Submicroscopic, it lived in colonies within the cells. Though not intelligent in any human sense, it did seem to be able to enforce an amazing set of rules on an entire planet, given an incredible capacity for evolving to meet any threat to the ecosystem and subdue it. Living an entire life span in only three to five minutes, its ability to evolve into whatever was necessary to obey its genetic coding—to keep things as they were—was strong. Within six months the organism had evolved enough to take care of the human interlopers, attacking and corroding all non-native materials and permeating and establishing a symbiotic relationship with the humans.
The other planets, however, held different fates for intruders. Different atmospheric balances, gravitational forces, radiation intensities—all sorts of differences existed on each, so this bug, this submicroscopic life form, could not change those worlds into Lilith. Instead, the organism changed. On Medusa it adapted the host organism to the new environment, striking a balance that way. On Charon and Cerberus it struck a balance within its hosts that was to its liking but which caused bizarre side effects in those hosts.
Worse, the Warden organism seemed to have some sort of link to the solar system of its origin. Remove someone infected by it and the Warden organism died—and sadly, since the organism had modified every cell of the body to to its own convenience, the host also died, horribly and painfully. Humans could live in the Warden Diamond, even travel in-system, but they could never ever leave.
Many scientists devoted their lives and careers to the problem, deliberately trapping themselves on the Warden worlds and establishing scientific colonies still run by descendants. But the solution, in the main, defied them—which of course only infuriated them and spurred them on all the more.
But it was not to be the scientists who would settle the bulk of the Diamond; it was the criminal class. A Utopian system sophisticated enough to maintain a frontier did not want to waste those people who had somehow found and exploited flaws in their system. The cream of the criminal class in a technological society was often the most brilliant and innovative, but such deviates could hardly be allowed in the civilized worlds or even tolerated for long on the frontier. Until the discovery of the Warden Diamond, these people had to be eliminated for the good of the social order. Now it was possible to transport this criminal elite, along with assorted political prisoners and other social undesirables, to a place where they would be free to be their immoral or amoral selves and still retain the inventiveness necessary to come up with something the Confederacy could use.
The perfect prison. Only, of course, what that accomplished was to place the most brilliant sociopathic—and psychopathic—minds together in one place, in contact with one another. They and their descendants built empires. Each world had unique attributes, held attractions for those the Confederacy and its Assassins had not yet caught. Cash could be shunted away to Cerberan and Medusan banks; loot of all kinds could be hidden forever on Charon or Cerberus until needed. Even Lilith, which would tolerate nothing alien, was a true repository for secrets channeled in and out of its protected orbital satellites to trusted members of the Lilith hierarchy. The strongest, cleverest, and nastiest reached the top and held power over planet-wide criminal syndicates whose influence reached into the heart of the Confederacy. The heads of these syndicates called themselves the Four Lords of the Diamond, and they were doing a nice job getting even with the society that sent them there. Now they were working for an alien enemy that had the potential to destroy the entire system, a fact the Confederacy discovered very late in the aliens’ game—and almost by accident.
The humans had little defense, as the aliens surely had realized. Agents sent to the Warden worlds faced almost certain death if discovered. If not, they were stuck there along with the criminal lords and their descendants and subject people. The situation tended to make keeping an agent loyal a big problem, since there was nothing he or she could be offered as a reward and it was a lifetime job. One such agent, a volunteer, became one of the Four Lords himself.
Yet the Confederacy’s only link to the alien menace that might attack and destroy them at any time was the Warden Diamond. They had to put not just agents down there but their best—and they finally figured out a way to do it, more or less. They took their best agent, an Assassin First Class of absolutely impeccable loyalty and devotion, and then introduced him to the Merton Process, by which the personality and memories of someone could be stored in a computer and then fed into other bodies.
The original minds in those surrogate bodies were of course destroyed. Twenty or thirty individuals died before a personality graft “took,” but that was all right—they were all antisocials anyway. Thus was their best agent “placed” into four totally different bodies and dispatched to the four Warden worlds. Once there, each had to act alone to find out what he could of the alien menace and, in any case, to accomplish a true Assassin’s task—kill each of the Four Lords of the Diamond, causing at least a disruption in leadership that might buy the Confederacy some time.
All the while the original Assassin sat in orbit off the Warden worlds on the picket ship that enforced the quarantine and waited for his four alter egos to report so that he could correlate what they found with his analytical computer.
Three of the four had within them a tiny organic transmitter that the computer and special satellites could pick up signals from and amplify, making them walking communicators on the surface. Raw data would be fed constantly to the analytical computer, then through a process called integration the computer and original agent could be linked, his own mind sorting the raw data bits into a subjective report that could be used to evaluate the raw data. The transmitter gave them what the alter ego on the planets said and did; the integration process gave what he thought.
The same man could thus be four different places at once while he also evaluated the information as an objective observer. Each agent would try to assassinate the Lord of his particular world; the original would try and take their experiences to solve the riddle of the alien’ menace.
But on Lilith things had gone both right and wrong. Right because the job had been done, but wrong in that the man had changed, or been changed, by his experiences, by his isolation, by bis hatred of his other self up in space.
Two reports had come in almost at the same time. Lilith was taken first, and it shook the watcher’s self-confidence and self-image. Nothing had happened the way it should have. The mission was on track, but in the process his own ego had somehow gotten derailed.
Cerberus would be the second report, and he was very nervous about facing it. He didn’t fear for the mission—that was a different matter. He feared what he might find out about himself. But after a night in the ship’s lounge and a fitful sleep that didn’t help at all, he knew he would go back, knew he would undergo the process. He feared neither death nor any enemy, and in fact had only now found the one thing he did fear.
Himself.
And so he finally approached the reclining chair once again. Slowly, hesitantly, he relaxed, and the computer lowered the small probes which he placed around his head; the computer then administered the measured injections and began the master readout.
For a while he floated in a semihypnotic fog, but slowly the images began forming in his brain as they had before. Only now they seemed more definite, clearer, more like his own thoughts.
The drugs and small neural probes did their job. His own mind and personality receded, replaced by a similar, yet oddly different pattern.