Warden 3

by Isaac Hooke

  Upon further consideration, she realized she had probably indeed been around.

  Shards of glass from the broken dome littered the frozen ground here, buried beneath a thin layer of snow. That glass proved slippery, and Rhea had to watch where she stepped.

  “So, lamps or no lamps?” Will transmitted.

  “I think it would be suspicious if we didn’t turn them on…” she answered.

  She and the others activated their helmet lamps, brightening the dreary landscape. The cones of illumination from their helmets had a strangely sharp quality: that made sense, considering without an atmosphere the light would not diffuse.

  She paused a moment to clear some of the snow beneath her with her boot. A few centimeters deep she discovered a translucent polycarbonate coating similar to what Centaar had. She wondered if the Europans had stolen the tech from the Ganymedeans. Probably.

  They passed the wreckages of vehicles and bounded by rubble fanning out from partially collapsed buildings. She spotted belongings and furniture among the debris: faded paintings, intricate cupboards, frozen tapestries, clothing.

  “A salvager’s paradise,” Will commented.

  The occasional mummified body protruded from the rubble. Sometimes she saw a cyborg with its metal head blown open, at other times a robot laying broken in pieces. All of them were covered in a thin layer of snow like everything else.

  “Not a paradise,” Rhea said, feeling the sadness grip her all over again. “But a crypt.”

  The debris became denser as they advanced, intruding well onto the roadway, and the party slowed down from a bound to shuffle. Will and Rhea had to be very careful to avoid the jagged edges of rebar and other sharp objects that protruded: it wouldn’t take much to puncture their suits. While they were all equipped with repair kits, there was a good chance the occupant would be dead before any repairs could be applied, at least in Will’s case.

  Rhea observed her surroundings as she shuffled forward. She searched the blown-out windows of the buildings, scanned the rooftops, and generally looked for signs of ambushers. The helmet’s limitations on her field of view meant she had to look farther to the left and right than she ordinarily would have; that, combined with the threat of puncturing debris ahead meant she could spare less time for each glance than she would have liked.

  There was also still broken glass from the buildings. It was hard to see, so she had to be careful where she placed her feet when passing a dangerous wreckage, lest she slip and impale herself.

  As they continued forward, the buildings fell away entirely to the right, leaving a wide plain exposed beneath the geodesic dome, which was mostly intact overhead. The icy surface below was smooth, unblemished.

  “Why no buildings here?” Will asked. “Was it a park?”

  Rhea walked a short distance away from the cover of buildings and onto that plain. She kicked at the snow with the heel of her boot, clearing it. There was no polycarbonate layer coating the surface within.

  “Not a park,” Rhea said. “A lake. The Ganymedeans usually allowed some of the crust to melt along the peripheries of their colonies. They liked waterfronts. Let’s turn inward. I feel exposed here.”

  Will nodded and proceeded back into the cover of the buildings. Rhea was glad when the plain was behind her—out there, it would be all too easy for a sniper to target them from beyond the dome.

  “We’re almost out of comm range with the shuttle,” one of the escorting robots announced.

  “It’s these buildings,” Will said. “Maybe we should tell it to circle overhead and maintain communications? That way it can call the cavalry if necessary.”

  Rhea considered. “Circling wouldn’t be too unexpected… archeologists often use drones and other craft to scout the ruins for them.” She glanced at the robots. “Tell the shuttle to assume a holding pattern overhead.”

  “It has been done,” one of the robots replied.

  Soon the shuttle circled overhead, at least according to the overhead map. She glanced up at one point and caught sight of its thumbnail-sized underside, satisfying her that it was really there.

  After ten minutes they reached a plaza of sorts. It was circular, with what must have once been a fountain at the center—a broken statue resided there, surrounded by a low rim.

  “So, have you seen enough yet?” Will asked.

  “No, let’s press on, just a bit longer,” she replied.

  “Searching for those ever-elusive memories, huh?” Will sent, muting the two Centaar robots. “All right, well, if you want to cross this square, I’d advise hugging the walls of the surrounding buildings. Or avoiding it entirely… this would be a good spot for a sniper to camp out.”

  “Leave it to humans to use the term ‘square’ to describe an area that is clearly circular in nature,” Horatio transmitted.

  Rhea ignored the latter remark; she was too busy scanning all the different buildings that surrounded the plaza. Instead, she answered Will’s original suggestion. “I think we can cross. But we hug the walls, as you suggested.”

  Will shuffled over the debris, keeping close to the wall formed by the buildings lining the left-hand side of the plaza. Rhea followed. The two escorting robots came next, with Horatio still bringing up the rear.

  She scanned the rooftops and blown-out windows past the fountain, looking for enemies. She was beginning to wonder if there was anyone out there after all. Surely any assassin would have struck by now.

  Her gaze drifted to the snow-covered ruins of the fountain. The way it seemed to thrust up from the surface reminded her of the icy crags and sprawling ridges she had witnessed on the frozen plain outside the dome. She was convinced this was the moon she had seen in the flashback that had come to her on Earth, during the fight against the Hydras. She remembered sprinting across the ice beneath a starry sky, wielding some kind of dual energy weapon suspiciously similar to the Ban’Shar. The weapon in her memories started off as a pair of disks she used to defend against the plasma bolts of the attackers, exactly like the Ban’Shar. And when it came time to move on to the offense, she’d transformed those disks into deadly blades.

  Yes, that fight had very likely taken place here, on Ganymede, where she had no doubt been defending against soldiers from Earth who had come to destroy her home. That meant it had happened over thirty years ago.

  There was something else about that fountain. Something vaguely familiar, that she couldn’t quite place.

  Another flashback came to her.

  She stood next to an icy monolith. Its shape was almost identical to the snow-covered fountain, wide at the bottom, and tapering to a blunt point at the top.

  The frozen ground lay beneath her feet, and she stood inside some sort of defile carved into the icy crust. Her metal body was completely exposed to the void of space, and yet somehow, she could still breathe.

  Another woman stood beside her. Like Rhea’s, this woman’s face dipped into the uncanny valley, what with its all too big eyes and mouth, so she knew immediately the woman was a cyborg. Her artificial skin ended at the upper chest, and the rest of her body was metal. Around her head, Rhea caught the telltale silhouette of a glass dome, seemingly built into her cyborg body.

  Rhea realized she had such a dome enclosing her head and neck too, along with the tanks necessary to supply the oxygen and pressurized atmosphere her brain required to stay alive in the void. Somehow, she knew that dome could retract as necessary when she entered an atmosphere.

  She didn’t have to worry about radiation interfering with her circuitry, as this warrior body had the equivalent of BNNTS built directly into the armor. Not that the fully operational ring network in orbit was allowing any radiation to reach her, anyway.

  In the last flashback she had of this moon, she had wrongly assumed she was wearing a spacesuit. It had happened so fast… she realized now that she probably hadn’t been suited up in that memory, either.

  “You have come far,” the woman was saying. “You are my great
est student.”

  “Thank you, Sensei,” Rhea said.

  “I’m going to nominate you for the Earth mission,” the Sensei said.

  “I would be honored,” Rhea said.

  “You should know, there’s no coming back from it,” the woman continued. “We don’t expect anyone to return.”

  Rhea looked into the woman’s eyes and saw pity there. But also, strength. Love. And a resolve to destroy their enemies, no matter the cost.

  “Do you still want to go?” the Sensei pressed.

  “Yes,” Rhea said. “I have sworn to protect Ganymede with my life. If it means dying on another world to save my own, then I will do it.”

  “If you fail, Ganymede will likely be destroyed,” the Sensei said.

  “I won’t fail,” Rhea insisted.

  And then she was back in the square once more.

  “Rhea?” Will was saying. “Why are you stopping?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Rhea?” Will pressed.

  A sickening feeling came over her. If she were human, there was a good chance she would have vomited in her suit. Instead, she staggered, and had to lean against the wall of the building beside her to support herself.

  Will rushed to her and held her up. “What’s wrong?”

  “I had a flashback,” she said.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “I…” She muted the two combat robots so only Will and Horatio would hear.

  “My greatest fear has come to pass,” she said. “I was one of those responsible for the Great Calming.”

  “What?” Will said. “What are you talking about?”

  “I was sent on some kind of suicide mission,” she said. “One that was meant to bring Earth to its knees, from the sounds of it.” She looked up, meeting his eyes, and when she spoke again, her voice was wild. “How can I live with myself? I helped kill billions.”

  “Do you have any recollection of the mission itself?” Will said. “Any memories of planting bombs on Earth?”

  “No…” she admitted.

  “Then you don’t know for sure you were involved,” Will said. “Your mission could have been something else entirely. Assassinating some political or military figure, disabling a power grid. Rescuing prisoners.”

  “No, you didn’t hear her talk,” Rhea said. “She made it sound like this mission was vital to Ganymede. Whatever I did had to be part of the same plan… a mission meant, at the very least, to set in motion the Great Calming.”

  “Maybe all you did was retrieve the blueprints of cities or other vital documents,” Will said. “Something the war planners could use to implement the Calming.”

  “Then I still contributed indirectly,” Rhea said.

  “Yes, but my point is, maybe you didn’t know what your bosses were going to do with it,” Will said. “Who knows, there’s a chance you didn’t even go at all. You could have backed out at the last minute. Or grown ill or something.”

  His words calmed her. She still wasn’t convinced he was right, but she nodded anyway. “I suppose anything is possible.”

  “Good, so stop beating yourself up about something you don’t even recall,” he said. “You could be misremembering, too, by the way. Mind wipes can do strange things to the brain. If any memories manage to survive, they can get mangled, mixed up. As far as you’re concerned, you could be remembering the gameplay from some fully immersive VR game set during the Ganymede war. Who knows, maybe they’re even false memories, imprinted by whoever wiped your mind.”

  Will had sown enough seeds of doubt that Rhea no longer felt completely devoured by guilt. It was still there, of course, but she promised herself not to think about it too much. The notion was just too painful.

  I couldn’t have done it. I couldn’t have.

  And yet, she knew it was entirely possible that she had been instrumental in the attack.

  She shook her head.

  Don’t dwell upon the unthinkable.

  She was starting to understand what Will had been trying to tell her all along: it was probably for the best that her mind was wiped. The past was often best forgotten.

  She had to wonder if she was the one who had ordered the mind wipe: after all, if it was true what she’d done, she didn’t think she would be able to live with the pain of killing all those people.

  Imagine that, I wiped my mind to forget, yet accidentally left myself enough clues to remember what I’d done, if I followed the trail obsessively enough. Next time I’ll have to be more thorough and order the technician to wipe everything, to prevent even those last clues from remaining. This means clearing out my language abilities, my muscle memory. Everything.

  She considered what would be left of her if she did that. She’d probably be reduced to the state of a slobbering infant.

  Several flashes of blue light came from her right, from somewhere across the square.

  Rhea dropped instantly, or rather as fast as the lesser gravity allowed, and ducked behind the closest pile of rubble. Will joined her. The two of them immediately deactivated their headlamps, so as not to give away their positions, and drew the pistols from their holsters.

  A fragment broke away from the building behind her and landed on the ground. She glanced up at the building, and saw a deep borehole carved into the surface where she had been standing only a moment before.

  She glanced to her right, toward her remaining companions.

  The two combat robots were reduced to smoldering piles of slag. Their weapons had been rendered useless, having melted to their frames along with the spacesuits.

  Horatio, meanwhile, had dived behind the wreckage of a vehicle in time. He, too, had turned off his headlamp.

  More plasma fire erupted, traveling upward. Rhea realized their attacker was chasing off the shuttle.

  Sure enough, on the overhead map the shuttle’s icon ripped westward until it froze, indicating the craft had passed beyond communications range.

  “We got a sniper,” Will announced needlessly.

  9

  Rhea ducked lower and glanced at Will.

  “At least our friend hasn’t ID’d you,” he said. “Otherwise, you would have been the first to go down.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” Rhea said. “Some assassins like to toy with their prey.” She thought of the Scorpion, and how he wanted to make sure Rhea knew who it was who had come to kill her.

  “You think it’s the Scorpion?” he asked, reading her mind.

  “Could be,” she replied.

  “I think our attacker targeted the robots simply because they were the most obviously armed,” Horatio said. “Think about it. If you were a sniper, scanning for your target, and couldn’t make an ID, wouldn’t you destroy the two biggest threats to you first?”

  “Do we have a location?” Rhea said.

  “I’m reviewing the footage of the attack, and the follow-up against the shuttle, now,” Horatio said. “There. I’ve got him.”

  Rhea received a share request. When she accepted, a flashing waypoint appeared on her overhead map. She glanced toward the building indicated by the waypoint. It was mostly concealed by the debris, but according to the flashing icon that overlaid her vision, their attacker resided inside a window close to the upper levels.

  “You think he’s still in that same spot?” Rhea asked.

  “Why would he move?” Will said. “He has us pinned.”

  “Someone’s got to get up there,” Rhea said. “Flush him out.”

  “Cover me,” Horatio said.

  Rhea glanced at Will, and the man nodded behind his faceplate.

  She partially arose and swung her pistol toward the waypoint indicated on the upper window. She zoomed in slightly and spotted the gray silhouette of what could have been a head.

  She opened fire. Will released plasma bolts from his pistol as well.

  The gray form ducked from view.

  At the same time Horatio got up and dashed to the row of buildings immediately
behind. “I’m headed for the rooftops. Shutting down comms to reduce the chance of discovery.”

  The robot ducked inside one of the open doors.

  Rhea continued to fire at the same spot with Will; as she did so, she spotted very subtle motion in the adjacent window, two meters from her target. Seeing that motion saved her.

  “He’s moved!” She ducked as she said the words, and a plasma bolt tore through the air just above her.

  She quickly relocated, crawling to another section of the rubble, which was piled higher; meanwhile more plasma bolts ripped into the debris behind her. Will also changed positions, and momentarily peered past his own cover to return fire.

  Rhea joined in.

  What followed was a tense standoff with both parties switching positions after every volley, and neither side gaining the upper hand. But the point was merely to distract their enemy and buy Horatio time.

  The assassin must have been wondering where the third surviving member of the group lurked and would be on the lookout for an attack from behind. It was Will and Rhea’s job to keep their enemy distracted long enough for Horatio to effect that rearward strike.

  And then, finally, plasma fire appeared from the current window that housed their attacker. It didn’t target Will and Rhea, but instead traveled horizontally across the plaza, striking the opposite building.

  A large form leaped from that same window and vanished from view, landing somewhere in the dim square below. Horatio appeared in the broken window frame. He was firing downward, activating the plasma rifles built into his forearms and shooting right through the fabric of his suit.

  The robot reactivated his communications and rejoined the comm channel.

  “I’ve got him pinned next to the fountain,” Horatio said. “I’d suggest splitting up and coming at him from the left and right flanks.”

  “Any idea who he is?” Rhea asked.

  “I believe it’s the Scorpion,” Horatio replied. “But he’s been augmented since our last encounter.”

  “Yet again,” Rhea commented.

  More bolts came from Horatio, but the robot ducked from view as plasma fire was returned from somewhere on the far side of the fountain.