Charon: A Dragon at the Gate Read online

  A cure was sought, but to no avail. The Warden organism, it seemed, so changed the host’s body chemistry that the host could no longer live without the Wardens there—but the Wardens required more, something else, something not dear. When you removed a Warden-infected person from the Diamond, the organisms died—and so did its unfortunate host.

  The mutation was so complete that those on one Warden world could move from world to world, but could not move outside the system—ever. Humans could live, work, and build in the Warden Diamond, but once there, they could never leave.

  It became the perfect prison for those master criminals.

  So first bad come the scientists, then the criminal elite. Over two hundred years a large indigenous human population had arisen on the four worlds as well—by far the majority. But the criminal element was the elite and the rulers. They hated the Confederacy for what it had done to them, and thanks to the Wardens within them, no longer felt human but something quite apart, alien, having no loyalty or kinship to the civilized worlds. Quickly they established control over their worlds, and quickly, too, they took advantage of interstellar communications to reestablish contact with their far-flung criminal empires and even with the Confederacy itself. They were quick to realize that the Warden Diamond not only kept them in, it also kept the Confederacy out. They controlled the fate of all sent to the Warden Diamond, and even the best Confederacy agent not only was at their mercy but was also, like them, changed and trapped there forever.

  It usually took very little time for such agents to realize on which side their bread was buttered.

  Their old cronies Outside in the rest of the Confederacy were quick to note that, except for Lilith, one could steal the Mono Lisa and by remote courier could leave it in the Diamond in plain sight—and no one could touch it, let alone recover it But since the Mono Lisa was made of natural pigment and canvas, and was inanimate, it could not “die” should the thief ask for its removal, retrieving it beyond the range of Warden life. The Warden Diamond was the perfect repository, for the cops couldn’t even confiscate the evidence.

  It became the safe-deposit box for the rulers of the Confederacy, because of its total inaccessibility. Much of the wealth and many of the secrets of the great interstellar empire went through the Warden Diamond, which gained more and more by proving itself reliable and secretive.

  To the leaders of each of the worlds—the best of the best, the criminal elite, the top crooks evolution could produce—accrued tremendous power and wealth that reached to the far limits of the Confederacy and far exceeded their powers back in the old days. These four leaders of the four Warden worlds were probably the most powerful human beings alive.

  The Four Lords of the Diamond.

  And yet so much did they hate the Confederacy for their exile that they were prepared to do almost anything to get back at it.

  And now an alien race of unknown form and unknown size, power, and intent had discovered humanity before humanity had discovered it. Discovered and poked and probed until that alien race understood the system man had built very well indeed.

  Seeing how other alien civilizations had been treated, they knew war was inevitable, but were by no means sure they could win it. And thus had the aliens contacted the Four Lords of the Diamond, and thus had they made a spectacular deal.

  They took out a contract on human civilization.

  The Four Lords, motivated by revenge and by unknown inducements from the aliens, would have full access to the alien technology and their own far-Sung criminal networks as well as to the experiences of all those exiles on the four Warden worlds. The aliens would remain unknown, unseen, while the Four Lords would be so powerful as to be untouchable.

  “You have a tough problem,” the young man sympathized. “You don’t have any reliable people on the Warden worlds, and anybody capable of doing what has to be done goes over to the other side. What can you do?”

  Commander Krega, head of Confederacy Security, nodded in agreement. “Exactly. You see where this puts us.

  Now, of course, we do have some people down there. None are a hundred percent reliable, and all of them would slit your throat in an instant if doing so was in their best interests. But there are occasional inducements, small payoffs of one sort or another, even a little blackmail on ones with close relatives back in the Confederacy, that give us a little edge. A little, but not much, since the Four Lords are pretty ruthless when it comes to what they perceive as treason. Our only advantage is that the worlds are still fairly new to us and thus relatively sparsely settled. There is no totalitarian control on any of them, but different systems and hierarchies on each.”

  The young man nodded. “I have the uneasy feeling that this is leading up to something, but I must remind you of what you told me about past agents, and also that I’d be but one man on one world.”

  Commander Krega grinned. “No, it’s not quite like that at all. You’re a damned good detective and you know it. You’ve located people in places nobody else looked twice at you’ve outmaneuvered and outguessed sophisticated computers and some of the best criminal minds ever known, despite the fact that you are still quite young. You are the youngest person with the rank of Inspector in the history of the Confederacy.

  “We have two different problems here. One is that we must identify this alien force and trace it back whence it came. We must know who they are and where they are and what their intentions are. Even now it may be too late, but we must act as if it were not. Also, we must neutralize their information conduit, the Four Lords. How would you do it?”

  The young man smiled thoughtfully. “Pay the Four Lords more than the aliens are. Put ‘em to work for us.”

  “Impossible. We already thought of that,” the commander told him. “No, making a deal is out We have no cards.”

  “Then you need somebody good down there on each world, looking for clues to the aliens. There has to be some sort of direct contact: they have to get then: information out and their little playtoys like that fancy robot programmed and in. An agent might turn traitor, but he wouldn’t be motivated by revenge if he were a volunteer, and he’d sure as hell feel closer to humanity than to some aliens of unknown looks and designs.”

  “Agreed. And it would have to be the very best for all four. Someone who could survive, even prosper under their conditions while having the ability to collect enough data and get it out But how do We buy the time we also need?”

  The young man grinned. “Easy. At least easy to say—maybe nearly impossible to do. You kill all four Lords. Others would take their places, of course, but in the interim you’d buy months, maybe years.”

  “Our thinking exactly,” Krega agreed. “And so we ran it through the computers. Master detective, loyal, willing to volunteer, and with an Assassin’s License. Four needed, plus a coordinator, since they all would have to be put to work simultaneously and would, obviously, have no likely reason or means to contact one another. Plus, of course, spares for insurance who could be sent in if something happened to one or more of the others. We fed in all the attributes and requirements and you popped out.”

  The young man chuckled dryly. “I’ll bet. Me and who else?”

  “Nobody else. Just you.”

  It was an elaborate and complex project—and the most closely guarded secret of the Confederacy. Called the Merton Process, after its inventor, it involved actual personality transfer. It was a rather messy affair, and the new personality not only totally destroyed the old but “took” in only one out of thirty or so cases. The others died, sometimes quite horribly. But the Confederacy had a number of expendables for such purposes and didn’t really think twice about it. Originally conceived of simply as a way of securing immortality for the rulers of the Confederacy and the best and brightest brains it had, the Merton Process was now to be put to a more rigorous test.

  One very special man’s entire personality was recorded, digitalized, quantified, and stored in the Merton computers, which would
then be used to create four new hims—all with his personality and intellect but in four very different bodies. Meanwhile the original himself would be out there in space, in his special module with his complementary computer partner. A tiny organic transmitter implanted in the brains of his counterparts on the Warden worlds would send all that they saw and did back to the module, the raw mass of data going into the computer, then filtered through the original detective’s own mind to form a subjective report. The combination—the objective raw data and the subjective report—would allow dispassionate analysis of all the data gathered by the counterparts below.

  The young man was thoughtful for a moment “And what if I refuse after all this? Or to put it another way, what if I say to go ahead and my, ah, alter egos decide once down not to follow through?”

  Krega grinned. “Consider what I’m offering. We have the capacity to make you immortal—if you succeed. If you succeed, no reward would be high enough. You are an atheist You know that when you go, you go forever—unless you succeed. Then you and, because of the soft imprints, your alter egos as well will continue to exist. Continue to live on. I think it’s quite an inducement”

  The young man considered it. “I wonder if they will see it that way,” he mused.

  Four Lords of the Diamond. Four clever, enormously powerful people to kill. Four keys to an enigma that could well spell the end of humanity. Five problems, five puzzles.

  Krega didn’t really have to offer a reward. It was irresistible.

  3

  He reentered his command module from the great picket ship that was always on station near the Warden Diamond, just beyond the life range of the Warden organism. Totally protected, it was a great city in space with all the amenities, offering both comfort and security. Still, none of the thousands aboard the combined research and quarantine enforcement ship knew what the man was doing there, nor could they enter or in any way discover the secrets of the module.

  “You have been away more than three days,” the computer chided him. “We have had an incoming data report from Charon all this time.”

  “I know, I know,” he grumbled. “I just … needed some time, that was all. I needed a little contact with the Confederacy and its people.” It shamed him a bit to admit that last, even to himself, such a blow was it to his self-image, but he was not the same man who had first entered this module so long ago. The experience he had shared with his counterparts on Lilith and Cerberus had changed him greatly, and he really didn’t like it one bit. It wasn’t as if he were getting reports from agents down there: hell, those people were him.

  The sociopathic worlds of the Four Lords were a contradiction of every single principle and belief he’d always held so dear. It wasn’t so much seeing the Confederacy and its values the way the criminals did—that was excusable, since he was dealing with psychopaths of one sort or another. But when he himself down there on those worlds began to doubt and finally fractured all those bedrock ideals—well, that was something else again.

  The Confederacy did not look so good, so much like paradise, when viewed from outside, and that view was difficult to refute. He feared for his own sanity most of all, and that made him fear another report, another secondhand life, yet another insane challenge to his orderly universe. He knew it, understood it, but that didn’t help much at all.

  The fact was, he most of all didn’t like discovering that he was as human as all the others in the human race, subject to the same fears, emotions, and failings. He had always thought himself superior, above all that. No more, no more …

  Nor had it escaped him that he was learning too much, knew too much even at this point. He was a tool of the Confederacy, just as a saw, drill, hammer, or—well, computer—was a tool. Useful to get the job done; then, as if such a tool grew, say, radioactive, readily destroyed when the job was over. He wasn’t kidding himself. They didn’t even have to worry about keeping any sparks alive within him—four of him were already down there, on each of the Warden worlds.

  The moment he solved the riddle of the Four Lords of the Diamond he was a dead man. His faithful computer might jettison the module into the sun or explode it, might supercharge it with electricity. The worst part was, he couldn’t even opt out now, not even with a mindwipe. They’d just trot out the Merton recording, make another him, have that new him go through the same experiences—and reach the same point he was at right now.

  But he would have to solve the puzzle first. He and he alone—not even the computer—would decide that terrible moment. It was an ironic, terrible box, and he knew it. The fate of human civilization, perhaps human life, was very much in his hands. Yet he could save them or himself—not both.

  His final, agonized decisions were nonetheless a compromise. First solve the puzzle. Then decide what to do with that solution. What troubled him most was the nature of that decision. He suspected even now that the nature of this alien threat was not as good and evil as he had originally believed.

  He sat down at the lab screen and thought a moment “Put up a wide scan of the Lilith organism,” he told the computer.

  The screen in front of him lit up and showed a strange enlargement Its closest relative was a virus, yet it was infinitely smaller, an alien abstract design of tiny lines and pits actually able to combine on an atomic level with actual molecules—molecules! It wasn’t a real creature but a few extra chemical ingredients on the end of a molecular formula, extras that somehow didn’t really change what the molecule was but nonetheless controlled it Once organism and molecules were linked, to remove the organism from inorganic molecules was relatively simple—they were always on the end. But in carbon molecules the Warden was not at the end at all but in the middle. Remove the Warden from a carbon chain and the chain fell apart—and so did the individual it helped make up. In much the same way, the synthetics with their odd and unnatural chains attracted the Wardens as carbon molecules did, but while the Wardens wormed their way in, they couldn’t stick. Synthetics disintegrated.

  There was an advantage to that, from the Confederacy point of view. It kept the Four Lords and their worlds technologically far behind the Confederacy, and limited their industry to what they could take from their own worlds and from the asteroids and other space junk in the system that the Warden somehow recognized as “natural.” In fact there were no important heavy metals on any of the Diamond worlds; mines on the asteroids and on the moons of the nearest gas giant, Momrath, provided the raw materials for the Warden worlds that could use any machines. Many down there could easily build an interstellar spacecraft, but they didn’t have the materials to do so.

  And yet, and yet …

  That thing on the screen couldn’t possibly be alive, not in any sense that any biologist understood life. More than that, it didn’t fit, not on the Diamond. The four worlds down there were very different, yes, but every one of them—every one—was composed of logical, rational, carbon-based life. Most of it wasn’t nearly as exotic as life on most planets in and near the Confederacy itself, yet it Was consistent and logically there.

  But nowhere was there any sign of anything else like the Warden organism. It didn’t belong there, not on those worlds. It had no dear ancestors, no relatives, no dead ends. In fact, it had no place or reason to evolve down there.

  “The remote probes—the ones that preceded the initial landings on all four worlds. Why didn’t those core samples show the Warden?”

  “The instruments were not really designed to look for something like it,” the computer replied. “Only after they knew something was there could they find it.

  “Mighty poor procedures,” he noted. “The whole idea of an exploration is to find just such new threats as this.”

  “If a question has not been asked it will rarely be answered,” the computer responded philosophically. “In other words, nobody can think of everything. Still, why the interest in the old samples? Surely you don’t think the Warden organism itself can be the aliens?”

  “No,
of course not. It’s an incredibly odd and alien thing, but even in its collective mode it’s hardly capable of a consciousness. You know, there are worlds in our catalogue where this thing wouldn’t really shock me or any of the scientists one bit—but not here. The thing doesn’t fit here. It’s as if an iceberg were suddenly found on a tropical world—it just doesn’t logically belong there.”

  “A number of researchers and theorists have noted as much. Some have even theorized an interstellar origin—it arrived, perhaps in a meteorite, and set up housekeeping. That is the prevailing theory.”

  He nodded. “But why just on Lilith? Or was it just on Lilith? How do we know we were the carriers to the other three worlds? Perhaps by the time we found the thing all four had already been contaminated, if they were.”

  “It has been postulated that the Wardens existed on all four worlds, too,” the computer told him. “Sampling work was taken from a base ship that was actually beyond the life range of the Warden organism. However, since plant life did not disintegrate in the Warden manner it was simply assumed that the Wardens were not yet there.”

  “Assumed … I wonder. What about the plant samples from Lilith, then?”

  “I just checked on that. The fact is, all vegetation died in the samples from Lilith, but there were a thousand natural explanations and it was not taken as a terrible sign. It wasn’t unusual enough in general surveys of alien worlds, really. Many alien plants are interdependent on organisms and conditions requiring exacting biospheres to survive—a minuscule change in pressure or temperature, for example. Although Lilith’s samples died first, all of the samples died within a period of a day or two at most. This is normal and expected. You cant possibly hope to duplicate every exact condition for totally alien forms of life. Still, your proposition is now beyond proof. All four worlds have the Warden organism.”