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

“Thank you, Cadet. I thought I was starting to feel a little dizzy.”
    “Yes, sir.” The aide went back to his rest position.
    “All right, Colonel,” Compton said to Runner as though nothing had happened. “I’ve been curious to see this gimmick of yours in operation ever since it was delivered here. Thank you. You can turn it off now. And after that, I’ll show you something you’ve never seen.”
    Runner frowned for a moment. Then he nodded to himself. He crawled under the weapons carrier. From that close it was no longer “invisible”, only vaguely dizzying to the eye. He opened the hatch and turned off the main switch.
    Compton could only have meant he was going to show him the ship.
    Of course, he had seen films of it often enough. Who had not? The Army had managed to keep spy-drones flying above the Mississippi plain. The ship ignored them unless they took on aggressive trajectories.
    Presumably there was some limit to the power the ship felt able to expend. Or perhaps the ship simply did not care what Earthmen might learn from watching it; perhaps it underestimated them.
    This latest in the long chain of Compton’s command bunkers, creeping mole-like towards the ship, was lighted a sickly orange-yellow. Runner seemed to recall a minor scandal in the Quarter-master Corps. Something about a contractor who had bribed or cozened a Corps officer into believing that yellow light duplicated natural sunlight. Contractor and misled officer were no doubt long dead in one of the labour battalions at the bore face, but some use for the useless lights had had to be found. And so here they were, casting their pall, just as if two lives and two careers had not already gone towards settling the account.
    But, of course, nothing settles an account as derelict as Earth’s was.
    In that light, Compton’s cabinet rolled forward to the bank of hooded television screens jury-rigged against a somewhat water-proofed wall. A row of technicians perched on stools watched what the drones were showing them.
    “Lights,” Compton said, and the aide made the room dark. “Here, Colonel – try this one.” He pointed his chin towards a particular screen, and Runner stepped closer. For the first time in his life, he saw something only a few hundred people of his time had seen in an undelayed picture; he saw the ship. It was two hundred miles away from his present location, and two hundred and fifty miles high.
    II
    Fifty years ago, the alien ship landed butt-down in the northwest quadrant of the central plain of the United States. Stern-first, she had put one of her four landing jacks straight down to bedrock through the town of Scott’s Bluff, Nebraska, and the diagonally opposite leg seventy-five miles away near Julesburg, Colorado. Her shadow swept fifty thousand square miles.
    A tower of pitted dull green and brown-gold metal, her forepeak narrowing in perspective into a needle raking unseen through the thinnest last margins of the atmosphere, she had neither parleyed nor even communicated with anything on or of Earth. No one had ever seen anything of what her crew might look like. To this day, she still neither spoke to Earth nor listened to whatever Terrestrials might want to say to her. She was neither an embassy nor an invader.
    For fifty years she had been broadcasting the same code group into space, hour after hour, but she had neither made nor received any beam transmissions along any portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. The presumption was she had a distress beacon out on general principles, but had no hope of communicating with a particular source of rescue.
    She had come down a little erratically; there was some suggestion of jury-rigging in the plates over an apparently buckled section of the hull shrouding her stern tubes; there seemed to be some abnormal erosion at one segment of the lip around the main jet. Over the years, Headquarters Intelligence had reached the decision that she was down on Earth for a