Worse, the Warden organism seemed to have some sort of link to the solar system of its origin. Remove someone infected by it and the Warden organism died—and sadly, since the organism had modified every cell of the body to to its own convenience, the host also died, horribly and painfully. Humans could live in the Warden Diamond, even travel in-system, but they could never ever leave.

Many scientists devoted their lives and careers to the problem, deliberately trapping themselves on the Warden worlds and establishing scientific colonies still run by descendants. But the solution, in the main, defied them—which of course only infuriated them and spurred them on all the more.

But it was not to be the scientists who would settle the bulk of the Diamond; it was the criminal class. A Utopian system sophisticated enough to maintain a frontier did not want to waste those people who had somehow found and exploited flaws in their system. The cream of the criminal class in a technological society was often the most brilliant and innovative, but such deviates could hardly be allowed in the civilized worlds or even tolerated for long on the frontier. Until the discovery of the Warden Diamond, these people had to be eliminated for the good of the social order. Now it was possible to transport this criminal elite, along with assorted political prisoners and other social undesirables, to a place where they would be free to be their immoral or amoral selves and still retain the inventiveness necessary to come up with something the Confederacy could use.

The perfect prison. Only, of course, what that accomplished was to place the most brilliant sociopathic—and psychopathic—minds together in one place, in contact with one another. They and their descendants built empires. Each world had unique attributes, held attractions for those the Confederacy and its Assassins had not yet caught. Cash could be shunted away to Cerberan and Medusan banks; loot of all kinds could be hidden forever on Charon or Cerberus until needed.