Even Lilith, which would tolerate nothing alien, was a true repository for secrets channeled in and out of its protected orbital satellites to trusted members of the Lilith hierarchy. The strongest, cleverest, and nastiest reached the top and held power over planet-wide criminal syndicates whose influence reached into the heart of the Confederacy. The heads of these syndicates called themselves the Four Lords of the Diamond, and they were doing a nice job getting even with the society that sent them there. Now they were working for an alien enemy that had the potential to destroy the entire system, a fact the Confederacy discovered very late in the aliens’ game—and almost by accident.

The humans had little defense, as the aliens surely had realized. Agents sent to the Warden worlds faced almost certain death if discovered. If not, they were stuck there along with the criminal lords and their descendants and subject people. The situation tended to make keeping an agent loyal a big problem, since there was nothing he or she could be offered as a reward and it was a lifetime job. One such agent, a volunteer, became one of the Four Lords himself.

Yet the Confederacy’s only link to the alien menace that might attack and destroy them at any time was the Warden Diamond. They had to put not just agents down there but their best—and they finally figured out a way to do it, more or less. They took their best agent, an Assassin First Class of absolutely impeccable loyalty and devotion, and then introduced him to the Merton Process, by which the personality and memories of someone could be stored in a computer and then fed into other bodies.

The original minds in those surrogate bodies were of course destroyed. Twenty or thirty individuals died before a personality graft “took,” but that was all right—they were all antisocials anyway. Thus was their best agent “placed” into four totally different bodies and dispatched to the four Warden worlds. Once there, each had to act alone to find out what he could of the alien menace and, in any case, to accomplish a true Assassin’s task—kill each of the Four Lords of the Diamond, causing at least a disruption in leadership that might buy the Confederacy some time.