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
