Battlemind Read Online Free PDF Page B

passed on across the perimeter and briefly caressed Miles Pritchard’s machine.
    She could hear him screaming as his machine exploded in blue flame and molten Naga-matrix.
    “Pritch!”
    The screaming cut off sharply as the link failed. With a jolt, Kara realized that fully half of the recon company’s warstriders were down, unresponsive… and the smaller Web machines were spilling into the perimeter now through gaping holes in the defensive line.
    Not much time left. Maybe, though, they could still test the Web’s resilience. “Heads up, everybody!” she called over the general channel. “I’m taking that gokker with a Heller!”
    “Negative on that, Spearpoint,” Overwatch called. “You’re too close—”
    “Gok that,” Kara snapped. “If it’s a choice between letting that monster step on me, and taking a bite out of him as I go down, then it’s chow time!”
    She was initiating the launch sequence as she spoke, keying in mental code phrases that unlocked her Falcon’s two CTN-20 Hellbrand missiles. Her dorsal surface split in two, the launcher unfolding as protective panels blossomed open. Another command overrode the fail-safe mechanism; each Hellbrand carried a seven-kiloton tactical nuclear warhead, pocket microyield thermonukes with a blast radius of at least ten kilometers, and they were programmed not to detonate within fifteen kilometers of their launch point. Kara, however, was in no mood to be fussily particular.
    “Nuke!” she yelled, with much the same fervor of a golfer shouting “fore.” She gave the mental launch command, and the CTN-20 whooshed from its half-buried launch tube, yellow flame stabbing from its aft venturi, trailing white smoke as it arced toward the huge target just a few kilometers away. A heartbeat later, she sent the second missile arrowing after the first.
    The first missile was swatted down by a bolt of lightning, but the range was so close that the pyramid didn’t have time to shift aim to the second high-velocity target. It streaked in low, striking the pyramid just beneath its base.
    An intense, dazzling, blinding pinpoint of radiance expanded in an instant to engulf the pyramid; seconds later, the sound hit, and with it the shock wave of a blast equivalent to seven thousand tons of conventional high explosives.
    “Hunker down, everyone!” Kara yelled into the inferno, but it was uncertain whether anyone even heard her. The roar, deafening, cataclysmic, blotted out everything else. The light, so dazzling at first, turned dark as a hot wind shrieked inward toward the sudden vacuum that marked ground zero, swirling dust and smoke and furiously burning gasses in and up and out, me whole rising in a filthy gray pillar of boiling ash.
    Kara could no longer see the cloud. That flash had burned out most of her optical sensors, and the searing wind lashing across her warstrider now kept her plastered against the heaving, buckling ground. She felt the wind stripping the last of her nanoflage from her hull. Then two of her four legs were ripped away, and her magnetics lost their grip on the magfield within the alien world’s surface. It was like being caught in a hurricane, and as the roar peaked in a thunderous crescendo, her Falcon was smashed back across the ground.
    There’d been little hope for any of the human-jacked striders on the surface of Core D9837. That had been known from the beginning, the results already factored into the plan of battle. They were here to get information, data on the Web that was already being relayed back to intelligence personnel waiting with the Unified Fleet on the other side of the Nova Aquila Stargate.
    Kara disliked suicide missions as a matter of principle, but this was one she’d been forced to accept. The human alliance needed this data, and this was the only way of obtaining it.
    She surveyed the almost solid block of red warning discretes illuminating the lower right corner of her visual display. Her Falcon was very