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tactics. As she fought, she could see a vast army of Web machines off on the horizon some fifteen kilometers away, building… something, a towering black metal something in the distance, as literally millions of individual, quasi-living parts leaped and skittered and flew and flowed into one another, their bodies dissolving, reforming themselves before her eyes.
    It looked like a pyramid, growing higher moment by moment, five-sided on a pentagonal base, encased in something like translucent black plastic, though fire directed at it by her strider and those of her companions bounced and flared as harmlessly from that surface as might hurled rocks from a starship’s hull.
    “Pel?” she called. “This is Kara.”
    “Yeah, boss.”
    “Throw a high-mag scan on that pyramid coming up in my sector. What do you think?”
    “It’s big.…”
    “I can see that.”
    “Sorry. I couldn’t resist.”
    She could feel the warmth of Hochstader’s grin. He was a big, gentle, easygoing man, popular with his troops, and with a sharp tactical sense that Kara had come to rely on since he’d joined the Phantoms the year before. He possessed a quiet reserve that the most intense firefight couldn’t penetrate.
    “It looks like they’re using their mutability against us,” he continued, more seriously. “You see what they’re doing under high mag?”
    “Yeah. Looks like the little ones are melting together, or reorganizing themselves, somehow, to make the big one.”
    “What do you want to bet they’ve analyzed our firepower and energy output and are building one big combat machine that we can’t scratch but could swat the lot of us like insects?”
    “I’m not taking those odds. I think that’s what it is… a really big warstrider. Overwatch? Are you copying this?”
    “Roger that, Spearpoint. And we concur with Lieutenant Hochstader’s analysis. Are you ready to pull out?”
    She hesitated, weighing her options. They couldn’t stay here much longer.
    “Overwatch, we still don’t have what we came for. We want to shove these things hard enough to find out what makes them break, and so far they’ve been doing all the shoving. Give us another couple of minutes.”
    “Copy that. We’ll be standing by, Spearpoint, if you want to abort.”
    “Rog.”
    The pyramid was moving forward now, its form apparently stabilized. Kara stroked the thing at radar wavelengths, measuring. Nearly half a kilometer high, it appeared to be levitating on tightly reined-in magnetic fields stronger than those found flickering at the heart of a sun. Its base, all but lost in deep shadow, was not flat but appeared to bulge downward, again in a five-sided figure, making the object an immense and lopsided decahedron, its glossy surface mostly black but picked out here and there with pale yellow bands and surfaces. The surfaces appeared smooth; she saw nothing like antennae or weapons marring those vast expanses… nor was there any indication that it was a command unit of some kind.
    It came closer, bulking higher until it blotted out most of the ragged spiral of the Great Annihilator high in the sky. Lightning played about the base; one bolt reached out and connected with Warstrider Harrison’s damaged Falcon, the play of energy briefly illuminating the entire battlefield with the radiance of many suns. By this time, all of the surviving warstriders were firing at the advancing, floating mountain but with no success that Kara could detect. So far as she could tell, volley upon volley of missiles, of laser beams, of charged particle bolts, of hard-driven streams of high-velocity deplur rounds could not even scratch that terrifying and apocalyptic vision of destruction.
    Lightning flared once more from the pyramid’s base. Excess charge bled through air and seared the ground beneath; the primary beam shrilled thunder as it passed low above Kara’s warstrider, and for a horrifying moment she thought her machine had been hit… but the bolt