Battlemind by William H Keith Read Free Book Online

for slow going.
    The pyramid was less than five hundred meters away now, towering upward above her and canted slightly forward, as though it might at any moment topple over and crush her beneath its immense weight. From this range, the surface appeared to be crawling, writhing with a pseudolife of its own. The crater blasted into the thing’s side was definitely smaller now, as though the machines making up the pyramid’s bulk were realigning themselves to fill it in. She could make out movement inside and the blue flicker of something that might be artificial lightnings at the very edge of her resolution.
    “If you can get a little closer, Captain,” the voice of Overwatch told her, “we might be able to get a look at what’s going on in there.”
    “That was the idea,” she said. It was good to know Overwatch was supporting her decision now. Well, through the telemetry, they could see the same readouts that she could. They knew she was never going to get this strider off-world again.
    “Watch it! Watch it! They’re breaking through!”
    “Lieutenant Ferris! We need support over—”
    “C’mon, people! Tighten up! Watch your fronts!”
    “I’ve got kickers! Kickers breaking through sector one!”
    “Valda! Where are you?”
    “Valda’s bought it—”
    In the distance, she could hear the shouts, the screams, the firm commands and harsh emotions. It sounded as though battle had just been joined back at the perimeter. She wasn’t tuned into their tactical frequency now, but she was hearing their voices from someone’s commo console back at the command center. She was tempted to open the tactical channel again, to find out what was happening, to find out if Ran was still okay… but she suppressed it. The rest of the Phantoms were on their own now.
    As was she.
    She saw a scuttling of shapes ahead and froze in position, panning left to right with her particle cannon. The shapes—long-legged and as gracefully sleek in their movements as spiders—were visible for but an instant, and then they were gone, lost in the rubble. She was close to a spill of debris from a building knocked flat by the nuke. Reaching out to some of the twisted metal-alloy ribs that had formed the structure’s foundations, she hauled herself along more quickly, moving hand-over-hand like a monkey swinging through the trees.
    The enemy kickers ignored her. Possibly, she thought, she’d been spared this long because she was only a single machine. She was beginning to get the idea that the Web did not fully understand the concept of individuals carrying out operations apart from the activities of other individuals.
    An interesting datum, that, and possibly one that would prove useful.
    A laser flared, the beam striking her hull from the left and boiling away a few hundred grams of the now-dead Naga shell. The Web, it seemed, was taking an interest in her again. Possibly she’d moved too close to the pyramid, which bulked high above her like a vast and overhanging cliff of polished rock. The laser fired again, missing her by centimeters. Pivoting, she returned fire with her particle cannon, the electrical discharge snapping across the blackened rubble of the fallen building with the dazzle of an arc-welder’s torch.
    The cavern, shrunken now somewhat, was still immense, a vast hollowing of the cliff above her head, the interior aglow with soft, blue light. She tried to make out the shapes there, tried to make sense of them, but there was nothing for her mind to grasp hold of. All she could really see was… movement.
    Insect-shapes.Millions of them, many as small as her hand, some as large as a personal flitter, a few bigger than a house. They were cascading down off the walls of the burned-out cavern, spilling out into the open air, dropping to the ground and surging forward. Laser fire sniped and hissed around her; she hit the ground heavily, her strider rolling to port, as her manipulators were burned away in the sudden