“Sensei,” Rhea said, lowering her hood.
Min glanced at Burhawk. “I thought you said she was wiped?” The woman even sounded the same.
“She has been,” Burhawk said. “Believe me. But her memories seem to be coming back faster than before.”
The woman nodded. “It happens sometimes in subsequent wipes. They fail to take entirely. The engrams of the mind adapt, the weakest are sieved out, leaving only the strong.” She looked off into the distance. “The memories that are used most are likeliest to remain: the muscle memories of the body, and of the tongue.”
“Teacher,” Rhea said, returning the woman’s focus to her.
“Don’t call me that,” Min said. “Never call me that.”
“Why?” Rhea said. “It’s who you are.”
“You don’t understand,” the woman said. “I’m the one who set the bounty on your head.”
Rhea switched to an attack posture and activated her Ban’Shar.
12
“Why?” Rhea said, her voice little more than a hiss, like the drawing of a blade from its sheath.
The other Wardenites followed her lead, unholstering their hidden pistols; some pointed them at Burhawk, others Min.
The Ban’Shar had cut through her long sleeves when they emerged, and the constituent plasma disks tinted everyone blue in the swirling murk.
“I didn’t realize your mind had been wiped at that point, nor that you were free of mind chips,” Min said. “Burhawk told me this only recently. I had already quadrupled the bounty on your head by then. I thought you were still Khrusos’ pet. His Dagger. When I saw you on the streaming sites, fighting those bioweapons—the Hydras—I believed it part of some campaign to increase the president’s popularity in some way. That you would reveal to the world that you fought for him all this time, and that he was the one who ordered you to protect Rust Town, or some such garbage. I was wrong.
“Even when Khrusos issued the warrant for your arrest, I still thought it some ruse… some big show to recall you in a manner that would deter assassination. But then your mentor came to me. I nearly killed him”—Burhawk snorted at that—“but something held my hand. He said he had been trying to track me down for years. I didn’t believe it when he told me you had attempted to assassinate the president, nor that he had personally seen to your subsequent mind wipe. I laughed and told him never to return. But then a few days later—today—I saw footage of you fighting against the security robots in the space terminal. That was when I knew I had made a very big mistake.”
Rhea stared at the woman for several moments.
“So you posted the bounty to kill the Dagger of Khrusos?” Rhea asked. “And not the Warden of Rust Town?”
Min nodded. “That is correct.”
Rhea tentatively deactivated the Ban’Shar. But she remained in a battle crouch. Will and the others lowered their weapons.
She glanced at Will. “Why did Veil tell me it was Khrusos himself who posted the bounty?”
“Dunno,” Will said. “Maybe she had unresolved business with the president and wanted you to conclude that business for her.”
“I can tell you why,” Min said.
Rhea and Will returned their gaze to her.
Min continued: “When I posted the job, I used the alias ‘Harbinger 59,’ a reference to a Trojan Khrusos made many years ago, which allowed him to hack into the Department of Defense and consolidate his control over the space navy. I knew there would be a few bounty hunters applying for the job who would recognize the alias, but I never thought any of them would actually believe it was the real Khrusos. Apparently there were: such as Veil.”
Rhea studied her old sensei.
“So I’m not the last Ganymedean after all,” Rhea said after a moment.
“No,” Min agreed. “There are a small network of us left. A handful, scattered throughout the solar system.”
“What was our original mission?” Rhea asked. “When we came to Earth? I remember escaping from a Ganymedean ship burning up in reentry, and nothing more.”
“Unfortunately, I haven’t yet been able to recall what our mission was, even after all these years,” Min said. “Khrusos is the only one who knows.”
Rhea cocked her head in confusion.
“Oh,” the woman said. “Yes, you wouldn’t know this. Like you, my mind was wiped. I became a slave of Khrusos, and lived in his palace on Earth, until moving with him to Mars. Also like you, I began to remember. But when I finally realized who I was, rather than trying to assassinate Khrusos, I took the more prudent course of action and ran away, going into hiding.”
“Why did you want to assassinate me, a fellow Ganymedean?” Rhea asked. “Yes, I was the Dagger, but I was also your sister. One of your pupils at that.”
“You were my greatest student,” Min said. “I couldn’t bear the idea of you continuing to serve that beast. I remembered you as you were, and the thought of your skills being perverted to perform such evil deeds was too much for me to bear. If I couldn’t kill Khrusos, at least I could kill you, his favorite pet, and thus free you from his servitude, and deny him his most powerful weapon. It was cruel, perhaps, but I thought I was doing the right thing at the time.”
The woman’s gaze drifted to Rhea’s exposed hands, and she stood up, coming closer. She didn’t lift her eyes from those hands. Something strange glinted within them, but for only a moment. Rhea wasn’t quite sure what it was. Greed?
“This technology was believed lost,” Min said. “May I?”
She extended her fingers, and glanced at Rhea, as if requesting permission to touch her.
Rhea nodded.
Min touched Rhea’s hand, and slowly intertwined her smaller fingers between Rhea’s.
The touch was intimate, yet also probing.
Rhea was beginning to feel uncomfortable,
