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

aside at the cadet officer who had guided him from the tramway stop to this chamber here, in one of the side passages of the siege bore that was being driven under the Medicine Bows in the direction of the alien spaceship that had dominated the world for fifty years. The boy – none of these underofficers were older than seventeen – had a face that looked as if it had been made from wet paper and then baked dry. His eyesockets were black pits from which his red eyes stared, and his hands were like chickens’ feet. His bloated stomach pushed against the wide white plastic of his sidearm belt.
    He looked, in short, like most of the other people Runner had seen here since getting off the tram. As he was only seventeen, he had probably been born underground, somewhere along the advancing bore, and had never so much as seen sunlight, much less eaten anything grown under it. He had been bred and educated – or mis-educated; show him something not printed in Military Alphabet and you showed him the Mayan Codex – trained and assigned to duty in a tunnel in the rock; and never in his life had he been away from the sound of the biting drills.
    “You’re not eager to go, Colonel?” Compton’s amplified whisper said. “You’re Special Division, so of course this isn’t quite your line of work. I know your ideas, you Special Division men. Find some way to keep the race from dehumanizing itself.” And now he chose to make a laugh, remembering to whisper it. “One way to do that would be to end the war before another generation goes by.”
    Runner wondered, not for the first time, if Compton would find some way to stop him without actually disobeying the Headquarters directive ordering him to cooperate. Runner wondered, too, what Compton would say if he knew just how eager he was for the mission – and why. Runner could answer the questions for himself by getting to know Compton better, or course. There was the rub.
    Runner did not think he could ever have felt particularly civilized towards anyone who had married his fiancée. That was understandable. It was even welcome. Runner perversely cherished his failings. Not too perversely, at that – Runner consciously cherished every human thing remaining to the race.
    Runner could understand why a woman would choose to marry the famous Corps of Engineers general who had already chivvied and bullied the Army – the organizing force of the world – into devoting its major resources to this project he had fostered. There was no difficulty in seeing why Norma Brand might turn away from Malachi Runner in favour of a man who was not only the picture of efficiency and successful intellect but also was thought likely to be the saviour of Humanity.
    But Compton several years later was—
    Runner turned and looked; he couldn’t spend the rest of the day avoiding it. Compton, several years later, was precisely what a man of his time could become if he was engaged in pushing a three hundred mile tunnel through the rock of a mountain chain, never knowing how much his enemy might know about it, and if he proposed to continue that excavation to its end, thirty years from now, whether the flesh was willing to meet his schedules or not.
    Compton’s leonine head protruded from what was very like a steam cabinet on wheels. In that cabinet were devices to assist his silicotic lungs, his sclerotic blood vessels, and a nervous system so badly deranged that even several years ago Runner had detected the great man in fits of spastic trembling. And God knew what else might be going wrong with Compton’s body that Compton’s will would not admit.
    Compton grinned at him. Almost simultaneously, a bell chimed softly in the control panel on the back of the cabinet. The cadet aide sprang forward, read the warning in some dial or other and made an adjustment in the settings of the control knobs. Compton craned his neck in its collar of loose grey plastic sheeting and extended his grin to the boy.