The rest of the briefing was pretty routine. After it I was over I simply got off the John and pushed it back I in the wall. I heard a flushing sound and, the next time I used it, discovered that my waste wasn’t the only thing that had disappeared. Because it had been a direct neural transmission, less than a minute was needed to get all the information they could pack into it, too.
Extremely efficient, the security boys, I told myself. Even my ever-vigilant jailers on the other end of those lenses and mikes would have no idea that I was anybody other than who I was supposed to be.
As to who that was, I’d gotten my first mental picture of myself from the briefing. Brutish, my old self might have said, but in many ways I was not all that bad-looking and definitely oversexed—something I really didn’t mind at all.
I was Cal Tremon, a lone-wolf pirate, murderer, and all-around bad boy. Over two meters tall, 119 kilos of pure muscle and gristle. My face was square and tough-looking, with a shock of coal-black hair fading into a beard that framed it like some beast’s mane, with a big, bushy mustache that connected to the sideburns. A broad mouth, thick-lipped, atop which sat a slightly flattened but very large nose. The eyes were large and a deep brown, but what made the effect so menacing was the bushy black eyebrows that actually connected at the bridge of the nose.
I looked and felt like some primordial caveman, one of our remotest ancestors. Yet the body was in good condition, tremendously powerful and formidable—far more powerful than my own had been. The muscles bulged. It would take some getting used to, this huge, brutish body, but once fine-tuned it would, I was certain, be an enormous asset.
On the other hand, the one thing Cal Tremon had never been and never would be is a cat burglar. He was about as petite as a volcano.
He. I, my mind corrected. Now and forever after / was Cal Tremon.
I lay back down on the cot and put myself in a light trance, going over all the briefing information, filing, sorting, thinking. The data on Tremon’s own life and colorful, if bloody, career was of particular import. Although he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would have any friends, there was a world full of crooks down there. Somebody must have known him.
Chapter Two
Transportation and Exposure
Except for regular meals I had no way to keep track of time, but it was a fairly long trip. They weren’t wasting any money transporting prisoners by the fastest available routes, that was for sure.
Finally, though, we docked with the base ship a third of a light-year out from the Warden system. I knew it not so much by any sensation inside my cloister but by the lack of it—the vibration that had been my constant companion stopped. Still, the routine wasn’t varied; I supposed they were waiting for a large enough contingent from around the galaxy to make the landing worthwhile. I could only sit and go over my data for the millionth time, occasionally reflecting on the fact that I probably wasn’t very far from my old body (that’s how I’d come to think of it). I wondered if perhaps he didn’t even come down and take a peek at me from time to time, at least out of idle curiosity—me and the three others who probably were also here.
I also had tune to reflect on what I knew of the Warden situation itself, the reason for its perfection as a prison. I had not of course swallowed that whole—there was no such thing as the perfect prison, although this one had to come close. Shortly after I was landed on Lilith and started wading in and breathing its air I would be infected with an oddball submicroscopic organism that would set up housekeeping in every cell of my body. There it would live, feeding off me, even earning its keep by keeping disease organisms, infections, and the like in check. The one thing that stuff had was a will to live, and it only lived if you did.
But it needed something, some trace element or some such that was only present in the Warden system. Nobody knew what and nobody had been able to do the real work to find out, but whatever it needed other than you was found only in the Warden system. Whatever it was wasn’t in the air, because shuttles ran between the worlds of the Diamond and in them you breathed the purified, mechanically produced stuff with no ill effect. It wasn’t in the food, either. They’d checked that. It was possible for one of the Warden people to live comfortably on synthetics in a totally isolated lab such as a planetary space station. But get too far away, even with Warden food and Warden ah-, and it died; and since it had modified your cells to make itself at home, and those cells depended on the organism to keep working properly, you died, too —painfully and slowly, in horrible agony. That distance was roughly a quarter of a light-year from the sun, which explained the location of the base ship.
All four worlds were more than climatologically different, too. The organism was consistent in what it did to you on each planet, but—possibly because of distance from the sun, since that seemed to be the determining factor in its life—it did different things to you depending on which world you were first exposed to it, and whatever it did stuck in just that fashion even if you went to a different world of the Diamond.
The organism seemed somehow to be vaguely telepathic in some way, although nobody explained how. It certainly wasn’t an intelligent organism; at least it always behaved predictably. Still, most of the changes seemed to involve the colony in one person affecting the colony in another—or others. You provided the conscious control, if you could, and that determined who bossed whom. A pretty simple system, even if nobody had yet been able to explain it.
As for Lilith, all I would remember was that it was some sort of Garden of Eden. I cursed again not having been fed the proper programming to make me fully prepared. Learning the ropes there would take time, possibly a lot of it.
About a day and a half—five meals—after I’d arrived at the base ship, a lurching and a lot of banging around forced me to the cot and made me slightly seasick. Still, I wasn’t disappointed. No doubt they were making up the consignments and readying for the in-system drop of these cells. I faced the idea with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I wanted desperately to be out of this little box, which provided nothing but endless, terrible boredom. On the other, when I next emerged from the box it would be into a much larger and probably prettier box—Lilith itself, no less a cell for being an entire planet. And what it would make up for in diversion, challenge, excitement, or whatever, it would also be, unlike this box, very, very final.
Shortly after the banging about started, it stopped again, and after a short, expectant pause, I again felt a vibration indicating movement—much more’ pronounced than before. Either I was on a much smaller vessel or located nearer the drives. Whatever, it took another four interminable days, twelve meals, to reach our destination. Long, certainly—but also fast for a sublight carrier, probably a modified and totally automated freighter. The vibration stopped and I knew we were in orbit. Again I had that dual feeling of being both trapped and exhilarated.
There was a crackling sound, whereupon a speaker I’d never even known was there suddenly came to life. “Attention, all prisoners!” it commanded, its voice a metallic parody of a man’s baritone. “We have achieved orbit around the planet Lilith in the Warden system,” it continued, telling me nothing I didn’t know but probably informing the others, however many there were, for the first time. I could understand what they must be going through, considering my own feelings. A hundred times mine, probably, since at least I was going in with my eyes open even if no more voluntarily than they. I wondered for a fleeting instant about Lord Kreegan. He had gone in voluntarily, the only one I ever knew about. I couldn’t help but wonder why. Perhaps there were things about the Warden Diamond that were outside the knowledge of the Confederacy.