“What I propose to do is to push whatever of your core identity I can into a specific recess so remote from consciousness that it might as well not be there. It won’t be measurable in any way, and, in addition, all communication between the matrixed area and the rest of your brain will be cut. It is, a delicate operation—the difference between obliterating this core and storing it thus is a measurement best expressed as a forty-place decimal point. Even I won’t know if I hit it right or not, nor exactly what was saved—if anything. But what I am trying to save is your total hatred and contempt for the Medusan system and particularly for those people who would do this sort of thing to human beings. If your hatred is strong enough, if your thirst for revenge is strong enough, it might just survive, although so buried, and cut off that even you will not know it is there. In theory, if this part of you remains, a single stimulus could be used to trigger it, reconnect it to your psyche. The stimulus I will give you and reinforce is a situation in which all three principals are in your presence simultaneously. If I succeed, your blind hatred will rush out and you will then kill all three or die in the attempt.
“Now, this is a long shot. One of the three may die, in which case you may find youself in the presence of the other two and not have your rage triggered. Or all three might never be together in your presence, in which case, again, it will not trigger. But all three have been together and may well be again, particularly under war conditions.
“It may be a week, a month, a year, ten years. We can’t know. But we can hope, and that is the chance I must take.”
A chance he must take!
“What you will be after you kill them, assuming you do and survive, I cannot say. Most likely the action will bring about a total release, after which you will again and always be what Ypsk has made you. You might become a wild beast. But you might have rational potential, depending on how much of you survives. Regardless, so thorough will the physical transformation and freeze be that you will physically, hormonally, and emotionally become what I intend to make of you. That I promise, although it is no comfort. Under a really good psych you might be restored intellectually, although, of course, as a new and different person with no past memories. I can do no less and still convince Ypsk and his test battery. Again, this may all fail—even my teacher succeeded only with fewer than ten percent of his subjects—but I can offer you, and your control, the hope that that beautiful creature by Ypsk’s side is in fact a ticking bomb that if triggered, could create such a power vacuum on Medusa that those under our control would assume power. I must proceed now, and I am sorry, but I hope this is some comfort. I have already spotted the absolutely ingenious organic transmitter in your brain, so I know your control has this information, too. Now only he and I will know. Time is short and the process long and arduous. Forgive me, Bul, or whatever your name is. Good-bye.”
Searing pain inside my head… Feel like I’m going to implode … Oh, God! I—
TRANSMISSION TERMINATED. TRANSMITTER DESTROYED.
EPILOGUE
He came out of it slowly, and shivered a bit as he lifted the probes from his head.
“That was most unpleasant,” the computer said.
He chuckled. “Well, God bless Dumonia, bless his devious hide. We might get something yet.”
“You seem remarkably fit for one who just underwent a wrenching defeat, faced his worst fear, and stared at mental savagery. Better, in fact, than you came out of the last three. I fear for your sanity.”
“You needn’t,” he assured the computer. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. I have to argue with you, though, on the failure. We’ve finally met our aliens, gotten their names, and confirmed some of my wildest and least certain deductions.”
“Then you have solved the enigma?”
“I think so. Morah’s comments still worry me. I still have that gaping feeling, not that I’m wrong, but that I’ve missed something. That was confirmed by Ypsir’s own attitudes just now.”
“But we never saw Ypsir.”
“We didn’t have to. But he’s a slick old greasy bastard, an old Confederacy politician, remember, and here he was about to make a recording that he intended to flaunt to the Confederacy. That’s confidence. You don’t flaunt something like that if you expect to get into a losing war soon. Yet he knows the relative strength and power of the Confederacy military. He is depraved, vicious, and almost inhuman, but he’s not stupid. Even with two of the Four Lords gone and the scheme blown wide open—they knew about us, note—he still expects to win. Why? Unless our fundamental assumption about these aliens, these Altavar, are wrong.”
“You think there will be a war, then?”
“I’m almost positive. Actually, it’s pretty odd, but the best chance of avoiding war was the man who doesn’t fit, Marek Kreegan. I wish now he had lived instead of this slime ball Ypsir.”
“I do not understand. He was a traitor.”
“He remains the one who doesn’t fit. Look at the Four Lords. One is a classic gangster, a master hoodlum, and the other two were former politicians so corrupt they crawled. And then there’s Kreegan. What the hell was he really doing there? And how did he come to be accepted as an equal Lord by the other three? Remember, we just learned that the other Lords actually deposed Ypsir’s predecessor because they found him too much the reformer and not really corrupt enough to share in the running of their criminal empire. Everybody keeps going back to Kreegan, too—the only man who wasn’t shown corrupt, and who they all seemed to depend upon even though they had no reason to. Not only did he not come from the criminal class—he was self-exiled, remember—but Lilith has the least to offer the hidden war. Yet there he is, at the forefront, the leader.”
“He did not seem admirable to me.”
He chuckled. “Maybe not, but he sure reminded me of me, and vice versa. I look at Kreegan and I see a man on a mission, a very long and complex mission, not a corrupt criminal.”
“There is no record he was on a mission.”
“Not for us. Well, maybe for us—but not officially. I think Kreegan, somewhere, on some other mission, stumbled on the aliens. I don’t know how, and I doubt if we ever will, but he found out what was going on years before we knew. Decades, perhaps, since there’s some evidence those aliens have been here all along.”
“Would it not have been more effective to report this information?” the computer asked.
“Report it? With what? He probably had no physical evidence. The Confederacy only believed it when they couldn’t avoid the truth, and even now they tread softly and slowly through the Warden Diamond rather than hitting hard and fast when the evidence that this is the heart of the conspiracy is right at hand. They would have declared Kreegan insane and destroyed him or sent him to the Diamond anyway. And so he played his role to the hilt, worked hard for twenty years—twenty years!—and finally became Lord of Lilith so he could take control of events. I think we killed the greatest Confederacy agent in human history before his plans came out”
“You think he was setting the aliens up for the kill, then?”
“Oh, no. If anything, I think he was totally committed to his covert war against the Confederacy, using those damned robots. He preferred a weakened, shaky, off-balance Confederacy to an actual war. That’s just what he was trying to do, in fact. I’d bet on it. And that fits in with Ypsir and Morah. I think these Altavar are stronger than we dreamed. I mink Kreegan assessed them as the probable victors in an all-out war, with huge masses of humanity killed. Sure! It fits! He had to choose between a covert war that would dismember the Confederacy or an all-out interstellar conflict he felt we could not win.”
“Are you going to include that in your report?”
“No. They wouldn’t believe it, anyway, and if they did they wouldn’t understand. It makes no difference in any event, except that explanation lays to rest a few of my remaining questions. He’s gone, and only Morah, who is good-but really hasn’t the skills of a Kreegan, is holding things off right now.
Somewhere along the line, Morah and Kreegan met, and Morah, the brilliant.master criminal, developed a Kreegan-style sense of what had to be done. He came around to Kreegan’s point of view. He is doing what he can, but he knows he isn’t up to the job. Damn!” He sat deep in thought for a moment. Finally he said, “Call Morah. Tell him to keep that meeting in session, that I’ll get back to him as soon as I have consulted with my superiors.”
“That is easily done. Has it occurred to you that they all are together in a highly vulnerable and exposed space station around Lilith at this time? Just one well-placed shot…”
“And then we would have to deal blind with the Altavar, and I’m not even sure we can. Besides, with what will you shoot them down?”
“This picket ship has more than enough armament for such a simple task.”
He chuckled. “So man can triumph over computer after all. How the hell do you suppose Altavar have gotten in and out of system, not to mention those robots? Where would be the first place you’d try out and test those robots to see if they really could fool everybody?”
“Oh. You mean that this ship is under their control and in their hands. That is a most unpleasant thought.”
“Bet on it. If you need any further confirmation, just remember that I sat down in a com chair up there, punched in Morah’s name and planet, and got a connection in seconds. No hunting around, no guesswork. The comm people knew who he was and exactly where he was at that point.”
“I could detonate this module, at least protecting our information.”
“t certainly hope not. Right now I’m the only one from the Confederacy that Morah or any of the others will trust at all. They know me, in one form or another. I’m right there with them. I’m Cal Tremon, Park Lacoch, and Qwin Zhang, but uncontaminated by Wardens. I’m the only man they’re going to believe, because I’m the only one they have expert evaluation of.” He laughed. “I don’t think you’re going to get to kill me anyway, old friend.”
“It is not my intention to do so unless the mission is compromised.”
“Maybe, maybe you just don’t know it. But it’s irrelevant.” He got up from the chair and moved back to the desk area, pulling down a pen and a pad of paper. He always used pen and paper for his notes rather than a terminal. You never knew who or what was listening in on a terminal, but if you ate your notes you knew exactly where they were and in what form. Old habits were hard to break now.
He was at it for some time, until, finally, slips of paper, cards, and scribbled notations were scattered all over the place. Finally he picked them up, looking them over, put them in an odd pile, smiled, then nodded. He reached up and pulled down the special comcode set.
“Open Security Channel R,” he instructed the computer. “Tightbeam, scramble, top security code. Let’s let them in on the fun.”
It took several minutes to establish communications through the various secret links over such vast distances, but because these signals traveled in the same oblique inter-dimensional way as the spaceships, communication was virtually instantaneous at this high-priority level. Once the phone was answered at the other end, that is, and all the information was matched to decode what was going in.
“Go ahead, Warden Control,” came a very slightly distorted voice from the speaker. “This is Papa speaking.”
“Hello, Krega! You sound tired.”
“I was sound asleep when your call came in, and I’m taking a couple of pills now to wake up. I assume this is some other special request you want—like the Cerberan thing?”
“No. This is my report. I have the strong feeling that something important is still missing, but I have no way of finding out what it is. Instead, I have assembled everything that I do know and all that my deductions lead to. I think I have enough information to allow us to act and I think time might be of the essence now. There is a war council going on in the Diamond right now, and I think our time’s about run out.”
“All hell’s breaking loose throughout the civilized worlds,” Commander Krega told him. “That sleep you got me out of was the first I’d tried in four days. It’s chaos! Supply ships routed wrongly, causing factories on a dozen worlds to shut down for lack of raw material, causing dozens more to have to ration food’ and other vital materials because the ships didn’t arrive. Even some naval units have opened fire on one another! The number of those damned robots—and the scale of the operation—is massive, Control! Massive! There must be thousands of them, all at different, usually routine posts along the lines of communications, shipping, you name it. Our Confederacy holds together by total interdependence. You know that.”
He nodded and couldn’t suppress a slight smile. So Morah had put Kreegan’s war into operation unilaterally, as well as mobilizing the vast political and criminal organizations the Four Lords controlled. “How are you holding out?” he asked, almost hoping for a really bad answer.
“We’re coping—but barely!” Krega told him. “We were prepared for this kind of thing, considering what we already knew, but the scale is beyond anything we imagined—and it’s devilishly clever. The people they took over are very minor, routine links in complex chains, but they’re at just the right point to make a minor mistake on a shipping order, or routing order, or even battle order. And so damn minor the mistakes are hell to track down. They didn’t go for the admiral, instead they went for a minor clerk who types up or sends out the admiral’s orders. We can hold now, but there are already food riots in many places and I doubt if we can stopgap this for long. You’re right about the time business. If you can’t give us an out, we’ve got no choice but to take out the whole Warden Diamond—now.”
“I’m not sure you can, Papa,” he said bluntly. “We missed it on these aliens. Evidence shows they’re every bit as strong or even stronger than we are. Hold on to your hat. You aren’t gonna believe all this.”
“Well, get going, then. But I’m not sure I go along with that military-strength idea. Logic argues against it.”
He smiled wanly. Why are aliens evil to a psychotic murderer? That question bothered the Charonese, who didn’t answer it. He could.
Evil is when a race casually contemplates genocide against another not because another race is a threat but because it is inconvenient.
He was about to begin his report when something occurred to him. “Papa? Tell me one thing I don’t know. Our other prime operative down there, this Dr. Dumonia. Who the hell is he, really?”
“Him? Former Chief, Psychiatric Section, Confederacy Criminal Division. Not under that name, of course. He devised a lot of the techniques we still use on agents like you.”
“And he retired to Cerberus?”
“Why not? He’s in a volatile profession, Control. All a psych ever sees are really sick minds. They finally just get fed up and can’t do it any more, or they crack themselves. He was a little of both. Well, we couldn’t kill him, after his invaluable services, and we couldn’t use a psych machine on him—he’s so good with one of those things he’s invulnerable to them. So we gave him a complete cover identity and he picked Cerberus, where he could establish a mild private practice and work when he felt like it on either criminal or normal people with problems. He’s pretty sour and disillusioned about the Confederacy, but he’s not fond of the Four Lords, either. This alien thing really got to him, so he came out of retirement and set up an organization for us.”
“I’m glad he stayed on our side.”
Krega laughed now. “He’d better. He’s got a few little organic devices similar to that transmitter we used with your people inside him, including a couple of a new design that he doesn’t know about. If he ever became a threat a remote signal from a flyby would splatter him from Cerberus halfway to the Confederacy.”
There was no real answer to that. After a moment of dead air, Control reshuffled his notes. “Ready to report.”
“Standing by to record. On my mark … Go!”
A great deal of the information in this report is deductio
n, not direct observation. However, I must point out firmly that every deduction made here is not only logical in the context of the Diamond and our known situation, each and every deduction holds true for all four worlds. I feel that the information presented as fact herein is true and correct and borne out by remote personal observation. Let’s begin by addressing the broad points of the extraordinarily complex and subtle puzzle that is the Warden Diamond itself.
Point 1: No matter what, it is obvious that the four Diamond worlds are not natural. Each of the four worlds was certainly within the known “life zone” before being transformed into its present state, but mere location in the life zone is not sufficient’to guarantee any conditions remotely survivable. This obvious terraforming process of all four would have been easily confirmed had normal scientific thoroughness been applied to the Diamond worlds, but since the appearance of the Warden organism, with its bizarre effects and by-products, such an examination was not possible in the early years and would be subverted by the locals at the present stage of development. Still, from sheer deduction it is obvious that the worlds were extensively terraformed, and I will offer but a few of the abounding examples to prove my point. For example, there is no evidence that any of the planets are the products of natural evolution. While there are different examples of the dominant life form on each world, there are no clear primal orders—each class of plant and animal is unique and in place.
Despite the fact that any naturally evolving life on the four worlds would have to have a common origin—the plants, for example, are too close to one another and to ones familiar to us—the dominant type of animal-life on each is without serious competition and without any sign that the other three forms existed except in minor phyla. Thus, the cold-blooded reptile dominates on the warmest planet, the insect is virtually alone on the lushest, as is the water-breather on the world that is mostly sea, and the large mammal on the coldest planet is the dominant form on both land and sea. In other words, despite a certain common origin, four different kinds of life dominate four different worlds with the other forms either eliminated or reduced to minor and static roles. Frankly, the whole thing smells more like some sort of experiment than any chance occurrence—which form is best for what, perhaps. To accept current biology on all four worlds is beyond my credulity range.
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