Free The Mammoth Book of SF Wars by Ian Watson [Ed], Ian Whates [Ed]

climbed out of the carrier, as he had to, to attach the bomb, he heard one noise that was not wind-thrum or the throb of internal machinery. It was a persistent, nerve-torn ululation, faint but clear, deep inside the ship and with a chilling quality of endurance.
    He hurried back down the leg; he had only four days to get clear – that is, to have a hope of getting clear – and he hurried too much. At the rat guard’s lip, he had to hang on by his heels and cast the fore pads under. He though he had a grip, but he had only half a one. The carrier slipped, jerked and hung dangling by the pad. It began to slide back down the short distance to the lip of the guard, rippling and twisting as parts of its sole lost contact and other parts had to take up the sudden drag.
    He poured coagulant into the pad, and stopped the awful series of sticks and slips. He slapped the other pads up into place and levered forward, forgetting how firmly that one pad had been set in his panic. He felt resistance, and then remembered, but by then the pull of the other three pads had torn the carrier forward and there was a long rip through which stress fluid and coagulant dripped in a turgid stream.
    He came down the last ten miles of the leg like a runaway toboggan on a poorly surfaced slide, the almost flaccid pads turning brown and burnt, their plastic soft as jelly. He left behind him a long, slowly evaporating smear of fluid and, since no one had thought to put individual shut-offs in the cross-valving system between the pads, he came down with no hope of ever using the carrier to get back to the mountains.
    It was worse than that. In the end, he crashed into the indented ground at the base of the leg, and, for all the interior padding, the drive levers bludgeoned him and broke bones for him. He lay in the wreck with only a faint awareness of anything but his pain. He could not even know whether the carrier, with its silent power supply, still as much as half hid him or whether that had broken, too.
    It hadn’t broken, but he was still there when the bomb exploded; it was only a few hours afterward that he came out of his latest delirium and found that the ground had been stirred and the carrier was lying in a new position.
    He pried open the hatch – not easily or painlessly – and looked out.
    The ship hadn’t fallen. The leg had twitched in the ground – it was displaced by several thousand yards, and raw earth clung to it far overhead. It had changed its angle several degrees towards vertical and was much less deeply sunken into the ground. But the ship had not fallen.
    He fell back into the carrier and cried because the ship hadn’t come down and crushed him.
    IV
    The carrier had to be abandoned. Even if the pads had been usable, it was three-quarters buried in the upheaval the leg had made when it stirred. The machine, Runner thought contemptuously, had failed, while a man could be holed and broken and heal himself nevertheless.
    He had very good proof of that, creeping back towards the mountains. Broken badly enough, a man might not heal himself into what he had been. But he would heal into something.
    For a time he had to be very wary of the mining machines, for there had been a frenzied increase in their activity. And there was the problem of food and water. But he was in well-watered country. The comings and goings of the machines had churned the banks of the Platte River into a series of sinks and swamps without making it impossible for a thirsty, crawling man to drink. And he had his rations from the carrier while the worst of the healing took place. After that, when he could already scuttle on his hands and one knee, he was able to range about. In crawling, he had discovered the great variety of burrowing animals that lived beneath the eye of ordinary man; once he had learned which one made bolt-holes and which could be scooped out of the traps of their own burrows he began to supply himself with a fair amount of protein.
    The