Von Neumann’s War полностью

“Oh, well I’m sure you’ve seen them. They come screaming out of the little box one right after the other, yeeeeeaaaak, yeeeeeeaaak, yeeeaaaak,” Alan made screeching sounds as he moved his hands up and down demonstrating how the missiles launch out of the firework.

“You mean sort of like Katyushas?” Cady asked, smiling.

Alan frowned.

“What are those?”

“Lord he’p me,” the master sergeant replied in his thickest accent. “Ah’s surrounded by ivory tahr intellectuals!”

“Katyushas are a type of box missile launchers,” Shane said.

“Oh, you mean like the Multiple Launch Rocket System?”

“Yeah, MLRS is another example,” Shane agreed.

“Got that then. We designed most of that system right here in Huntsville at the Missile Command. And the ATACMS before that. In fact, if you go down the road you came in on and turn back north for a few miles you cross ATACMS Road. But, Katyushas? Why does that ring a bell?”

“They’re the Russian equivalent, sort of.” Shane was thinking he needed to steer Alan back on topic.

“Oh yeah! Katyushas! Those are the little rockets we shot down with the Tactical High Energy Laser back in the 1990s. I remember seeing the videos.”

“Uh, Alan, back to the fireworks and the little nuke, how’s that help us?” Shane shook his head, trying not to grin. He thought of Katyushas as “those damned missiles the insurgents keep firing at us.” But Alan’s referent was “those missiles we’re figuring out how to shoot down.” It was times like this that he realized just how sheltered Alan and the rest were.

“Oh, sure, sorry. I think we could take something like a Bradley and put a battery of a hundred of these modernized W-54 warheads in the back of it. If you set this thing off all at once, you have a distributed discrete explosion the order of the Hiroshima blast. Hoo-weee! Helluva firework!”

“Uh, yeah,” Shane said, sighing. “First of all, the range of the Davy Crockett was within the blast radius—”

“That’s an urban legend, sir,” Cady interrupted. “I had a sergeant major when I was a wee lad who’d actually dealt with the system. It wasn’t that bad. But it was pretty damned close. You wanted to duck and cover after you fired.”

“And the Davy Crockett launcher was pretty big,” Shane pointed out. “I couldn’t see putting more than one or two—”

“Not the actual missile,” Alan said, sighing in turn. “Smaller missiles, maybe based on Stingers. And the W-54 is old tech; there are much smaller and more powerful warheads now. I was thinking a pack about a meter or two on a side and maybe two meters long.”

“That might work,” Cady admitted. “Hell of a bang, that’s for sure.”

“Uh, Alan, if you have this rain of nuclear blasts distributed all around you, how do you expect to get out.”

“Well, you’re in a Bradley aren’t you?” Alan said, shrugging. “What’s a little radiation between friends?”

Shane and Cady looked at each other, then at Alan and then back at each other. Finally, Cady shrugged.

“What can I say, sir?” the master sergeant said, shrugging again. “This is what happens when you let rednecks play with nuclear weapons.”

“This image here was taken when we first noticed the landing tubeway at the Moon.” Traci pushed her glasses back up on her nose and chewed on the end of an ink pen. She had worked so many around-the-clock shifts tracking the lunar invasion over the last ten weeks that her eyes just couldn’t handle her contact lenses anymore. She needed a full eight hours of sleep to get her contacts back. She didn’t foresee getting that anytime soon. In fact, she had slept on a couch in Roger’s office the past two nights and had showered in the fitness facility across the street at least three times a week rather than at her apartment. Her job was monopolizing all of her waking moments.

“Yes, I’ve seen this image, Traci.” Roger looked over her shoulder at her computer screen.

“Okay, now look at this one taken two weeks later. See anything interesting?” She waited for Roger to analyze the image for a moment.

“A dust cloud!” The image now revealed a cloud of lunar dust just large enough for the Hubble imagery to resolve encircling the landing zone. The tubeway was no longer there either.

“Uh huh, now look at the image at six weeks after the landing.” Traci clicked a button on the mouse and another image popped up.

“Okay, the cloud is a little bigger.” Roger leaned in closer over Traci’s shoulder to see the screen better. The scent of the former Hooters’ waitress’s perfume wasn’t lost on him. She might not have been home in three days but she still looked and smelled good.

“And this one taken yesterday at about ten weeks from the landing.” Traci didn’t seem to mind Roger leaning over her shoulder. He was always all business anyway. Damnit.

“Again, it’s larger than the previous one, but the growth in diameter is smaller.”