Artist's take on Nemes on a alternative cover of Endymion. Note: in the books, she is described as fully human in appearance.
Rhadamanth Nemes is an agent of the TechnoCore and a specialized trooper within the Pax's military forces. She is introduced in Endymion as the first soldier of her kind, later being joined in The Rise of Endymion by her "siblings" Gyges, Scylla and Briareus. It is worth mentioning that she is the first of her kind by far, having existed for at least two centuries and assassinating The Consul.
Overview and Abilities
Unbeknownst to most even within the Pax, Nemes is not actually human: she is a cybernetic construct, created as the first of a legion of artificial soldiers intended to combat the Ousters. In her normal state, she appears to be a short, compact woman with dark eyes and short black hair. Underneath her outer layer of skin is a framework composed of what appear to be carbon-fiber bones and synthetic muscle tissue; she can peel off and reattach sections of her skin when necessary.
Nemes has a number of abilities that assist her in combat. The most useful of these is her ability to "phase shift," which causes her to become "displaced" in spacetime and appear enveloped in a reflective layer resembling chrome steel. In this state, she has limited metamorphic abilities, being able to create bladed edges on her extremities. She is also able to enter "fast time" while phase shifted, allowing her to travel at near-instantaneous speeds and pull off complex maneuvers within nanoseconds or less. This ability parallels that of the Shrike, although Nemes' phase-shifting does not allow her to travel through time as the Shrike can.
During melee combat, Nemes can alter certain aspects of her physiology to suit her needs. Her artificial skeleton has sharp, angled corners and keels that can be used as cutting edges when her outer skin is removed, and her fingernails can extrude into long, sharp protrusions. In addition, she has redundant rows of sharp teeth that can lower into place to maximize her biting abilities.
Even in her non-phase shifted state, Nemes is extremely durable, able to withstand bodily trauma that would easily kill a human. While phase shifted, however, she is completely invulnerable to damage from conventional weaponry or nearly any other source: during her mission to kill Aenea on God's Grove, Nemes was blasted by a sustained energy beam from the orbiting Raphael and buried in molten rock, only to emerge completely undamaged when her siblings came to retrieve her some time later.
Nemes' other abilities include forehead-projected radar and ultrasound shriek sonar, non-verbal communication with her siblings, advanced sense of smell (detection and identification of distinct airborne organic molecules, about three times more sensitive than a typical gas chromatograph mass spectrometer's), night-vision, infrared-vision, and the ability to extrude neural-interface tendrils from her fingers that can analyse blood samples and retrieve data from both brains and computers.[1][2]
Biography
Rhadamanth Nemes claims to have grown up in the farming and fishing planet of Esperance when speaking with Pax officials,[3] and that most of her military training was done on Lee Three and on the Lambert Ring territories.[4]
Victims
SPOILER ALERT! The section(s) below are MAJOR SPOILERS.
Characters killed by Rhadamanth include:
- The Consul[5]
- Father Glaucus[1]
- Cuchiat and his band of Chitchatuk who accompanied Aenea and Raul on Sol Draconi Septem[1]
- Admiral Marget Wu[6]
- Archbishop Jean Daniel Breque[6]
- Father Farrel[6]
- Father LeBlanc[6]
- John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa (but he resurrected, thanks to his cruciform)[6]
- General Surkhang Sewon Chempo, leader of the Palace Guard[6]
- Reting Tokra, the Dalai Lama's regent[6]
- Carl Linga William Eiheji, the Dalai Lama's bodyguard[6]
Death
SPOILER ALERT! The section(s) below are MAJOR SPOILERS.
Rhadamanth Nemes died falling into the gas clouds and acid seas of T'ien Shan after her duel against Raul Endymion.[7]
However, other clones of Rhadamanth built by the TechnoCore actually exist. It is unknown if these clones kept memories from the original Nemes.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Endymion, 1996, Chapter 47.
- ↑ The Rise of Endymion, 1997, Chapter 11.
- ↑ Endymion, 1996, Ch. 49, pp. 486–487.
- ↑ Endymion, 1996, Ch. 49. Radamanth Nemes is introduced to other Pax officials.
- ↑ Endymion, 1996, Chapter 55.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 The Rise of Endymion, 1997, Chapter 21.
- ↑ The Rise of Endymion, 1997, Chapter 23.
