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

ship, and its extensions, did him no harm. Some of this was luck, when he was in the zones traversed by the machines as they went to and from the ship. But after he had taken up a systematic trek back along the North Platte, and presumably ought to have stopped being registered in the ship’s detectors as an aimless animal, he was apparently protected by his colouration, which was that of the ground, and again by his slow speed and ability to hug the terrain. Even without pseudopods and a fusion bomb to carry, his speed was no better than that.
    When several months had passed he was able to move in a half-upright walk that was an unrelenting parody of a skip and a jump, and he was making fair time. But by then he was well up into the beginnings of the Medicine Bows.
    He thought that even though the ship still stood, if he could reach Norma soon enough she might still not be too lost.
    Not only the ship but the Army drones had missed him, until he was almost back to the now refilled exit from which he and the carrier had launched themselves. The passages were hurriedly unblocked – every cubic yard of rubble that did not have to be dispersed and camouflaged at the pithead represented an enormous saving of expenditure – and he was hauled back into the company of his fellow creatures.
    His rescue was nearly unendurable. He lay on a bed in the Aid Station and listened to Compton’s delight.
    “They went wild when I told them at Headquarters, Colonel. You’d already been given a posthumous Medal of Honour. I don’t know what they’ll do now you’re available for parades. And you certainly deserve them. I had never had such a moment in my life as when I saw what you’d done to the ship.”
    And while Compton talked, Norma – Norma with no attention to spare for Runner; a Norma bent forward, peering at the dials of Compton’s cabinet, one hand continually twitching towards the controls – that Norma reached with her free hand, took a photograph out of a file folder clipped to the side of the cabinet and held the picture, unseeing, for Runner to look at while she continued her stewardship of Compton’s dials. The cadet had been replaced. The wife was homemaking in the only way she could.
    The ship no longer pointed directly away from the ground, nor was she equally balanced on the quadruped of her landing jacks. The bombed leg dangled useless, its end trailing in the ground, and the ship leaned away from it.
    “When the bomb went off,” Compton was explaining, “she did the only thing she could to save herself for the time being. She partially retracted the opposite leg to balance herself.”
    Norma reached out and adjusted one of the controls. The flush paled out of Compton’s face, and his voice sank towards the toneless whisper Runner remembered.
    “I was always afraid she would do that. But the way she is now, I know – I know that when I undermine another leg, she’ll fall! And she can’t get away from me. She’ll never take off with the leg dragging. I never had a moment in my life like the moment I had when I saw her tilt. Now I know there’s an end in sight. All of us here know there’s an end in sight, don’t you, Norma? The ship’ll puzzle out how you did it, Runner, and she’ll defend against another such attempt, but she can’t defend against the ground opening up under. We’ll run the tunnel right through the rock layers she rests on, get underneath, mine out a pit for the leg to stumble into and blow the rock – she’ll go down like a tree in the wind, Runner. Thirty years – well, possibly forty, now that we’ve got to reach a further leg – and we’ll have her! We’ll swallow her up, Runner!”
    Runner was watching Norma. Her eyes darted over the dials and not once, though most of the gestures were abortive, did her hands stop their twitching towards the controls. When she did touch them, her hands were sure; she seemed quite practised; Runner could calculate that she had probably