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favoritism—especially sexual favoritism—could destroy the best of military units. “Ran, do you copy?”
    “Right here, Captain,” he replied.
    “Let’s pull in the perimeter. Everyone who’s left, pull in tight for mutual defense.”
    “Affirmative,” Ran said. “Will! Cyn! Are you on-line?”
    “Here, Lieutenant,” Sergeant Cynthia Gonzales replied.
    “Me too,” Sergeant Willis Daniels added.
    “You heard the Captain. Let’s get ’em rounded up.”
    Together, the officers and NCOs began herding the dazed, surviving warstriders across the flame-scoured plain, gathering them at a wreckage-strewn depression in the earth not far from where they’d originally touched down. The surface of the battlefield might have been swept clean by nuclear fire, but the Webbers had been emerging from underground as well as descending from me sky, and Kara had every reason to believe that more would be appearing at any moment.
    Kara reached the depression and surveyed the blasted landscape. The other surviving striders began appearing now, dragging their way through the rubble or floating just above it in awkward dips and lurches. A quick scan of the display showing the company’s readiness figures gave her the bad news. Only six of me warstriders possessed all of their weapons intact, and two—Ed Furillo’s and Angel Shannon’s—were completely unarmed, with all weapons burned away or sealed uselessly inside faulty hull panels.
    Her tactical display showed something else as well. There was movement in the shadows of the towers around the LZ, and in the sky high above the spreading cap of the mushroom. The Webbers were emerging once again onto the fire-savaged surface of this world.
    “Maybe those of us who can should fire our Sabers,” Cynthia suggested. “Targets of opportunity… while we still can.”
    “Negative on that,” Kara told her. “This is recon, not search-and-destroy. We’ll wait and use them if we have to, and only in self-defense.”
    She caught the other woman’s mental shrug, and a hint of disagreement. “As you say, Captain.”
    “Captain Hagan!” Will called. “Check the pyramid!”
    Pivoting, she focused her damaged sensors on the ruin of the artificial mountain. The gaping hole in its side and bottom appeared to be closing, the edges softening and blurring as the countless small machines that had made up its bulk in the first place rearranged themselves. She could see individual pieces flowing down the canted surfaces or dripping off the rim of the base to the ground below. Was it repairing itself… or dissolving back into its component parts? She couldn’t tell, but it was uncomfortably clear that the nuclear strike had not solved their problem.
    It had only postponed it.
    She stared for a long moment at that huge and enigmatic structure. Looking into the hole in the thing’s side was like staring into a cavern, a mysterious black place filled with unknown horror. The horror was made worse by the knowledge that she’d gambled, and lost. Her decision to use nukes had been a bad one; the enemy had been slowed, but not stopped… and the price she’d paid had been half of the company, and probably the success of the operation as well.
    “Ran?”
    “Yeah?”
    “You’ve got command. Hold the perimeter.”
    “Now wait a minute, Kar.…”
    “We need more data. We still don’t know how they’re coordinating, how they’re working together. Maybe I can get close enough to find out.”
    “That’s not necessary, Captain,” the voice of Overwatch said.
    “I think it is.”
    “Kara, you can’t go in there!” Ran told her. “Not alone!”
    “Who’s going to stop me?”
    Ran’s strider unfurled one gleaming manipulator, jointed and oil-shiny. She watched the glitter of several imaging lenses as they scanned her.
    “What are you going to do, Ran?” she asked quietly. “Dismantle me?”
    The appendage hesitated, then gave an eloquent mechanical imitation of a shrug. “Damn