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would be pretty damned useful; her hivel cannon was dead, and with it three important sub-circuit networks in her fire control array. The Naga segments that composed part of her hull and working systems had a limited self-repair capability, including regrowing damaged electronic circuits, but this was beyond their scope.
    More high-velocity missiles shrieked through the thin, hot atmosphere, glowing brightly with friction as they snapped overhead, but her AI had already noted that they would miss and did not alert her to the threat. She eased off on her magnetics and flexed her legs, gentling closer to the ground as she continued firing at the advancing enemy. With a thought, she unfolded her starboard-side missile launcher and loosed a hissing volley of M-310 missiles into the lightning-flecked gloom in the distance.
    An instant later, a laser speared her, the five-megawatt beam sinking into the black heat sink of her external nano.
    Five megawatts striking a target for one second yields the same energy as the detonation of a kilogram of TNT. Kara’s external nano could handle about three quarters of that inflow, shunting it into her primary storage cells, but the rest had to go somewhere. The explosion was as thunderous, as concussive as the earlier slug strike had been, and she lost nearly one square meter of her nanoflage as her hull erupted in white-hot fury.
    The Web machine that had fired at her was a hulking, black and brown monstrosity of ill-fitted angles, parts, and legs, only a little smaller than her warstrider, its hull built around the length of the weapon that appeared from its size to be its entire reason for existence. Less than a hundred meters away, it crouched, readying a second shot; Kara triggered a bolt from her CP cannon first and felt an intense and savage satisfaction as the blast carved a man-sized chunk of metal and ceramics off the enemy device and scattered it on the thin, hot winds as droplets of condensing vapor.
    “Is this supposed to be proving something?” Sergeant Kemperer yelled. She glanced at the magnified image of his strider, off to her left. Part of his machine’s hull was glowing dull red, and the surface had taken on a pocked appearance from multiple hits by high-velocity slugs and high-energy beams.
    “Just keep taking them down, Deke,” Lieutenant Hochstader told him. “Don’t let them organize and don’t let them break through the line, or we’ve had it.” His voice sounded remarkably calm against the shriek and thunder of battle. Naga-grown symbiotic implants—like the cephlinks of decades before—conferred a kind of electronic telepathy on those who were jacked into the network, a communications channel secure from the thunder and crash outside the striders’ black hulls.
    Kara called up a long-range situation map, shrinking the ten-kilometer circle of the Phantoms to a tiny green oval, surrounded by a seething ocean of red. She’d hoped to identify some one arc of the defensive perimeter that was not under massive assault, allowing her to pull back striders from one area and plug them into another if things became desperate. There was no such arc, however. If she wanted to pick up reserves, she would have to do it by shrinking the perimeter, and the volume of firepower from the surrounding enemy forces was a good reason not to do that. If that incoming fire became any more concentrated than it already was, targeting a smaller area…
    The Webbers, she noted, were showing nothing even remotely like combat tactics. The patterns on her display indicated something more akin to the blind, chemical reaction of antibodies to an invading bacterium. The more defenders the human force burned down, the more appeared behind the first ones to continue the assault.
    Still, Kara had the impression that their attack, fierce and unrelenting as it was, was more for show than anything of substance. It might even be a diversion of a sort, an attempt at a primitive kind of combat