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 greatest 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
