by Isaac Hooke
Her body was continually shrieking, as her nano machines digested materials to repair the damage to her servomotors.
She heard a shout from her right as Khrusos was lifting his body for yet another slam attack.
“Hey asshat,” Miles said. A steady stream of plasma bolts slammed into Khrusos’ side at near point-blank range. Miles had collected Burhawk’s rifle and was unleashing it from almost right underneath the big cyborg.
Khrusos sidestepped, momentarily taken off guard by the attack, and then swiped at Miles with one of those legs. The blow sent Miles flying across the room. He hit the marble wall so hard that a blood stain was left behind on the surface. When Miles slid to the floor, he didn’t get up.
Miles had likely killed himself, but the act had brought Rhea the time she needed to escape from underneath Khrusos. The big cyborg slammed his body down once more, but Rhea vaulted free. She was smaller and lighter than before, thanks to the battering she had taken, and was very easily able to vault onto the closest legs of Khrusos. In three quick bounds she had clambered onto his back, and she stabbed her combined blade down, sinking it deep into the cyborg’s dorsal quarter. She ran forward, dragging the blade, widening that gash.
In response, Khrusos leaped upward, intending to repeat what it had done to her on the floor, with the ceiling.
But Rhea was expecting that, and she pulled the blade free and leaped off. Khrusos succeeded only in bashing himself against the bare ceiling.
Rhea deactivated her Ban’Shar to hit the floor rolling, and then clambered to her feet. Khrusos landed amid several of her fallen robot allies, crushing them. Min, Horatio and Burhawk were also nearby. It was sheer luck they weren’t trampled as well.
She sprinted across the room, toward the far side, while Khrusos slowly approached. He seemed more cautious after that last attack.
Meanwhile Will continued shooting the cyborg from the side, but wisely didn’t get too close to Khrusos, unlike Miles.
Maybe I should get nearer, Will sent over a mental channel. Looks like Miles might have done a bit of damage when he closed the range.
No, Rhea replied. You’ll just kill yourself for no reason. Any damage Miles did has already been repaired. Look at Khrusos. Nothing can stop him. Stay back! And that’s an order.
Like I take orders from you, Will quipped, but thankfully he didn’t get closer.
She paused next to one of the metal tentacles she had severed, and wrapped her palm around it, letting nano machines flow into it, intending to use some of its metal to replenish herself.
To her surprise, the nano insects immediately vacated the material, returning inside her empty-handed.
What’s wrong? Will asked when he noticed her shaking her head.
I can’t take repair materials from the limb, she replied. It’s like something is repelling me.
And then Khrusos leaped at her, forcing Rhea to abandon the tentacle. She jumped wide and activated her Ban’Shar in shield mode this time. A tentacle slammed directly into one of the plasma disks. While the tip of the tentacle disintegrated, the momentum shoved her well back, so that she caused far less damage than she would have liked.
As the severed tentacle retracted, she deactivated her Ban’Shar and grabbed on. She pulled herself upward, and leaped between the tentacles, swinging between them, intending to pull herself behind that head and onto the thorax once more. But as she moved from tentacle to tentacle, wrapping her hands around each, she sensed something she hadn’t noticed before.
Inside each tentacle, beneath her palms, she perceived the pulse of machine life. It was not something she felt with her hand, but her mind. Thousands of individual entities, power sources drumming with energy. Integrated with the circuitry inside that limb, like her own.
That meant Khrusos had nano machines inside him, technology that was running on a communication band her mind-machine interface could readily understand. Ganymedean technology. Likely there were trillions of them inside him. He had taken the Ganymedean technology and increased the iteration limit. It seemed that although Khrusos had outlawed nano machines, he had no qualms about using them for himself.
That would explain the transformation she saw, changing from steps and platform, to the iron monster before her. The reorganization needed at a micro-structural level essentially required the technology. That would also explain how he was so readily repairing himself.
As she pulled herself onto the thorax, her gaze momentarily alighted upon the floor below, and she realized that many of the limbs she’d sliced off were gone: Khrusos had reabsorbed them. Definitely nano machines.
As to why she hadn’t felt them when she touched the severed tentacles: with the limbs disconnected from the main body, the nano machines would have been inactive. But they likely still emitted some sort of signal that prevented her technology from breaking them down for spare parts.
And while she couldn’t use the opposing nano machines for repair materials, perhaps she could take them for herself, commanding them to leave that body, and enter hers…
Indeed, they seemed to be talking to her. Calling out to her.
Tentacles flung around the large metal head toward her and tried to bash her off. She leaped higher, out of the way, bounding up the thorax. Then she knelt, pressing her palm into the base of that metal head.
She reached out with her mind, as Min had taught her, and commanded the nano machines within to join her. She wasn’t certain it would work. Perhaps Khrusos had had his scientist program in some failsafe to prevent such a transference.
But to her delight, a moment later the foreign nano machines began flowing into her arm, augmenting it, widening it.
Khrusos leaped upwards then, and bent his head far forward, essentially flattening the area between the thorax and head so that Rhea was fully exposed for the coming impact with the ceiling. She was forced to roll away, and narrowly avoided the impact with the ceiling.
Fragments fell away from the rooftop around her as she slid down his flank; she let her hand press against his side as she descended, so that she continued to siphon off nano machines. When she reached the bottom of the thorax, she grabbed onto one of the nearby legs, and similarly drained it as Khrusos fell toward the floor.
Tentacles came in at her, and she activated the Ban’Shar shield in one hand to defend herself. But as usual, while she damaged the incoming appendage, the momentum was enough to drive her well backwards, and she was sent flying away. She deactivated the Ban’Shar before landing skidding on the floor.
The nano machines she’d stolen had spread throughout her body, so that she was back to her normal size. A little bigger, in fact.
She expected Khrusos to rush her then, but instead he turned about and headed toward the far side of the room, to the section where the throne and its platform had formerly been located. A large portion of the wall slid upward, and Khrusos made a running leap toward it, tucking in his head and legs so that he narrowly squeezed through, carried by his impetus. On the other side he lowered his spiderish limbs and landed, then turned left, disappearing down the hall.
Rhea was confused. Was he actually frightened?
She glanced at Will, who was lingering near the opposite wall and transmitted: “Get back to the other entrance. You have two sides to defend against now. At least the first entrance offers some semblance of cover.”
“What about you?” he returned.
“You know I can’t let him get away,” she replied. She was already sprinting at her top speed toward the opening where Khrusos had fled. She was worried the wall would seal before she reached it.
But she needn’t have worried. It remained open.
As soon as she passed through, she was struck by a tentacle and sent flying into a group of waiting walkers.
She activated her Ban’Shar blades and swirled, so that the plasma swords tore through her foes. She made short work of them, then turned toward Khrusos.
Her enemy broke right through the wall of the
palace, and sunlight streamed in from outside. Khrusos leaped upward, vanishing from sight once more.
Rhea dashed forward, deflecting the energy bolts nearby infantry robots launched at her, and vaulted through the gaping hole Khrusos had torn in the wall. When she was outside, she glanced up, and saw her foe climbing the exterior of the building.
Rhea followed, skirting up the pillars of the colonnade, making handholds as necessary in the marble with her robot strength. She reached the entablature and pulled herself onto the main wall, pursuing Khrusos onto one of the spires that thrust from a palace corner.
Her enemy continued to scale that spire, which dwindled in circumference the higher he climbed. He was heading toward the apex.
She risked a glance down as she chased: below her, the grounds looked quite small. Almost dizzyingly so. She spotted an incoming plasma bolt and activated the Ban’Shar of one hand to deflect it. She switched it off a moment later and scooted around to the far side of the spire so that she wasn’t in the line of fire of whatever had launched that bolt.
She continued higher. Khrusos stood balanced on the apex, which ended in a point, and lingered there, perched like a spider waiting for its prey. A hundred meters above him lay the curved glass of the geodesic dome, held in place by the polycarbonate struts of the framework.
She approached cautiously, at first. But when six octocopters ascended into view, she realized Khrusos had climbed only to draw her out into the open, so that she was in plain sight of the airborne drones.
She quickly dug into the marble surface with one hand, and unholstered her pistol. She shot down one of the octocopters, then sheathed the weapon, switching on the Ban’Shar in one smooth motion to deflect incoming bolts fired in return. She managed to take down two of the octocopters with her deflections and swapped back to her pistol to down the remaining three.
She spotted more octocopters approaching in the distance and holstered the weapon to continue her climb. She increased her pace, climbing the ever-diminishing spire.
When she was still several meters away from Khrusos, her enemy suddenly leaped down, and Rhea was forced to throw herself to the side. She intended to grab onto the spire once more as she fell, because it was wider below her, but one of those tentacles batted into her, and sent her hurtling upward at a terrific speed.
She smashed into the glass of the geodesic dome, which didn’t break, thankfully, and grabbed onto one of the protruding struts before she plunged to her death—there was no handhold, so she made one.
She swung one arm around to grip another strut nearby, so that she was hanging there, spread-eagled, facing the palace. The ground seemed to spin vertiginously below her.
A dark blur drew her attention to the palace.
Khrusos had hurled himself off the spire and was headed directly for her.
She was going to be crushed, her body rendered helpless as she plunged to her doom below. Unless…
She let go of the struts moments before Khrusos impacted her. She timed the release to land on one of his legs, intending to vault off it toward the palace. But she never reached that leg, because another tentacle batted into her, drawing her upward with Khrusos.
The big cyborg crashed into the geodesic dome and tore right through. Glass shattered around her, and polycarbonate beams broke away.
Rhea was carried through by both momentum and the force of the explosive decompression; because Khrusos had batted her, she arced away from him, spinning through the air.
She felt a moment of helplessness as the red landscape spun around her, and she knew death was coming.
But then she landed on the side of the dome. While the impact was hard, and would have killed an ordinary human, she survived because she’d only fallen a hundred meters or so.
She could do nothing as gravity and momentum carried her sliding down the smooth exterior.
She realized her nano machines had automatically activated when she entered the Martian atmosphere, and had constructed a translucent dome around her head, filling the space inside with a pressurized, breathable environment for her brain.
Khrusos was similarly gliding down the dome exterior not far from her. With one hand, she tried to redirect her descent so that she was angled more toward him.
Worried about the dome’s loss of integrity, and the resulting impact on the citizens of Hongton, she glanced over her shoulder and was relieved to see that repair drones had already begun arriving: they fought against the explosive decompression to spray rapidly hardening expanding foam into the gap, forming an emergency patch.
She returned her attention to the convex surface in front of her. The rocky ground below was fast approaching.
Khrusos was well ahead of her and was going to be the first to the bottom, as he headed straight down rather than at an angle like her. However, before he skidded off the bottom edge, he shoved off, vaulting away from the geodesic dome to land a good distance in front of it.
The slope was quickly growing steeper the further Rhea descended, and her slide accelerated. She didn’t want to risk injury, so she turned sideways and slammed a hand into the glass surface, pressing hard with her fingers to slow herself. She scraped a long, thin runnel along the exterior of the glass as she continued downward.
When she judged herself close enough to the ground, she decided to shove off as Khrusos had done. She released the surface and pushed away with both hands and feet, arcing away from the dome toward the rocky terrain below. Beside her, the glass composite gave way to concrete as she passed the annular base of the geodesic dome.
She landed on the rocky, red surface of Mars a moment later; her legs buckled only slightly under the lesser Martian gravity, and she straightened her knees to turn toward Khrusos.
The enormous cyborg was already bearing down upon her. Rapidly. Four of the tentacles shrunk as she watched, merging with the head, only to emerge a moment later as a pair of mandibles that chomped eagerly at the space in front of them, as if anxious to bestow a life-ending embrace.
Rhea broke into a run as well, sprinting directly toward her incoming foe. The wall that formed the base of the geodesic dome wasn’t far to her left, and she swerved slightly closer to it, intending to use it as a springboard of sorts.
She waited until Khrusos was just the right distance away from her, then leaped toward the concrete wall. Her left leg contacted the surface at a height in line with her enemy’s tentacled head, and she let the knee bend almost all the way down, absorbing the momentum of her flight. She straightened the leg, releasing the stored energy and vaulting off the wall, launching herself even higher, so that she arced up and over Khrusos. She timed the jump so that she landed on his thorax.
He had swerved toward her in an attempt to snatch her out of the air, so that she nearly overshot her target, and had to back away from the edge. After doing so, she quickly knelt, planting her palms against the metal surface of her foe. She summoned the nano machines within to join her, calling upon those not just beneath her hands, but the units directly under her knees, and toes as well. Foreign nano technology flowed into her from Khrusos, merging with her. Enlarging her.
A blur of motion drew her gaze upward: a tentacle was hurtling straight for her. She rolled to the side but was too late—the translucent dome that enveloped her head was hit in a glancing blow, and partially shattered.
She rolled to the side as more tentacles came in. Her nano machines rapidly set to work, repairing the dome, so that in only a few seconds pressurization returned, and she could breathe again. It did come at a slight cost, of course, because the machines had taken materials from her chest armor to repair the damage.
Those tentacles kept coming in, not giving Rhea a chance to steal more nano machines—she had to continually dodge the attacks. She activated her Ban’Shar—the knuckles of the weapons were partially engulfed by her expanded hands—and sliced away the tips of the appendages that came at her, but realized the futileness of that when the severed tentacles landed on t
he thorax and were quickly reabsorbed.
She deactivated her Ban’Shar and continued dodging instead, trying to come up with some sort of plan to purloin more of those nano machines and add them to herself.
Then she realized she didn’t necessarily have to touch Khrusos with her palms to take the technology… had she not drawn out the nano machines through her knees and toes only moments before?
She focused, concentrating on the soles of her feet as she jumped across the thorax, while still doing her best to dodge those tentacles. Every time her feet made contact, she felt the foreign nano technology below her, and she called to it. Soon, with each touch of her soles to the metal surface, nano machines flowed in droves from Khrusos, swarming up into her legs, augmenting her calves, then legs.
She jumped around, continuing to take more and more of the machines as she avoided the attacks; her upper body began to expand as well, starting with her torso, then her arms, neck and head. As she continued to grow, her utility belt broke away, along with the pistols it held. Her Ban’Shar became swallowed by her expanding hands, so that she could no longer activate them.
The artificial skin of her face stretched at first, threatening to break, but then nano machines began to supplement its microfibers, too, so that it didn’t tear away, and instead expanded along with the rest of her body. The translucent dome that enveloped her head also grew.
Growing desperate, Khrusos threw his body to the ground, and rolled over, trying to crush her.
Her bigger body was lighter and less cumbersome than it should have been thanks to the lower gravity, and Rhea was able to readily leap onto the closest leg, grabbing onto it with her hands and swinging upward so that she landed on his underbelly. When she landed, she continued the nano machine drain via her soles.
Because she was larger, and thus made a bigger target, it was becoming harder to dodge the many appendages: she was unable to move away in time when Khrusos wrapped his legs around her.