Dune: House Harkonnen

by Brian Herbert; Kevin J. Anderson

  Leto thought of the Earl of Ix, bald and boisterous, who had fought beside Paulus Atreides in the Ecazi Revolt. Based on his father’s reputation as a war hero, Rhombur probably had more secret allies than even he realized.

  “We can make special marked containers and get the word to C’tair. I think . . . I think we can pass all of the appropriate checkpoints.” Suddenly angry, he pounded his fist on the wooden bench beside him. “Vermilion hells, Leto, I’ve got to do something! I haven’t been able to set foot on my own home planet for nearly half my life!”

  “If it were anyone else asking me this . . .” Leto caught himself, and said, “Possibly— so long as you conceal the involvement of House Atreides.” He sighed. “Before I decide, what’s the second favor?”

  Now the Prince seemed truly nervous. “I’ve pondered how I should ask this, yet I couldn’t come up with the right words. Everything seemed, uh, false and manipulative . . . but I need to tell you.” He took a deep breath. “It’s about my sister.”

  Leto, about to open a second beer, stopped short. His face darkened. “Some things are private matters, even from you, Rhombur.”

  The Prince gave him a commiserating smile. Since he had taken a Bene Gesserit as his concubine and fast friend, he had grown wiser. “The two of you have gotten off track, through no one’s fault. It just happened. I know you still care deeply for Kailea— and don’t try to deny it. She’s done a lot for House Atreides, helping with the accounts and commercial matters. My father always said she had the best instinct for business in our family.”

  With a sad shake of his head, Leto said, “She used to be full of good advice. But since Chiara came, she’s demanded more and more trappings and fineries. Even when I give them to her, Kailea seems dissatisfied. She’s . . . she’s not the same woman I fell in love with.”

  Rhombur drank from his own beer, smacked his lips at the bitterness. “Maybe that’s because you’ve stopped giving her a chance, stopped letting her use her business skills. Put her in charge of one of your industries— paradan melons, pundi rice, coral gems— and watch the production increase. I can’t imagine how far she might have gone if, uh, the revolt hadn’t happened on Ix.”

  Leto pushed his bottle aside. “Did she put you up to this?”

  “Leto, my sister is a rare woman. I’m asking this as your friend, and as her brother.” Rhombur passed a hand through his tousled blond hair. “Give Kailea the opportunity to be more than a concubine.”

  Gazing at the exiled Prince, Leto became as cold and stiff as a statue. “So you want me to marry her?” Rhombur had never used their friendship to force an issue, and Leto had never dreamed he could deny his friend anything. But this . . .

  Biting his lower lip, Rhombur nodded. “Yes, uh, I suppose that’s what I’m asking.”

  They both remained silent for a long, long moment as the coracle swayed. A huge barge lumbered across the delta toward the docks.

  Leto’s thoughts churned, and he finally reached a difficult decision. He drew a deep breath, flaring his nostrils. “I’ll say yes to one of your favors— but you must choose which one.”

  Rhombur swallowed hard, noted the anguished expression on Leto’s face. After a long moment he looked away. When he squared his shoulders, Leto was uneasy about what he would say. He had put everything on the line.

  Finally, the exiled Prince of Ix answered in a wavering voice, “Then I choose the future of my people. You have taught me the importance of this. I need those explosives. I just hope C’tair Pilru can put them to good use.”

  He leaned forward and took a long drink of the smuggled Harkonnen beer, then reached out to clasp Leto’s forearm. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the Atreides, it’s to put the people foremost, and personal wishes second. Kailea will just have to understand that.”

  The Duke took their coracle around sandbars into the river channel, toward the mounded barges bedecked with green ribbons fluttering in the breezes. People were gathered at the docks, loading sack after sack of Caladan’s primary grain export. Wagons rolled up along the riverbank, while low-riding boats drifted in from flooded fields. Someone shot homemade fireworks into the air, which banged and sizzled with color in the cloudy skies.

  Leto brought their boat up against the main docks near a fully loaded barge preparing to launch. A large ornamental podium, surrounded by green-and-white streamers, waited for him.

  Pushing his difficult discussion with Rhombur to the back of his mind, Leto put on a noble face and enjoyed the festivities. It was one of his traditional duties as Duke Atreides.

  Facts mean nothing when they are preempted by appearances. Do not underestimate the power of impression over reality.

  — CROWN PRINCE RAPHAEL CORRINO,

  The Rudiments of Power

  Baron Harkonnen hobbled to the highest tower balcony of the family Keep overlooking the morass of Harko City. He leaned on his sandworm-head cane— and hated it.

  Without the cane, though, he couldn’t move.

  Damn the witches and what they’ve done to me! He had never ceased brooding on how he might get his revenge, but since both the Sisterhood and House Harkonnen held mutual blackmail information, neither could move openly against the other.

  I must find a more subtle way.

  “Piter de Vries!” he bellowed to anyone who could hear him. “Send in my Mentat!”

  De Vries lurked near him at all times, hovering there, spying and scheming. The Baron needed only to shout, and the twisted Mentat could hear. If only everyone else obeyed him as well— Rabban, the Mother Superior, even that smug Suk doctor Yueh. . . .

  As expected, the feral man danced in on tiptoes, moving with rubbery limbs. He carried a sealed parcel in his arms, right on time. The Baron’s engineers had promised results, and every one of them knew he would flay them alive if they failed him.

  “Your new suspensors, my Baron.” De Vries bowed and extended the container toward his master’s lumbering hulk. “If you strap them about your waist, they will decrease your body weight and allow you to move with unaccustomed freedom.”

  Reaching out with pudgy hands, the Baron tore open the package. “The freedom I used to have.” Inside, linked together on a chain belt, were small globes of self-contained suspensors, each with its own power pack. While he didn’t think he would fool anyone, at least the suspensor belt would help hide the depth of his infirmity. And make others wonder . . .

  “They may require a bit of practice to use—”

  “They’ll make me feel fit and healthy again.” The Baron grinned as he held the suspensor globes in front of him, then fastened the belt around his grotesquely swollen waist— how had his belly grown so large? He toggled on the suspensor globes, one by one. With each additional hum, he felt the weight lessening from his feet, his joints, his shoulders. “Ahhh!”

  The Baron took a long step and bounded across the room like an explorer on a low-gravity world. “Piter, look at me! Ha, ha!” He landed on one foot, then sprang into the air again, leaping nearly to the ceiling. Laughing, he bounced once more, then spun on his left foot like an acrobat. “This is so much better.”

  The twisted Mentat hovered by the door, wearing a self-satisfied smile.

  The Baron landed again and swept his cane from side to side with a whistling sound like an athletic fencer. “Exactly as I had hoped.” He smacked the cane hard on the unyielding desk surface.

  “The parameters may take some getting used to, my Baron. Don’t overextend yourself,” the Mentat cautioned, knowing the Baron would do exactly the opposite.

  With the footwork of a gross ballet dancer, Baron Harkonnen crossed the room and clapped an astonished Piter de Vries paternally on the cheeks, then moved toward the high, open balcony.

  As de Vries watched the big man’s foolishly overconfident movements, he imagined that the Baron would misjudge his bounding strides and sail off the edge of the Keep tower and into open sky. I can only hope.

  The suspensors wou
ld hinder his descent somewhat, but they could only lessen the immense weight. The Baron would strike the distant pavement at a slightly decreased velocity— but he would splatter across the streets, nonetheless. An unexpected bonus.

  Since de Vries was responsible for watching over the family’s various assets, including hidden spice stockpiles such as the one on Lankiveil, the Baron’s demise would enable him to shift ownership to himself. Dimwitted Rabban wouldn’t know what was happening.

  Perhaps a nudge in the right direction—

  But the big man caught himself on the balcony rail and rebounded, settling into an enthusiastic pause. He stared across the smoky streets and sprawling buildings. The metropolis looked black and grimy, industrial buildings and administrative towers that had sunk their roots into Giedi Prime. Beyond the city lay even dirtier agricultural and mining villages, squalid places that were barely worth the trouble of keeping in line. Far below, like lice crawling the streets, workers milled about between labor shifts.

  The Baron hefted his cane. “I don’t need this anymore.” He took one last look at the silver maw of the symbolic sandworm on its head, ran his swollen fingers along the smooth wood of the shaft— then hurled the walking stick out into open space.

  He leaned over the railing to watch it drop, spinning and dwindling, toward the streets below. He held out a childish hope that it might strike someone on the head.

  Buoyed by the globes on his belt, the Baron returned to the main room, where a disappointed Piter de Vries looked toward the abrupt edge of the balcony. The Mentat knew he could never scheme against the Baron, for he would be discovered and executed. The Baron could always obtain another Mentat from the Bene Tleilax, perhaps even a new de Vries ghola grown from his own dead cells. His only hope lay in a fortuitous accident . . . or an acceleration of the effects of the Bene Gesserit disease.

  “Now nothing can stop me, Piter,” the Baron said, delighted. “The Imperium had better watch out for Baron Vladimir Harkonnen.”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” the Mentat said.

  If you surrender, you have already lost. If you refuse to give up, though, no matter the odds against you, at least you have succeeded in trying.

  — DUKE PAULUS ATREIDES

  If he was to rescue his sister, Gurney Halleck knew he had to act alone.

  He planned carefully for two months, aching to move, knowing Bheth was suffering every moment, every night. But his scheme would be doomed to fail if he didn’t take every possibility into account. He obtained crude maps of Giedi Prime and laid out his route to Mount Ebony. It seemed very far away, farther than he had ever traveled in his life.

  He was tense, fearing the villagers would notice his activities, but they staggered through their days with gazes downcast. Even his parents said little to him, noticing nothing of his moods, as if their son had disappeared along with their daughter.

  Finally, as prepared as he was ever going to be, Gurney waited until darkness. And then he simply . . . left.

  With a sack of krall tubers and vegetables slung over one shoulder and a harvesting knife tucked into his belt, he made his way across the patchwork fields. He hid from roads and patrols, sleeping during the day, traveling under the wan moonlight. He doubted searchers would come after him. The Dmitri villagers would assume that the troublemaker had been snatched away in the middle of the night by Harkonnen torturers; with any luck, they’d be afraid to report his disappearance at all.

  Several nights, Gurney managed to slip aboard unmanned cargo transports that crawled westward across the landscape, heading in the correct direction. Their hulking forms levitated along without stopping, all through the night. The transports took him hundreds of kilometers, allowing him to rest and brood and wait until he could find the military compound.

  During long hours, he listened to the throb of suspensor engines that dragged produce or minerals to processing centers. He longed for his baliset, which he’d been forced to abandon back at home, for it was too bulky to carry on his mission. When he had the instrument, no matter how much the overlords took from his family, he could still make his own music. He missed those days. Now he just hummed to himself, all alone.

  Finally, he saw the looming cone of Mount Ebony, the stark and blackened remnant of a volcano whose cliffs had broken off at sharp angles. The rock itself was black, as if covered with tar.

  The military compound was a jigsaw puzzle of evenly spaced buildings, all square, all undecorated. It looked like an insect warren established uphill and upwind from the slave pits and obsidian mines. Between the fenced-in slave pits and the regimented military encampment lay a hodgepodge of buildings, support facilities, inns . . . and a small pleasure house to entertain the Harkonnen troops.

  So far Gurney had made his way undetected. The Harkonnen masters could not conceive that a downtrodden laborer with little education and few resources would dare to strike out across Giedi Prime on his own, would venture to spy upon the troops with a personal goal in mind.

  But he had to make his way into the place where Bheth must be imprisoned. Gurney hid and waited, observing the military compound and trying to formulate his plan. He came up with few alternatives.

  Still, he wouldn’t let that stop him.

  • • •

  A lowborn, uneducated man could never hope to pass himself off as someone who belonged there, so Gurney could not infiltrate the pleasure house. Instead he chose a daring raid. He grasped a metal pipe taken from a refuse pile and held his harvesting knife in the other hand. Stealth would be sacrificed for speed.

  He charged through a side door of the pleasure house and ran to the administrator, a crippled old man wired into a chair at the front table. “Where’s Bheth?” the intruder yelled, surprised to hear his own voice after so long. He thrust the point of his blade under the old man’s sinewy chin. “Bheth Halleck, where is she?”

  Gurney reeled for a moment. What if Harkonnen pleasure houses never bothered with the names of their women? Trembling, the old man saw death in Gurney’s blazing eyes and the scars on his face. “Chamber twenty-one,” he said in a croak.

  Gurney dragged the administrator, chair and all, into a closet and locked him in. Then he raced up the hall.

  A few surly customers stared at him, some half-dressed in Harkonnen uniforms. He heard screams and thumps from behind closed doors, but he had no time to investigate the atrocities. His concentration focused only on one thing. Chamber twenty-one. Bheth.

  His vision tunneled down to a pinpoint until he located the door. His audacity had bought him a little time, but it would be only moments before Harkonnen soldiers were called. He didn’t know how fast he could get Bheth out and into hiding. Together, they could race across the landscape, vanish into the wilderness. After that, he didn’t know where they would go.

  He couldn’t think. He only knew that he had to try.

  The number was scribed on the lintel in Imperial Galach. He heard a scuffle inside. Using his muscular shoulder, Gurney battered the door. It splintered at the jamb and caved in with a heavy thud.

  “Bheth!” Letting out a wild roar, he rushed into the dimly lit chamber, knife in one hand, metal club in the other.

  From the bed she gave a muffled cry, and he turned to see her tied up with thin metal cables. Thick grease had been smeared over her breasts and lower body like war paint, and two naked Harkonnen soldiers lurched back from their activities like startled snakes. Both men held strangely shaped tools, one of which sparked and sizzled.

  Gurney didn’t want to imagine what they’d been doing, had forced himself not to contemplate the sadistic tortures that Bheth endured daily. His roar became a strangled cry in his throat as he saw her— and froze in shock. The vision of his sister’s humiliation, the tragic sight of what had happened to her in the intervening four years, doomed his rescue attempt to failure.

  He hesitated only an instant, his jaw dropping. Bheth had changed so much, her face drawn and aged, her body wiry and bruised . . . so d
ifferent from the silken seventeen-year-old he had known. During the fraction of a second that Gurney stood motionless, his angry momentum stalled.

  It took the Harkonnen soldiers only a heartbeat to leap from the bed and fall upon him.

  Even without their gauntlets, boots, or body armor, the men pummeled him to the floor. They knew exactly where to strike. One of the men jabbed a sparking device against his throat, and his entire left side went numb. He thrashed uncontrollably.

  Bheth could only make wordless, breathy sounds as she struggled against the wires that held her to the bed. Oddly, he noticed a long, thin scar tracing a white line along her throat. She had no larynx.

  Gurney couldn’t see her anymore as his vision turned crimson. He heard heavy footsteps and shouts thundering down the halls. Reinforcements. He couldn’t get up.

  With a sagging heart, he realized he had failed. They would kill him and probably murder Bheth, too. If only I hadn’t hesitated. That instant of uncertainty had defeated him.

  One of the men looked down, lips drawn in a rictus of fury. Spittle ran from the left corner of his mouth, and his blue eyes, which might have been handsome at another time, on another person, glared at him. The guard snatched the harvesting knife and the metal pipe from Gurney’s limp hands and held them both up. Grinning, the Harkonnen soldier tossed the knife aside— but kept the pipe.

  “We know where to send you, lad,” he said.

  He heard Bheth’s odd whispering again, but she could form no words.

  Then the guard swung the metal pipe down on Gurney’s head.