“We anticipated that issue,” General Mitchell replied, smiling faintly. “We’re implementing training in nonprojectile and zero-metal projectile weapons.”
“Care to translate that for me?” the President asked, frowning.
“The units are being rearmed with staffs, quarterstaffs, and bows,” General Mitchell said, shrugging. “We’re also falling back on historical communications models.” He looked over at the aide de camp at his shoulder and then back.
“The original purpose of an aide de camp was to carry messages, and messengers were a primary communications method as late as the First World War. We’ve established cavalry messenger posts across a large area and we’re slowly expanding that area. Even if the Internet goes down entirely we should be able to maintain communications across the U.S. Slow communications, but communications. The Army has extensive experience in continuing under rather odd conditions, Mr. President. I mean, we’ve got manuals that cover most of the conditions we’re going to be running into. As long as the food holds out, we’re going to stay an Army.”
“Good to hear that at least one thing is working,” the President said, nodding. “Any projections as to what cities might be next?”
“Not at this time,” General Mitchell said. “So far they’re hitting the East Coast and seem to be working south and east. We’ve established lidar sites across the country hooked into the internet and SIPARNET.”
“Lidar is…” the President said, holding up a hand to forestall response. “That’s using lasers as radar, right?”
“Yes, Mr. President,” Mitchell said, trying not to grin. “Close enough. The problem is that it’s limited as hell. But, on the other hand, the bots don’t seem to detect low-power laser. The lidar is where we’re getting some of the data on spread. We got the idea from the satellites that NRO managed to field.” He paused as an aide entered the room and handed him a message. He looked at it for a moment and then frowned.
“Speaking of lidar, we just picked up a… call it one of the ‘main’ tubes lifting off from near where Trenton used to be. The other attacks came in on relatively low vectors, that is they didn’t get very high since the other cities were relatively close. This one is heading for altitude.”
“Where’s it headed?” the President asked, frowning.
“Unknown at this time,” the general said. “West. But that’s the rest of the country. Chicago? St. Louis? Here? The West Coast? Unknown at this time.”
Another aide came in and gestured at the plasma screen on the wall.
“We’ve finally gotten the lidar software working, sir,” the female aide said in a soft voice. “Channel ninety-two should give you a view. It’s controlled from the battle center; if you—”
The view on the screen was of a map of the North American continent. The tube, big as it was, wouldn’t have been visible, but there was a large karat over it as well as smaller ones over the lesser tubes spreading along the eastern seaboard.
“There goes Baltimore,” the President said. “I don’t know if I’m grateful or hate the fact that we’ve got real-time information. Not much we can do about it, is there?”
“Something coming in on Fox,” Vicki said nodding to an aide. The screen was changed to a view of a reporter trying to describe what was going on behind him. The sound was off, but they didn’t really need it.
Two ships, liners by the looks of them, were visible at sea. A swarm of bots was in pursuit, but even as they headed for the undefended ships another, larger, ship came into view. It was a carrier, from the perspective on the shot it wasn’t clear which, that was interposing its bulk between the fleeing cruise ships and the bot swarm.
Flickers of tracers from the carrier’s Phalanx guns reached out towards the bot swarm but the depleted uranium rounds were swallowed to no effect. Then the swarm reached the carrier and began to cover it. And the ship began to disintegrate.
The last shot was of the carrier’s island slumping off and splashing into the sea. By that time the ship had been eaten down below the flight deck, and fires from ruptured fuel bunkers had turned it into an inferno from which small, burning, figures could be seen falling. But the liners were well out to sea, probably beyond the range of the bots’ interest.
“That was the Carl Vinson,” General Mitchell said to the hushed room. “Five thousand men and women. Those liners are filled with the last refugees from Washington and Baltimore. They’re headed for Bermuda. For all the good it will do them.”
“Turn it off,” the President said quietly. “We’re just eating ourselves up watching it. But as soon as they know where that main tube is going, get me the information. And tell Dr. Reynolds that we need more than just cool toys. We need to stop them.”
The frequency spectrum analysis the government had made was just what Richard needed to find the key to the encryption. He generated an algorithm that would set his spectrum analyzer to follow the hopping frequency of the bots’ transmissions at maximum frequency resolution. After days of listening to the bots at those hopping frequencies he finally picked up two signals that must have been close enough for his system to pull out of the noise floor.
As plain as day he watched the frequency modulation of each of the individual frequency spikes jitter up and down the band around the main center spike. It was that jittering signal, that frequency modulated signal embedded in the hopping frequencies that was the handshaking key.
Richard watched as the frequency modulated signal looped and repeated a few times and then a stream of different modulations were sent. He figured that this was the exchange of encryption data between the communicating bots. He ran this data through his credit card hacking code and there was the crypt key. Richard programmed in the algorithm to implement the key and decrypt the signals real time. He then watched a string of ones and zeroes fill the computer screen.
He had broken the bots’ communication scheme. Now he just needed to figure out what the hell all that binary code meant. What were the alien things saying to each other? He decided to upload his data to the government with hopes that they could do something with it. Besides, he wanted to play around with the flying bot that he and Helena had caught. There was bound to be a use for it. The damaged bot was still propelling itself in the forward direction and had yet to completely fail or stop its propulsion. Richard had made some preliminary scans of the bot and could tell its communications tube was working, so he kept the thing wrapped in aluminum foil and at the lowest point of the mineshaft at the bottom of the underground river when he wasn’t analyzing it.
Major Shane Gries and Sergeant Major Thomas Cady stood guard around the wheeled cart. The wounded but still functional bot they had captured in Greenland was being moved down one floor of the Huntsville redoubt from where it had been stored. The thing’s propulsion unit was shot but it was still broadcasting, so they had to store it at least three stories down below the surface. Measurements of the bot emissions showed that three stories of concrete was plenty to shield the thing from its friends.
Other than bot topography, initial analyses had only led to minimal breakthroughs in the alien mechanisms. But since Dr. Richard Horton had been in continuous contact with Dr. Alice Pike the momentum had changed for the better.