Read Online The Mammoth Book of SF Wars by Ian Watson [Ed], Ian Whates [Ed] - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Ian Watson [Ed], Ian Whates [Ed]
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it during the night. He started the engine and, lying flat on his stomach in the tiny cockpit, peering through the cat’s-eye viewports, he slid out onto the surface of the mountain and so became the first of his generation to advance into this territory that did not any more belong to Man.
When he was three days out, he passed within a hundred yards of a cluster of mining-machines. They paid him no attention, and he laughed, cackling inside his egg. He knew that if he had safely come so close to an extension of the ship – an extension that could have stepped over and crushed him with almost no extra expenditure – then his chances were very good. He knew he cackled. But he knew the Army’s drones were watching, unobtrusively, for signs of his extinction or breakdown. Not finding them, they were therefore giving Compton and Headquarters the negative good news that he had not yet failed. At Headquarters, other Special Division personnel would be beginning to hope. They had been the minority party in the conflicts there for as long as they had been in existence at all.
But it did not matter, he thought as he lay up that night and sipped warm water from the carrier’s tank. It didn’t matter what party was winning. Surely even Compton would not be infuriated by a premature end to the war. And there were plenty of people at Headquarters who had fought for Compton not because they were convinced his was the only way, but only because his was a way that seemed sure. If slow. Or as sure as any way could be.
It came to Runner, for the first time in his life, that any race, in whatever straits, willing to expend so much of its resources on what was really not a surety at all, must be desperate beyond all reason.
He cackled again. He knew he cackled. He smiled at himself for it.
III
The interior of the weapons carrier was padded to protect him from the inevitable jounces and collisions. So it was hot. And the controls were crude; the carrier moved from one foot to another, like a turtle, and there were levers for each of his hands and feet to control. He sweated and panted for breath.
No other machine could possibly have climbed down the face of that mountain and then begun its heaving, staggering progress towards the spaceship’s nearest leg. It could not afford to leave tracks. And it would, when it had covered the long miles of open country that separated it from its first destination, have to begin another inching, creeping journey of fifty-five miles, diagonally up the broadening, extensible pillar of the leg.
It stumbled forward on pseudopods – enormous hollow pads of tough, transparent plastic, moulded full of stress-channels that curled them to fit the terrain, when they were stiffened in turn by compressed colourless fluid. Shifting its weight from one of the these to another, the carrier duck-walked from one shadow to another as Runner, writhing with muscle cramps, guided it at approximately the pace of a drunken man.
But it moved forward.
After the first day Runner was ready to believe that the ship’s radar systems were not designed to track something that moved so close to the ground and so slowly. The optical detection system – which Intelligence respected far more than it did radar; there were dozens of countered radar-proof missiles to confirm them – also did not seem to have picked him up.
He began to feel he might see Norma again. Thinking of that babbling stranger in Compton’s accommodation, he began to feel he might someday see Norma again. The ship’s leg was sunken through the ground down to its anchorage among the deep rock layers sloping away from the mountains. It was, at ground level, so far across that he could not see past it. It was a wall of streaked and overgrown metal curving away from him, and only by shifting to one of the side viewports could he make out its apparent limits from where he now was.
Looking overhead, he saw it rise away from him, an inverted pylon thrust into
When he was three days out, he passed within a hundred yards of a cluster of mining-machines. They paid him no attention, and he laughed, cackling inside his egg. He knew that if he had safely come so close to an extension of the ship – an extension that could have stepped over and crushed him with almost no extra expenditure – then his chances were very good. He knew he cackled. But he knew the Army’s drones were watching, unobtrusively, for signs of his extinction or breakdown. Not finding them, they were therefore giving Compton and Headquarters the negative good news that he had not yet failed. At Headquarters, other Special Division personnel would be beginning to hope. They had been the minority party in the conflicts there for as long as they had been in existence at all.
But it did not matter, he thought as he lay up that night and sipped warm water from the carrier’s tank. It didn’t matter what party was winning. Surely even Compton would not be infuriated by a premature end to the war. And there were plenty of people at Headquarters who had fought for Compton not because they were convinced his was the only way, but only because his was a way that seemed sure. If slow. Or as sure as any way could be.
It came to Runner, for the first time in his life, that any race, in whatever straits, willing to expend so much of its resources on what was really not a surety at all, must be desperate beyond all reason.
He cackled again. He knew he cackled. He smiled at himself for it.
III
The interior of the weapons carrier was padded to protect him from the inevitable jounces and collisions. So it was hot. And the controls were crude; the carrier moved from one foot to another, like a turtle, and there were levers for each of his hands and feet to control. He sweated and panted for breath.
No other machine could possibly have climbed down the face of that mountain and then begun its heaving, staggering progress towards the spaceship’s nearest leg. It could not afford to leave tracks. And it would, when it had covered the long miles of open country that separated it from its first destination, have to begin another inching, creeping journey of fifty-five miles, diagonally up the broadening, extensible pillar of the leg.
It stumbled forward on pseudopods – enormous hollow pads of tough, transparent plastic, moulded full of stress-channels that curled them to fit the terrain, when they were stiffened in turn by compressed colourless fluid. Shifting its weight from one of the these to another, the carrier duck-walked from one shadow to another as Runner, writhing with muscle cramps, guided it at approximately the pace of a drunken man.
But it moved forward.
After the first day Runner was ready to believe that the ship’s radar systems were not designed to track something that moved so close to the ground and so slowly. The optical detection system – which Intelligence respected far more than it did radar; there were dozens of countered radar-proof missiles to confirm them – also did not seem to have picked him up.
He began to feel he might see Norma again. Thinking of that babbling stranger in Compton’s accommodation, he began to feel he might someday see Norma again. The ship’s leg was sunken through the ground down to its anchorage among the deep rock layers sloping away from the mountains. It was, at ground level, so far across that he could not see past it. It was a wall of streaked and overgrown metal curving away from him, and only by shifting to one of the side viewports could he make out its apparent limits from where he now was.
Looking overhead, he saw it rise away from him, an inverted pylon thrust into
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