Four Lords of Diamond - Book 1 by Jack L. Chalker Page A

got off the John and pushed it back I in the wall. I heard a flushing sound and, the next time I used it, discovered that my waste wasn't the only thing that had disappeared. Because it had been a direct neural transmission, less than a minute was needed to get all the information they could pack into it, too.
    Extremely efficient, the security boys, I told myself. Even my ever-vigilant jailers on the other end of those lenses and mikes would have no idea that I was anybody other than who I was supposed to be.
    As to who that was, I'd gotten my first mental picture of myself from the briefing. Brutish, my old self might have said, but in many ways I was not all that bad-looking and definitely oversexed—something I really didn't mind at all.
    I was Cal Tremon, a lone-wolf pirate, murderer, and all-around bad boy. Over two meters tall, 119 kilos of pure muscle and gristle. My face was square and tough-looking, with a shock of coal-black hair fading into a beard that framed it like some beast's mane, with a big, bushy mustache that connected to the sideburns. A broad mouth, thick-lipped, atop which sat a slightly flattened but very large nose. The eyes were large and a deep brown, but what made the effect so menacing was the bushy black eyebrows that actually connected at the bridge of the nose.
    I looked and felt like some primordial caveman, one of our remotest ancestors. Yet the body was in good condition, tremendously powerful and formida-ble—far more powerful than my own had been. The muscles bulged. It would take some getting used to, this huge, brutish body, but once fine-tuned it would, I was certain, be an enormous asset.
    On the other hand, the one thing Cal Tremon had never been and never would be is a cat burglar. He was about as petite as a volcano.
    He. I, my mind corrected. Now and forever after was Cal Tremon.
    I lay back down on the cot and put myself in a light trance, going over all the briefing information, filing, sorting, thinking. The data on Tremon's own life and colorful, if bloody, career was of particular import. Although he didn't seem like the kind of guy who would have any friends, there was a world full of crooks down there. Somebody must have known him.
---- Chapter Two> Transportation and Exposure
    Except for regular meals I had no way to keep track of time, but it was a fairly long trip. They weren't wasting any money transporting prisoners by the fastest available routes, that was for sure.
    Finally, though, we docked with the base ship a third of a light-year out from the Warden system. I knew it not so much by any sensation inside my cloister but by the lack of it—the vibration that had been my constant companion stopped. Still, the routine wasn't varied; I supposed they were waiting for a large enough contingent from around the galaxy to make the landing worthwhile. I could only sit and go over my data for the millionth time, occasionally reflecting on the fact that I probably wasn't very far from my old body (that's how I'd come to think of it). I wondered if perhaps he didn't even come down and take a peek at me from time to time, at least out of idle curiosity—me and the three others who probably were also here.
    I also had tune to reflect on what I knew of the Warden situation itself, the reason for its perfection as a prison. I had not of course swallowed that whole— there was no such thing as the perfect prison, although this one had to come close. Shortly after I was landed on Lilith and started wading in and breathing its air I would be infected with an oddball submicroscopic organism that would set up housekeeping in every cell of my body. There it would live, feeding off me, even earning its keep by keeping disease organisms, infections, and the like in check. The one thing that stuff had was a will to live, and it only lived if you did.
    But it needed something, some trace element or some such that was only present in the Warden system. Nobody knew what and nobody had