He sat back in his chair, unable to keep a little bit of smugness from his expression and tone, and told Morah the basics. The Chief of Security was impressed.
“Your theory has some holes,” he told the man on the picket ship, “but I am extremely impressed. You certainly know… enough. More than enough. I’m afraid we all vastly underestimated you. Not merely your agents down here in the Diamond, but their boss as well. Particularly their boss.”
“Then you, too, have some holes in what you know,” he came back. “One particularly major one. But I’ll give you that one as a gift—you’ll find out sooner or later anyway, and it might help you in plotting a course. All of them—all four—are not my agents. All four are quite literally me. The Merton Process, remember.”
It had been a complex and elaborate plot by the Confederacy, to counter, in part, an even more complex and enormous plot by their enemy. The Confederacy had been fat and complacent all those centuries, and then, suddenly, it had been confronted with evidence that an alien power of superior technology had discovered them, had fashioned such perfect robots to replace key personnel that absolutely no known method would detect them, and that the Confederacy was, in fact, under some sort of systemized attack. The focus of the attack was the Warden Diamond, four human-habitable worlds used as prison planets for the most brilliant criminal and perverted political minds. The perfect prison, since all four worlds were contaminated by an organism that fed, somehow, off energy available only within the Warden system. The organism invaded the bodies of all who landed there, mutating them and giving them strange powers; but it also imprisoned them, as the organism could not survive far from the Warden system’s sun—and neither could anyone it inhabited.
But placing the top criminal minds and political deviants together on four worlds in contact with one another had created the most powerful criminal center ever known, one whose tentacles spread far from the Warden system and continued to run the criminal underworld of a thousand planets remotely, and more efficiently, than ever before. But all these masterminds were trapped, and they hated the Confederacy for that trap.
Into that situation had come the aliens. Technologically superior to the Confederacy, they were numerically inferior and so alien that they could neither take on the Confederacy openly and win nor do so secretly. Then they encountered the Warden Diamond and realized what the four worlds held. A deal was struck. The heads of the four worlds—the most powerful and ruthless criminal minds alive—the Four Lords of the Diamond were approached with a proposition. Use their own power and the technology of the aliens, together with their knowledge of mankind and the Confederacy, and subvert it. Cause so much trouble, so much disruption, that the Confederacy would be too concerned with its own problems to even think of the Warden Diamond.
Marek Kreegan, Lord of Lilith, himself a former agent for the Confederacy, came up with a detailed plan for replacing key personnel all over the Confederacy with the impossible robots. Through Wagant Laroo’s operation on Cerberus, the robots themselves were first primed with the minds of the very people they would replace. The Cerberans could swap minds as a byproduct of the Warden organism and also had Dr. Merton, creator of the mechanical-mind-exchange process being used experimentally by the Confederacy, to make it work right. Aeolia Matuze of Charon ran a world where almost anything could be easily hidden, so it served as the meeting place between aliens and agents—and as Morah’s base of operations. Finally, Talant Ypsir, Lord of Medusa, provided the hardware, raw materials, and in-system transportation of alien technology—and, perhaps, even the aliens themselves. Each of the Lords also controlled vast underworld organizations within the Confederacy itself.
Kreegan hoped to avoid a terrible war, but he intended to disrupt and perhaps break up the Confederacy itself, leaving a fragmented bunch of worlds he and his fellow Lords could take over. The aliens had promised that, in return for removing the Confederacy’s threat, they would provide a means to escape from the Warden Diamond and its insidious organism.
But when a robot’s cover had been blown, and it had demonstrated its superior capabilities, the Confederacy quickly caught on to the plot and came up with one of its own. To send an agent down on the Warden worlds was not enough. The Lords controlled their worlds; besides, any agent down there was trapped, too, and soon would figure out which side best represented his future.
But, using the Merton Process, the mind of their top agent was simultaneously placed in the bodies of four convicted criminals with long histories; each was sent to one of the four Warden worlds. Also implanted within each was the means by which whatever they saw and did would be transmitted to their original agent, in orbit on the picket ship. With the aid of a sophisticated analytical computer, it was hoped he would be able to piece together the puzzle of the Warden Diamond. In the meantime, his own personality should add psychological reinforcement to the command given the agents down below—kill the Four Lords, disrupt their timetable,, buy time for the Confederacy.
But as the agent watched, even experienced, each of his counterparts’ lives on Lilith, Cerberus, and Charon, he had also watched as his counterparts—himself—threw aside their basic values, their loyalties, the precepts of the Confederacy which he/they had accepted and to which he/they had devoted a lifetime. Now, convinced he’d figured out the plot and being pressured by his computer and his superiors, he was telling Morah this. It was not self-confidence that made him tell the mysterious, still unseen aliens’ Security Chief the secret; rather, it was to inspire confidence. Morah knew and had close at hand at least one of “him”—Park Lacoch of Charon. Now Morah would know just who be was really dealing with.
The Security Chief was suitably impressed. “All of them you? Fascinating. In a sense, it’s taking Kreegan’s robots one step farther. All right—I agree we could probably strike a deal. But I suspect if you’ve lived those lives along with them, you’re not quite the man they sent any more—and they know it. I know the first for a fact, for we are having this conversation. I infer the second from your own statements. You do not expect to survive the next encounter in your lab. So that leaves me nowhere, you see. Any deal we might strike is certain to have no validity to your bosses. Still, I am touched by your attempt—and by your devotion. You do not have to go back into that lab, you know.”
The agent looked squarely at the screen, into those weird eyes that none could look into in person. “If you know me at all, you know that I do. My title is Assassin, but I am no hired killer. I have a job to do—if I can.”
“Just hypothetically—if you can survive this last entry and the report, what would you do? Where would you go? Not back to the Confederacy, surely.”
He grinned. “Are you making a hypothetical job offer?”
“Perhaps. I hope you do survive. It would be most interesting to talk to you at length.”
He laughed. “You have only to talk to Park. Or Cal Tremon. Or Qwin Zhang. Or—hmm … I’ll be damned. I don’t know what name I’ve got on Medusa, I haven’t gotten to that one yet.”
Morah was impressed. “You figured out all you have without Medusa? You have an amazing mind.”
“I was bred for it.” He “sighed. “If I survive, we will meet, and soon. If I do not, then the others, different as they now are, will carry on.”
“It would be fascinating to have the five of you together. That is something to think about.”
“Fascinating, yes,” he admitted, “but I’m not sure I’d be the one in the group who’d be the most popular.”