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 - technically an agent of the TechnoCore, having assasinated the Hegemony Consul two centuries prior to her first in-story appearance, is 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, non-verbal communication with her siblings, and the ability to extrude neural-interface tendrils from her fingers that can retrieve data from both brains and computers.
Biography
Rhadamanth Nemes claims to have grown up in the farming and fishing planet of Esperance when speaking with Pax officials,[1] and that most of her military training was done on Lee Three and on the Lambert Ring territories.[2]
Victims
SPOILER ALERT! The section(s) below are MAJOR SPOILERS.
Characters killed by Rhadamanth include:
- The Consul [3]
- Aenea
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