need to figure out how these things work. To do that, we have to capture one. Alive or dead, I’m not sure it matters.”

“I wouldn’t like to try to keep a live one,” Cady said. “Dead… hit it with a stick. I’m telling you, we need a staff corps.”

“We already have a staff corps,” Shane pointed out, grinning. “The Chairborne Rangers.”

“But the other ones just eat it,” Alan pointed out.

“Get around that when the time comes,” Roger said. “We need one for study.”

“Capture one…” Shane said, his eyes narrowing. “You know what I was doing before you feather merchants roped me in, right?”

“Looking at wild-eyed projects?” Cady asked.

“And some of them were pretty wild,” Shane said, nodding. “There’s two I’m thinking of right now. One of them was Gecko-Man and the other was Coyote glue.”

“Gecko-Man?” Tom asked, smiling. “Coyote glue?”

“They were both pretty screwy,” Shane admitted. “Gecko-Man was synthetic gecko-feet skin. It sticks to just about anything. If you had gloves made of it you could climb right up a wall. You can stick it and then unstick it with a sort of rotational motion. Think super, stick-to-anything Velcro.”

“I can see where you’re going with that,” Roger said, nodding. “Figure out a way to get them to stick it to them and attach it to something.”

“Have to be a pretty strong something,” Tom pointed out. “I’m not sure what the energy budget of these things is but they can fly into and out of a gravity well. That means one hell of a lot of pull.”

“I wonder how resistant to electricity they are?” Alan asked. “Get them to stick to a live wire?”

“They’d just eat the wire,” Cady pointed out.

“Coyote glue was really, really weird,” Shane said. “DuPont had come up with it. One of those things like super putty. They were working on something else and got this. It’s an adhesive, very sticky, but it’s elastic as well.”

“Like the Coyote gets his foot stuck and it pulls back?” Alan asked, grinning. “Tries to pull it off with his hand and gets the hand stuck?”

“Just like that,” Shane said, smiling back with a nod. “It only starts to set when it hits air and it never really gets hard or dry. Just… stays sticky for a long time. They wanted to use it for a crowd control system. The current glue they use for that, if it gets over a person’s face they suffocate. They were pretty sure they could tinker Coyote glue so a person could pull it away from their face but not get entirely away. But I was thinking…”

“Put out a trap with some of it,” Roger said, nodding. “They get stuck to it. Like flies on a spider web.”

“Energy budget again,” Alan pointed out sourly, looking over at Tom. But Tom was clearly gone somewhere, with an abstracted expression on his face.

“Yeah,” Roger argued. “But you can tinker that. Admix some high strength materials in it like Spectra 1000 fishing line. Give it a good foundation, just a big ass concrete slab.”

“It’s really elastic,” Shane pointed out. “Really, really elastic. I could see one of these things, well, pulling really hard. And then getting pulled back just as hard.”

“Okay, we’ve got some good stuff here,” Roger said, nodding. “The probe mines—”

“And potato guns,” Alan pointed out.

“And… low velocity kinetic bombardment devices,” Roger said, writing carefully. “What’s the status on Gecko-Man materials?”