The central machine world was based entirely on theatrics. He suspected the touch of Erasmus in this, though Omnius had such an overblown perception of his own importance that he no doubt wanted all machine minions to bow before him as a god—even if the evermind had to program them to do so.
Rectangular plates appeared on the ground, laying down an interlocked pathway that guided Khrone to his destination in the magnificent arched cathedral. Head held high, he strode along carrying his precious package, refusing to look like a supplicant summoned before his lord. Rather, Khrone was a man on a mission with important business to complete. Omnius would be pleased to have the concentrated ultraspice for use with his cloned Kwisatz Haderach. . . .
Inside the ostentatious hall, the ghola of Baron Harkonnen stood with young Paolo at a nine-level pyramid chess board. Glowering, the Baron knocked over a rook on one of the top levels. “That move is not allowed, Paolo.”
“It enabled me to win, didn’t it?” Pleased with his ingenuity, the young man crossed his arms over his chest.
“By cheating.”
“It’s a new rule. If we are as important as you say, we should be allowed to make up our own rules.”
A flash of anger crossed the Baron’s face, and then vanished into a chuckle. “I see your reasoning—and that you are learning.”
When Khrone stepped forward, they looked at him with identical expressions of distaste. “Oh, it’s you.” The Baron sounded entirely different from when he’d been tormented by the Face Dancers. “I didn’t think we’d be seeing you again. Bored of Caladan?”
Ignoring them, Khrone noted that the two principal thinking machines had resumed their guise of an elderly couple in gardening clothes. Why were they wearing these personas now? For the benefit of these two gholas? It wasn’t as if the thinking machines were keeping secrets from anybody here. Khrone had never been able to determine a pattern in their behavior.
Perhaps it was linked to the fact that Omnius and Erasmus wanted to receive all of the lives Khrone had gathered and assimilated during his last mission among the humans. They looked forward to the sharing of their Face Dancer “ambassadors” each time one of the far-flung representatives returned. It seemed to make them feel superior, and allowed the independent robot to feel that he belonged to the human race, somehow.
“Look, he’s brought something,” Paolo pointed out. “A present for us?”
Khrone went directly to the old man and woman. As the woman leaned toward him, her visage had a feral and hungry look. “I think you brought more than just a package, Khrone. You haven’t been back to Synchrony in some time. Show us the personas you’ve acquired. Every little bit adds to us, makes us greater.”
“I have had enough.” The old man turned away. “I am beginning to find them somewhat distasteful. They are all the same.”
“How can you say that, Daniel? Every human is different, so beautifully chaotic and unpredictable.”
“Exactly what I mean. They are all confusing. And I am not Daniel, I am Omnius. Kralizec is upon us, and we have no time for further preparatory games.”
“Sometimes I still like to consider myself Marty. In many ways it’s more appealing to me than the name or guise of Erasmus.” The old woman took a step closer to Khrone. The Face Dancer didn’t dare flinch, though he despised what was about to happen. Her hand was gnarled, with large knuckles. It felt clawlike when she touched his forehead. She pressed harder, and Khrone shuddered, unable to block the intrusion.
Each time a Face Dancer mimicked a human shape, he sampled the original subject and acquired both a genetic trace and an imprint of the memories and persona. The thinking machines had set the shape-shifters loose into the Old Empire. Infiltrating the humans, they gathered more and more lives as they subsumed useful people and played their roles. Whenever a Face Dancer returned to the machine empire, Erasmus in particular wanted to add those lives to his vast repository of data and experience.
Out of forced subservience, Khrone and his comrades surrendered that information. But though the thinking machines could upload the various lives the Face Dancers copied, they could not take their core personas. Khrone held onto his secrets, even as he offered up all those people he had been in recent years—an Ixian engineer, a CHOAM representative, a crewman on a Guildship, a dock worker on Caladan, and many others.
When the process was finished, the old woman’s hand withdrew. Her wrinkled face wore a satisfied smile. “Oh, those were interesting ones! Omnius will certainly want to share them.”
“That remains to be seen,” the old man said.
Feeling drained, Khrone caught his breath and straightened himself. “That is not why I came.” His voice was shamefully weak and quavering. “I have obtained a special substance you will find invaluable for your Kwisatz Haderach project.” He held out the ultraspice package, as if offering a gift to a king, precisely as Omnius expected him to behave. The old man accepted the package, scrutinized it carefully.
The Face Dancer gave Paolo a condescending look. “This potent form of melange is sure to unlock the prescience in any Atreides. Then you will have your Kwisatz Haderach, as I have always promised. There is no need to continue pursuing the no-ship.”
Omnius found the comment amusing. “Strange you should say that now.”
“What do you mean?”
Beside him, the old woman grinned. “This is a momentous day, since both of our plans have come to fruition. Our patience and foresight have paid off. Now, what shall we do with two Kwisatz Haderachs?”
Khrone paused, startled. “Two of them?”
“After so many years, the no-ship has finally fallen into our trap.”
Khrone slid his surprise back into himself and went rigid. “That is . . . most excellent.”
The old woman rubbed her hands together. “Everything is culminating at once. It reminds me of the climactic movement in a symphony I once wrote.”
The old man began to pace around the chamber, holding the package of ultraspice in his hands. He sniffed it.
Paolo turned away from the chess game. “You don’t need another Kwisatz Haderach. You have me. Give me spice now!”
Erasmus shot him an indulgent smile. “Perhaps in a little while. First we’ll see what the no-ship has for us, who their Kwisatz Haderach is. It should be interesting.”
“Where is the vessel?” Khrone asked, focusing on the main question. “Are you sure you have it?”
“Our cruisers are surrounding it even now, and our operatives aboard took steps to guarantee that it could not escape again. Your Face Dancers did a fine job, Khrone.”
Omnius interrupted, “And, on a greater scale, our largest battleships are closing in on human defenders in their Old Empire. We will conquer Chapterhouse soon, but that is only one of many simultaneous targets.”
“It should be quite a spectacular battle.” Erasmus sounded more dry than eager.
The evermind was stern. “Triumph will be assured as soon as the proper conditions are met, according to our mathematical prophecies. Success is imminent.”
With glee on his flowmetal face, Erasmus beamed at Paolo and the Baron. “Two Kwisatz Haderachs are better than one!”
Time is a commodity more precious than melange. Even the wealthiest man cannot buy more minutes to put into each hour.
—DUKE LETO ATREIDES,
last message from Caladan
A gossamer net of jeweled colors closed around the Ithaca. The no-ship’s engines strained, but could not break away. Scrambling to reassert control over the helm and drag themselves free of the strange bonds, Duncan powered up the Holtzman engines, preparing to rip a hole through the glimmering mesh. It was their only way out.
Glaring at the dead Face Dancer on the deck, Sheeana ordered two Sisters nearby, “Remove that thing from the navigation bridge!” Within moments, the women carried away the limp and bloody shape-shifter.
Now that the net was visible to them all, Duncan focused his Mentat awareness t
o study the woven grid that ensnared them. He searched frantically for holes or weak spots in the powerful structure, but found nothing to suggest the slightest defect, no frayed point that might allow them to escape.
He would try brute force, then.
Years ago, he had broken free of the net by using the Holtzman engines in ways they had never been designed to function, flying the Ithaca at just the proper angle and speed to penetrate the fabric of space. It had reminded him of a Swordmaster’s move, using a slow blade against a personal shield.
“Accelerating now,” he said.
Teg leaned over the navigation controls, sweating. “This is going to be close, Duncan.” The large ship pulled against the multicolored strands, tore several, and then picked up speed. “We’re breaking free!”
Duncan felt a brief moment of hope, a surge of triumph.
An explosion rocked the ship, followed by another, and another. Vibrations and shock waves rang through the hull and decks as if some titan were smashing the vessel with a great hammer. The navigation bridge shuddered.
Holding his chair, Duncan called up diagnostic maps. “What was that? Is the Enemy firing on us?”
The detonations threw Teg to the floor, but he scrambled back to his feet and gripped the console for balance. “The stolen mines! I think we just found them.” His words tumbled out in a rush. “Either Thufir or the Rabbi must have set them to go off—” As if to confirm his speculation, another explosion rocked the deck, much closer than before.
The Ithaca reeled out of control, its engines paralyzed. The deck tilted, as artificial gravity generators were knocked offline. Duncan felt a sickening disorientation as the vessel spun off axis.
The shimmering net grew brighter, tightening like a noose.
Finally, out in the distance, Enemy ships drew into view, like hunters approaching a trap they had set. Duncan stared at the external screens. Who had pursued them for so long? Face Dancers? Some vicious, unknown race? What could be frightening enough to drive the Honored Matres back into the Old Empire?
“The bastards think they have us.” Duncan made a fist.
“Don’t they?” Looking up from his status screens, the Bashar was dismayed by the severe damage indicators lighting up sections of the vessel like fireworks displays. “The mines have ruined our most vital systems, and we’re dead in space.”
Using Mentat focus, Duncan studied the panels on his command console. The intricate displays showed the strangling net all around them. He jabbed his finger toward a knot in the diagram, an area of pulsing, flickering electronic signals. At first glance the tangle seemed no different from the rest of the interconnected strands, but as he studied it, he thought he might have found a weakness. “Look there.”
Teg feverishly bent closer. “A loophole?”
“If only we could move!” Racking his brain, Duncan stalked back and forth in front of the controls. “It would be quite a drunkard’s dance to get through that maze—if this ship could fly at all.”
“If we all worked together, the entire crew, it would take a week to make repairs. We don’t have that much time.” The Bashar gestured to the tactical screens that displayed data from the long-distance sensors. “Enemy ships are closing in. They know they’ve snared us.”
Duncan accepted the grim reality. “Holtzman engines are dead. No way to make the repairs in time, no way to escape.” He hammered his fists on a panel next to the tangled, pulsing loophole on the console’s projections. “But I know I could do it. Why won’t this damned ship fly?”
Teg glanced at the sensor blips that indicated the encroaching Enemy, saw the automated damage reports streaming across the display, and knew exactly what had to be done. Only he could do it.
“I can fix the ship.” He had no time to explain. “Be ready.” Then he simply vanished.
MILES TEG ACCELERATED his metabolism, kicking himself into the hyper-fast speed he had learned after surviving unendurable torture at the hands of the Honored Matres and their underlings. Around him, time slowed. This would be dangerous to him because of the extreme energy requirements, but he had to do it. The rapidly strobing alarm lights became a slow pulsation that seemed to take an hour for each cycle, brightening and dimming. Re-accessing the archival records of the ship’s systems would take too long, but Teg had examined them before. As a Mentat he remembered everything, and now he set to work.
By himself.
Even at his accelerated speed, Teg exerted himself to run as fast as he could. On deck after deck, everyone aboard stood like statues, their expressions showing concern and confusion. Teg flashed past them to the nearest damage sites.
Where the first mine had gone off, he stared in amazement and consternation at the twisted metal, the melted craters in the machinery, the vaporized systems. Teg hurried from one explosion to the next, determining how far the damage extended and which systems were crucial for their immediate escape. The Face Dancer infiltrators had planted and hidden the eight mines well, and each detonation had resulted in a crippling blow: navigation, life-support, foldspace engines, defensive weapons.
Teg made snap decisions. His life had primed him for emergencies; on the battlefield, one could not hesitate. If Duncan couldn’t manage to fly the Ithaca away right now, they would never again require life-support systems. He, or someone else, could fix those later. An acceptable gamble. The no-field generators were off-line.
Engines. Four of the eight mines had been set to damage the foldspace engines. The Face Dancer saboteur had deliberately flown the no-ship close to the Enemy’s stronghold, and the detonations had left them crippled and stranded.
With hyper speed Teg studied, analyzed, and compiled a plan using his Mentat abilities. He inventoried spare materials, replacement components, emergency equipment. He needed to work swiftly with what he had; there was no one to help him. First, he rerouted and reprogrammed the weapons, and prepared them to launch a volley of blasts at the oncoming ships. That might grant them an extra few moments.
Teg continued to hurry. The pulsing alarm lights flickered on to off, like a sun rising and setting. Another hour gone in his own frame of reference. In real time, only a few seconds had passed since his disappearance from the bridge. Next, he turned to the engines, which were essential to their escape.
The primary linkages had been disrupted, with Holtzman catalysts shaken from their cradles, shoved out of alignment, made inoperable. Two reaction chambers were breached. An explosion had nearly broken through the hull. He stood stunned, his arms shaking, thinking he couldn’t possibly fix this. But he forced such thoughts away, went back to work.
Teg’s muscles trembled with exhaustion, and his lungs burned from gasping air so fast the oxygen molecules could barely move into position.
Fixing the hull should be easy enough. Teg ran to the maintenance sectors, where he located extra plates. Since he could never make the ship’s heavy-lifting machinery operate fast enough for his time-sense, he decided that suspensors would have to do. He applied the null-gravity projectors to the heavy plates and hurried with them down corridors, dodging petrified people.
With each second, the Enemy battleships were getting closer. Some of his fellow passengers were only just now learning of the mines that had been detonated. He put on another burst of speed, and the suspensor carriers kept up with him.
In a few “hours,” according to his metabolism, and only a few moments in reality, he fixed the hull damage that could have resulted in an engine breach. Sweat poured off of Teg’s body, and he was near collapse. But in spite of that utter exhaustion, he could not let himself slow down. Never before had he allowed himself to fall so deeply into a pit of burning metabolism.
Teg’s body could not maintain this pace for long. But if he didn’t, the ship would be captured, and they would all die. Fangs of hunger gnawed at his stomach. This would not do. He had to concentrate, had to fuel the engine of his body so that he could do what must be done.
Ravenous, not slowing fr
om his superspeed, he raided the ship’s stores, where he found energy bars and dense food wafers. He ate concentrated nutrients until he was gorged. Then, burning calories as fast as he could swallow them, Teg ran again from one disaster area to the next.
He spent subjective days at these highly focused labors; to observers on the outside, caught in the glacial pace of normal time, only a minute or two passed.
When the task grew overwhelming, the Bashar struggled to reassess what the ship needed in order to function. What was the bare minimum of repairs that would let Duncan fly through the weakened loophole?
The exploding mines had led to a cascading series of damages. Teg nearly got lost in the details, but reminded himself of the immediate need and forced himself to skate the thin ice of possibilities.
Teg and his brave men had stolen this very vessel from Gammu more than three decades ago. Though it had performed admirably since then, the Ithaca had not undergone any of the usual necessary maintenance at Guild shipyards. Worn components had not been replaced; systems were breaking down from age and neglect, as well as the depredations of the saboteurs. Limited by the spare parts and materials he could find in the maintenance bays, he tried and discarded possible fixes.
Alarms continued to pulse slowly. He was moving too fast for sound waves to mean anything. In real time, there would be shrieking sirens, shouting people, conflicting orders.
Teg fixed another of the Holtzman catalyst cradles, then took the time to look at a viewer. In the image displayed between scan lines, he saw that the Enemy ships had finally arrived, massive and heavily armed . . . a full fleet of monstrous, angular things that bristled with weapons, sensor arrays, and other sharp protrusions.
Though he already felt used up, Teg knew with a sickening certainty that he needed to go even faster.
He raced to the ship’s melange stores and broke the locks with a twist of his hand because he was moving so fast. He removed cakes of the dark brown compressed substance, stared at it with Mentat calculation. Considering his hypermetabolism and his body churning through its biochemical machinery faster than it ever had before, what was the proper dosage? How quickly would it affect him? Teg decided on three wafers—triple the maximum he had ever consumed—and gobbled them all.
Sandworms of Dune Page 31