Lilith: A Snake in the Grass
( Four Lords of the Diamond - 1 )
Jack L. Chalker
Somewhere, from among the four human-settled worlds of the Warden Diamond, hostile aliens were spying on Earth. But no agent could be sent to investigate and report back; a symbiont invaded all life forms and destroyed any form of machinery. That called for extraordinary means. One agent was chosen, then four men were stripped of their own minds and personalities, and his was imposed upon them. hooked up properly, he could then receive their reports, without ever leaving safe territory. Each man was assigned one world to conquer. His mission was first to find the Overlord of that world and kill him, then to take over his link with the aliens. Of course all this must be done with no help beyond his own naked ability.
Lilith: A Snake in the Grass
by Jack L. Chalker
For Lou Tabakow, a great unsung friend of science fiction for almost fifty years and a man whose kindness and friendship I will always treasure.
Prologue
Background to Trouble
The little man in the synthetic tweed jacket didn’t look like a bornb. In fact, he looked much the same as most of the other clerks, junior computer operators, and political men on the make in Military Systems Command. Two beady little brownish eyes set a bit too far apart by a hawk nose, a twitchy little mouth above a lantern jaw—the kind of nebhish nobody ever looked at twice. That’s why he was so dangerous.
He wore all the proper entry cards, and when handprints and retinal patterns were taken at doors that could trap or even destroy if the slightest thing was wrong he was passed without so much as an electronic pause. He carried a small briefcase, unusual only in that it was merely clasped and not chained to him or attached in some other way. Still, that caused no notice or alarm—it was probably tuned to his body, anyway.
Occasionally along brightly lit halls he’d meet another of his apparent ilk, and they’d pass, perhaps nodding as if they knew each other but more often simply ignoring one another as they would in a crowd or on any street corner. There was nothing exceptional about them, nothing to mark them as something apart from the common herd, because, except for their jobs and job location, there wasn’t any real difference. Except for this one little man. He was definitely exceptional, being a bornb.
Finally he reached a small room in which a single computer access element was placed in front of a comfortable-looking chair. There were no warning symbols, no huge guards or robot sentinels about, even though this particular room was the gateway to the military secrets of an interstellar empire of vast proportions. There was no need. No single individual could activate that access element; doing so required the combined and nearly simultaneous consent of three different human beings and two robot backups, each of whom received a different coded order from a different source. Any attempt to use it without the actions of all the others would result not only in a dead computer and blank terminal but also in a warning flashed to security.
The little man sat down in the chair, adjusted it for proper operating position, then leaned over and casually opened his briefcase. Removing a small crystalline device, he idly flicked it on with a thumb motion and then it set against the activation plate of the terminal.
The screen flickered, came to life. Printed on it were all the access codes as if it had received them and the question of whether the user preferred voice or CRT communication. There was no question of a print-out. Not with this computer.
“CRT only, please,” the little man idly said, in a thin, dry, nasal voice that bore no trace of accent. The machine waited. “Defensive files C-476-2377AX and J-392-7533DC, please, at speed.”
The computer seemed to blink at that last; at speed would be at roughly four hundred tines a second, the limit of the CRT to form the images in the first place. Nonetheless, the computer went to work. Both plans were delivered up and snapped past the little man in less than a second.
He was pleased. So much so that he decided then and there to press his luck a little and ask for more. “Run the master defense emergency plans, please, at speed, in order,” he told the machine casually.
The machine obeyed. Because of the volume of material it took almost four minutes.
The little man glanced at his watch. It was so tempting to continue, but every second he was here increased his chances of somebody just looking in or some random check. That wouldn’t do, not at all.
He placed his device back in his briefcase, snapped it closed, stood up, and walked out. At that point he made one minor mistake, one he would not be expected to know. You had to tell the damned thing to clear and reset the codes. If you didn’t, this computer didn’t react like all others and simply stay on—intolerable, with access to such secrets—or shut itself down. When it “saw” that the operator had left the room without resetting it, the machine advised control personnel of that fact, then locked in emergency shutdown until reset.
As the little man reached the first checkpoint door on his way out, things were already starting to crack around him.
The young woman glared for a moment at the red alert light that had flashed on her console. She ran a quick check to make sure there was no internal malfunction, then punched up the trouble—the Eyes Only Storage Computer.
Although she was one of those with part of the code that would activate the computer, she could not ask it any questions on its information storage from where she was—but she could get security information. She knew she had given no access so far today, so she punched two buttons and instructed, “Run tape last operation.”
The little man’s face showed clearly. Not only his face, but his retinal pattern, thermal pattern, everything about him that could be read by remote sensors and recorded. She brought in the rest of the computer net. “Identify!” she commanded.
“Threht, Augur Pen-Gyl, OG-6, Logistics,” came the computer’s reply.
Before her hand could hit the alarm it had already been hit by two of her associates.
No alarms sounded, no flashing lights and whistling bells that would panic or tip off a spy. Instead, as Threht reached the third and last security door, peered into the oculator, and pressed his palm on the identiplate, it simply refused to open.
He realized at once that security, both human and robotic, was already closing in on him from all sides, and decided in a flash that the least security would be on the other side of the door. He raised his left hand, paused for a moment, frozen, as if marshaling all he had, then struck the door near its locking mechanism. The area buckled, and he leaned forward and without seeming effort pushed until the door slid back enough for him to squeeze through.
Once he was inside, the door slammed shut behind him, and he could hear the secondary seals slide into place. It formed an effective trap, between the inner and outer door. The chamber itself was airtight; so if someone got this far, the air inside the chamber could be rapidly withdrawn. No chances, not with somebody this good.
The vacuum hardly bothered him. He kicked at the outer door once, twice; on the third try, it gave. He leaned forward with all his might, opening a crack and holding the door open against the massive inrush of air until the pressure equalized. At that point he threw it open and strode through into the main entrance hall.
His guess had been correct; security forces were only now reaching the hall area, and stunned personnel throughout the hall prevented a quick shot. Four sleek black security robots sped toward him. Apparently unafraid, he let them advance. Then, just before they reached him, he suddenly ran right at the two in the lead, pushing one into the other and spilling both to the floor. The scene was incredible: a tiny, ordinary-looking fello
w tumbled four tons of animated metal without so much as recoiling.
He moved quickly now, directly for the clear windows at the front of the hall. He moved with such tremendous speed, speed beyond human and most robots, that when he reached the windows he leaped straight into them. The panes were tremendously thick, able to resist even conventional bornbs hurled against them, but they cracked and shattered like ordinary glass as he sailed through; he then dropped the twelve meters to the ground, landing on his feet with perfect balance, and started to run across the broad courtyard.
By then he had lost the element of surprise. Realizing from the point at which he’d battered in the first door that they were dealing with some clever sort of robot, the security forces had assumed the worst and were ready for him with killer robots, human troops, even a small laser cannon.
He stopped in the center of the grassy knoll and looked around, sizing up the situation but appearing cool and efficient. Then, suddenly, turning to look at the massive amounts of firepower trained on him, he grinned; the grin became a laugh, a laugh that rose in pitch until it became eerie, inhuman, maniacal, echoing back from the building’s walls.
The order was given to open fire, but as the beams tore into the spot on which he stood he just wasn’t there any more. He was going up, rising into the air silently and effortlessly at a tremendous rate of speed.
Automatic weapons tried to follow him but couldn’t match his rate of climb. One officer stared up into the empty sky, laser pistol drawn. “The thing that pisses me off most is that he didn’t even tear his pants.”
Control shifted instantly to Orbital Command, but they weren’t prepared for the suddenness of the little man’s departure, nor could they be certain of how high he would rise or to where. Thirty-seven commercial and sixty-four military ships were in orbit at that point, plus over eight thousand satellites of one sort or another—not to mention the five space stations. Sophisticated radar would spot him if he changed course or attitude and decided to land elsewhere on the planet, but while he remained in space they would have to wait until he did something to draw their attention. There were simply too many things in orbit, and he was too small to track unless first spotted so they could lock onto him.
So they waited patiently, ready to shoot the hell out of any ship that made a break for it or simply decided to change position. And they closely monitored each ship; should someone try to board from space they’d know it.
The robot played the waiting game for almost three full days. By then its primary mission was a total failure—the plans it had stolen were now known, so quite obviously obsolete at that point—but what it had stolen was of some value, since they revealed strengths and current positions, and when analyzed by a specialist in military affairs would show a prospective enemy how the thinking of the Military Command and its bosses ran. Still, it couldn’t wait forever —the force positions could not be so easily or quickly changed, and any contingency plan for their dispersion must be a variation of the original. For the present, their range of options was narrowed, but the options would increase geometrically with each elapsed hour. The robot had to make its move, and it did.
A small planetary satellite officially on the records as an obsolete weather-control monitor station came within three thousand meters of a small corvette. The ship, a government courier boat, would ordinarily be unmanned while keeping station, but no ships were left unguarded at this point.
The robot, still looking like the perfect clerk, emerged from the satellite through a hatch that should not have been there. But, then, the satellite was only superficially what it appeared to be, having long ago. been copied and replaced with something infinitely more useful.
With seeming effortlessness, the robot sped to the corvette and stuck to the outer hull. It reached to its belt and pulled off a small weapon whose dangling line it attached to a small terminal that was otherwise invisible under its left arm. The robot had spent the past three days drawing enormous energy reserves to itself with the devices in the satellite; now, at capacity, it discharged through the weapon. A strong beam emerged from the thing, quickly cutting a hole the size of an orange in the corvette’s hull. It had chosen its spot well: there were only two guards, one human and one robot, on the ship, and both were in the compartment directly under the point at which the beam went through the elaborate triple hull and into the opening. No one would ever know if it Was decompression or the beam that killed the unlucky human guard; the robot, obviously, was shorted out by the sudden dispersion of energy within the compartment The enemy robot then tripped the airlock in the forward compartment and entered effortlessly, finding no apparent alarms and no opposition. The instant acceleration from a standing start would have killed any living thing on board.
The young man sat in absorbed silence, listening to the taped narrative. He was in much the same mold as most of his fellow humans at this point in human history, the perfection of the physical body. From the viewpoint of earlier times he was almost a superman; genetic engineering had made that possible. But every man and woman these days was at this peak of perfection, so among his fellow humans he was merely average-looking, somewhere around thirty with jet-black hair and reddish-brown eyes, at the legal norm height of 180 centimeters, and the. legal norm weight of 82 kilograms. But he was neither average nor normal in more than one specific area, and that was why he was here.
He looked over at Commander Krega as the narrative stopped at the fleeing ship. “You had all the available ships under close watch and trace, of course?” It wasn’t a question, merely a statement of fact.
Krega, an older version of the norm himself in whom the experience of an additional forty years’ service showed on his face and particularly in his eyes, nodded. “Of course, But merely to have destroyed the thing at that point, when he’d already come so far and done so much, would have been a waste. We simply placed a series of tracers on everything that could conceivably move in orbit and waited for him … it … whatever. It was just a robot, after all, albeit a striking one. We had to know whose. At least who it worked for. You know something about subspace ballistics, I take it?”
“Enough,” the younger man admitted.
“Well, once we had his angle and speed—and what speed from a standing start!—we knew where he’d have to, come out. Fortunately, tightbeams can outrun any physical object, so we had someone in the area when he emerged a few subjective minutes later. Close enough, anyway, to get his next set of readings. That much, wasn’t difficult. He made seven blind switches, just to try to throw us off the track, but we never lost him. We were able to move in within a few minutes of the point in time at which he began transmitting the data—a safeguard just in case we were as efficient as we actually are. We closed in immediately then, though, and fried him and the ship to atoms. No other way around it. We’d seen firsthand just some of the things that baby could do.”
The younger man shook his head. “Pity, though. It would have been interesting to disassemble the thing. It’s certainly not any design I know of.”
The commander nodded. “Or any of us, either. The fact is, the thing was just about at the limits of our own technology, if not a bit beyond. It fooled x-ray scanners, retinal scanners, body heat and function sensors—you name it. It even fooled the friends of the poor civil servant it was pretending to be, implying memory and possibly personality transfer. At any rate, even though its clever little orbital base blew up after it departed, there was enough left to piece together some of its insides—and I’ll tell you, it’s not ours. Not anything close. Oh, you can deduce some of the functions and the like, but even where the function is obvious, it isn’t done the way we’d do it, nor are the materials similar to ours. We have to face the ugly fact that the robot and its base were built, designed, and directed by an alien power of which we are totally ignorant”
The young man showed mild interest. “But surely you know something about it now?”
The commander shook his head sadl
y. “No, we don’t. We know more than we did, certainly, but not nearly enough. These bastards are wickedly clever. But I’ll get to that in a minute. Let’s first look at what we do know, or can deduce, about our enemy.” He turned in his desk chair and punched a button. A blank wall bunked and became a visor screen showing an enormous collection of stars, thousands of which blazed a reddish color.
“The Confederacy,” the commander stated needlessly. “Seven thousand six hundred and forty-six worlds, by last count, over a third of a galaxy. Quite an accomplishment for a race from a single planet out there on that one little arm. Planets terraformed, planets where the people were adapted to the place, even planets with sixty other intelligent native life forms on them, all now nicely acculturated to our way of doing things. We own it, we run it our way, and we’ve always had our own way. Not a single one of those other races was ever in any position to challenge, us. They had to accept us and our way, or they died in much the manner our own native world was pacified so many centuries ago. We’re the boss.”
The young man didn’t respond. He felt no need to. Born and raised in this culture, he simply took what Krega was saying for granted, as did everyone else.
“Well, we’ve now met our technological equals, perhaps even slight technological superiors,” the commander continued. “Analysis made the obvious deductions. First, we’re always expanding. Obviously there is another dominant race and culture doing the same from some other point in the galaxy. They discovered us before we discovered them—bad luck for us. They scouted, probed, and analyzed us, and came up with several facts. Second, our ultimate collision is unavoidable. We’re starting to compete for the same space. Third, they are probably smaller than we, numerically weaker, as it were, but with a slight technological edge. They assume war, but they are not certain they could win it. If they had been sure they’d have attacked by now. That means they need information—lots of it. How our military organization is set up. How our defenses are established and would be used. And most important, how we think. A total understanding of us while we remained in ignorance of their ways would give them and their war machines a tremendous edge, assuming equal firepower. Fourth, they’ve been at this for some time, which means our collision is still way off, perhaps years. Finding us was probably accidental, some scout of theirs who got overextended, lost, or just overly ambitious. They’ve been around long enough, though, to make robots that pass for humans, to put spy stations in orbit around Military Systems Command, of all things, and to work out a deal with some of our own to help sell us out.”
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