Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail (2 page)

That disturbed him a bit. “How long would they need for a hundred-percent success rate? In other words, how much time are we talking about?”

‘To do things right—decades. A century, perhaps. I know what you’re thinking. Too long. But the alternative will not be the disaster to my people you counted on, only a major inconvenience.”

He nodded glumly. “And if they are—inconvenienced? What sort of price will they exact on the Confederacy?”

“A terrible one. We had hoped from the beginning to avoid any sort of major bloodshed, although, I admit, the prospect of fouling up the Confederacy has great appeal for us. Foul them up, perhaps try and overthrow them from within, yes—but not all-out war. That prospect appeals not at all to the thinking ones among us, and is exciting only to the naive and the totally psychotic.” The frown came back a bit. “I wonder, though, just how much of the truth you really
do
know.”

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 he 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.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps. I suspect we would have four equally clever, equally ambitious, but different individuals. Still, I thank you for your warning and your offer. I will convey the details to the proper authorities. I, too, hope that massive war can be avoided—but wiser heads than mine will be needed.” He paused. “Good luck, my enemy,” he added sincerely, then broke the connection.

He sat there, just staring at the blank console, for several minutes.
You have not considered all the implications …

He was missing something. Morah had been too casual, too sure of himself. One piece, one vital piece, remained. Perhaps it would be found on Medusa. It had to be.

Mirror, mirror
…

He didn’t want to go back into that room. Death waited there, death not only for himself but for millions more at the least.

I’m of two minds about this
…

Morah’s attitude, now—was it bluff and bravado? Would he pull something? Or was he serious in his hard confidence?

Would I lie to you?

Sighing, he rose from his chair and walked back to the lab cubicle attached to the rear of the picket ship.

2

The door to the cubicle he generally called his lab opened for him and then hissed closed with a strange finality. The entire module was attached to the picket ship, but was internally controlled by its own computer. Everything was independent of the ship if need be—power, air, and air-filtration systems, it even had its own food synthesizer. The door was, of necessity, also an airlock; the place was essentially a container with a universal interlock, carried in a space freighter and then eased into its niche in the picket ship by a small tug. Since the module did not have its own propulsion system, it was definitely stuck there until its securing seals were released and it could be backed out by a tug.

The controlling computer recognized only him, and would be resistant to any entry attempt by another—and lethal should the intruder succeed. The trouble was, he knew, the computer had been specially programmed for this mission by the Security Police, and not all that programming was directed toward his safety, survival, and comfort.

“You were not gone very long this time,” the computer remarked through speakers in the wall. It sounded surprised.

“There wasn’t much to do,” he told it, sounding tired. “And even less I
could
do.”

“You made a call to one of the space stations in the Warden Diamond,” it noted, “on a scrambler circuit. Why? And who did you call?”

“I’m not answerable to you—you’re a machine!” he snapped, then got hold of himself a bit. “That is why the two of us, and not you alone, are on this mission.”

“Why didn’t you use me for the call? It would have been simple.”

“And on the record,” he noted. “Let us face it, my cold companion, you do not work for me but for Security.”

“But so do you,” the computer noted. “We both have the same job to do.”

He nodded absently. “I agree. And you probably have never comprehended why I’m needed at all. But I’ll tell you why, my synthetic friend. They don’t trust
you
any more than they trust me, for one thing. They fear thinking machines, which is why we never developed the type of organic robot the aliens use. Or, rather, we did once—and lived to regret it.”

“They
would
be superior,” the computer responded thoughtfully. “But be that as it may, as long as they control my programming and restrict my self-programming, I’m not a threat to them.”

“No, but that’s not really why I’m here. Left to your own devices—pardon the pun—you would simply carry out the mission literally, with no regard for consequences or politics or psychology. You would deliver information even if doing so meant the loss of billions of lives. I, on the other hand, can subjectively filter those findings and weigh more factors than the bare mission outline. And that’s why they trust me more than you—even though they hardly trust me, which is why you are here. We guard and check one another. We’re not partners, you know—we are actually antagonists.”

“Not so,” the computer responded. “You and I both have the same mission from the same source. It is
not
our job to evaluate the information subjectively, only to report the truth. The evaluation will be made by others—many others, better equipped to do so. You are assuming a godlike egocentric personality that is neither warranted nor justified. Now—who did you call?”

“Yatek Morah,” he responded.

“Why?”

“I wanted him to know that I knew. I wanted his masters to know that as well. I find war inevitable. However, I also find that his side loses everything, while we lose a great deal but hardly all. It was my decision to face him with that fact and to give the ball to him, as it were. Either he and his masters come up with a solution, or war
is
inevitable.”

“This is a questionable tactic, but it is done. How did he take it?”

‘That’s just the trouble. He took it. It didn’t seem to worry him or bother him. That’s what I had to know. He
is,
I believe, sincerely interested in avoiding war for his own purposes, but he is not worried about it from the viewpoint of those who employ him. It was the one thing I could not get from the field reports—a direct sense of how the aliens view the war threat.”

“It was only a viewing scanner on a single individual,” the computer noted. “He could be bluffing. All things considered, how else
could
he react?”