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

They’re in there now, deep in the heart of the Sun, and always will be.
    We never saw the Medusae again. It could be that they died, that not even they could withstand the fierce fires of the Sun. Or it might be that they are still in there, still listening, to a song that will never end. Either way we are safe, and we have had our revenge upon them, and that is all that matters.
    That is the story. Afterwards, we left Old Earth, that poor poisoned planet, our ancient home which could no longer support us. Humanity set forth in our marvellous Fleet of Dreadnaughts, looking for new worlds to settle, hopefully this time without alien masters. We keep looking. The last of Humanity, moving ever on through open Space, on the wings of a song, for ever.

ALL FOR LOVE
Algis Budrys
What if the military effort to overthrow a single alien ship should completely obsess what remains of civilization on Earth, giving a new twist to “total war”?
Algirdas Jonas Budrys was son of the representative in the USA of the Lithuanian government-in-exile, a strange political limbo which perhaps reflects in his second novel Who?, filmed eighteen years later, about whether a prosthetically rebuilt, and necessarily masked, man is the person whom he claims to be. Also outstanding as a novel of identity and obsession is his classic Rogue Moon, about successive attempts by identical teleported suicide volunteers to penetrate a lethal alien labyrinth, learning just a little more each time. “All For Love” is one of the most mordant and memorable of all his stories.
    I
    M ALACHI RUNNER DIDN’T like to look at General Compton. Compton the lean, keen, slash-gesturing semi-demagogue of a few years ago had been much easier to live with than Compton as he was now, and Runner had never had much stomach for him even then. So Runner kept his eyes firmly fixed on the device he was showing.
    Keeping his eyes where they were was not as easy as it might have been. The speckled, bulbous distortion in front of him was what Headquarters, several hundred miles away under The Great Salt Lake, was pleased to refer to as an Invisible Weapons Carrier. It was hard to see because it was designed to be hard to see.
    But Malachi Runner was going to have to take this thing up across several hundred miles of terrain, and he was standing too close to it not to see it. The Invisible Weapons Carrier was, in fact, a half-tone of reality. It was large enough to contain a man and a fusion bomb, together with the power for its engine and its light amplifiers. It bristled with a stiff mat of flexible-plastic light-conducing rods, whose stub ends, clustered together in a tight mosaic pointing outward in every conceivable direction, contrived to bend light around its bulk. It was presently conducting, towards Runner, a picture of the carved rock directly behind it.
    The rock, here in this chamber cut under the eastern face of the Medicine Bow Mountains, was reasonable featureless; and the light-amplifiers carefully controlled the intensity of the picture. So the illusion was marred by only two things: the improbable angle of the pictured floor it was also showing him, and the fact that for every rod conducting light from the wall, another rod was conducting light from Runner’s direction, so that to his eyes the ends of half the rods were dead black.
    “Invisibility,” Compton said scornfully from behind and to one side of Runner. Or, rather, he whispered and an amplifier took up the strain in raising his voice to a normal level. “But it’s not bad camouflage. You might make it, Colonel.”
    “I have orders to try.” Runner would not give Compton the satisfaction of knowing that his impatience was with the means provided, not with the opportunity. The war could not possibly be permitted to continue the thirty years more given to it by Compton’s schedule. Compton himself was proof of that.
    Not that proof required Compton. He was only one. There were many.
    Runner glanced