All of this stuff was concentrated on the bits of probe scattered around the room. The “live” one was being kept under careful observation in an underground bunker wired with command and automatically detonating mines. It was still radiating in the RF spectrum but as deep as it was there was no way that radio was getting out. Since being brought off the sub it had been surrounded by Faraday cages to prevent communication. Assuming it didn’t have a secondary “magic” communications system, the probes shouldn’t know where it was located. Whether they would care was another question.
Work on the “live” one could wait. For that matter they weren’t even messing with the “whole” one that Cady had knocked out. The engineers and scientists gathered in the clean room were having a hard enough time with the bits that Shane had brought back.
“You can tell they’re baffled,” Riggs said quietly. The glass was two-way and not particularly thick; he didn’t want them being thrown off by the comment. “They don’t scratch their heads, but they have other tells.”
“Roger tries to stick his hands in his pockets, and he fidgets,” Shane said, nodding. “And Tom rubs his beard. Alan just throws his hands up in the air like…” He waited a moment and then chuckled as the environment-suit clad engineer straightened up and threw his hands up in the air, gesticulating wildly and clearly on the edge of shouting.
“But I’ll say this for them, they just won’t give up. Roger has been in there almost twenty-four hours a day. I’m not even sure he has slept this week. He probably wouldn’t have eaten if his girlfriend, uh, what’s her name… Tami… you know the one with the huge knockers…”
“Traci?” Gries asked.
“Yeah, that’s it, Traci. Anyway, she has brought them food and occasionally makes Roger quit to take a shower or a nap or something,” Riggs grinned.
“Damn, Traci, huh? I had no idea.”
“Anyway, since Roger briefed us on France he’s been… different. Hell, we all have, but Roger… well, I think he thinks it’s his fault somehow.”
“France?” Gries asked.
“Nobody has briefed you?”
“Sir, we’ve been pretty much spinning our wheels since we returned. And like you said, Roger has been busy.”
“Shit. I’ll get somebody to brief you as soon as I can. Europe is… bad.”
Roger looked over his shoulder at the two observers and shrugged. Then he tapped Tom on the shoulder and waved to Alan.
The two soldiers met the engineers at the exit to the clean room and Danny raised an eyebrow.
“Not going well?” he asked neutrally.
“Not at all,” Roger admitted. They’d been studying the probes for a week and hadn’t been able to give one progress report. “We think we’ve found their motivator, the inertialess drive. But supplying power doesn’t get it to work. And we’ve found something that looks like the brain, but it’s a solid mass of silica and metal, mostly metal. And we’ve found what has to be their power source. But it’s…” Roger paused and rubbed his bloodshot eyes.
“Impossible,” Alan said, flatly. “F’n impossible! It’s a ball of hollow metal about the size of a baby’s fist. No fuel, no external supply. Just… a ball of metal.”
“And it’s got to, somehow, supply power equivalent to a multistage rocket,” Tom pointed out. “The runs from it shouldn’t even be able to handle the power. We know these things can accelerate at something like a hundred gravities. Even with their relatively low mass, we’re talking about terawatts of power and there’s no way that the power runs that we’re seeing could handle that load. And we’re still not sure what the tractor beam is generated by. Nothing in this thing makes sense.”
“The brain is the worst,” Roger said. “It’s unbelievably complicated. I mean you’d expect it to be, but this thing is light years beyond our current tech. I think it’s basically a controller chip, but it’s constructed in three dimensions. We’ve been trying to do that for decades but, besides the sheer difficulty and expense, the programming algorithms are a bitch. And the actual processing seems to be at the atomic level. We don’t have the instruments to study it, here, much less make head or tail of it.”
“What do you want to do?” Riggs asked.
“Give it to other people,” Roger replied definitely. “We’ve got three of the brain cases, if that’s what they are. We’ll send one to the redoubt at the LockMart facility in Denver, another to MIT, and the last one to Georgia Tech. Tech’s setting up a redoubt using some of our plans, so they could hold out even after Atlanta gets hit. Hopefully they can make some sense of it. I’m also going to request that all the data be turned into open source. We need anyone and everyone looking at this data. We don’t know who might have the right way to look at it.”
“That will need authorization,” Riggs pointed out.
“I’ll bring it up with the secretary, but I think I have that authority though I’m not sure,” Roger said. “But we need to make this information open to the public.”
“They’re going public with the fact that we sent a team into Greenland and it won a small battle with the probes,” the general said, nodding. “If we start putting out data about the probes it will be obvious where it came from. I’ll suggest making it a two parter. Do a dog and pony show with Shane and his team along with the bits of probes that we recovered. Civilian morale needs a shot in the arm; it’s getting really low.”
“I couldn’t believe the media when I got back,” Shane said, nodding. “It’s all doom and gloom.”
“There are plenty of people who have just given up,” Riggs admitted. “All of the media included.”
“Not that I particularly want to do a dog and pony,” Shane added. “But I think it will help.”
“I’ll call the Chairman,” Riggs said musingly, then chuckled. “You know, a few months ago I was surprised he knew my nickname. Now I’m calling him just about every day. Or, more often, he calls me. Strange.”
“Hell,” Roger said, trying to be humorous with his deepest accent, but his tiredness, fear, and somberness was hard to overcome. “Ah’s a deputy secretary with the weight of the world on my shoulders. How strange is that?” He said through a very thin, pursed lipped, halfhearted smile.
“As strange as getting invaded by metal probes from beyond the solar system?” Shane asked, shrugging.
Chapter 20
Ret Balclass="underline" So my friends, if you are still on the Internet then you haven’t been overrun by the machines yet. If you happened to catch the news of the team that went to Greenland — that’s right Greenland, they’re getting awfully close to us now — then you know that the machines can be beaten by our military. I wonder though: Can we beat them in a full out attack? We’ve lost contact with China and Russia and all of Europe. Parts of Africa and India are out of contact and I’m hearing rumors from my friends in the South Pacific that Japan is under attack. What do we do, friends? I’m taking your calls and e-mails here tonight on the Truth Nationwide. Bart from Chicago, you’re on the air.
Caller: Hello, Ret. I served in the 801st for six years and I have to tell you that this is something we’ve never trained for. As far as I can tell we’ve lost all satellite communications and GPS. We’ve lost our capabilities to use radar and radio comms. And it looks like even flying is now out of the picture. When was the last time you saw a plane in the sky?