Dune: House Harkonnen

by Brian Herbert; Kevin J. Anderson

  Finally he left the tiny stall-point of human recollection and expanded to encompass the star systems, stretching to reach them and beyond. As D’murr guided the Heighliner through foldspace, the galaxy became his woman . . . and he made love to her.

  Unceasing warfare gives rise to its own social conditions, which have been similar throughout the ages. One such condition is a permanent state of alertness to ward off attack. Another is the rule of the autocrat.

  — CAMMAR PILRU, Ixian Ambassador in Exile

  Treatise on the Downfall of Unjust Governments

  For C’tair, the pleasures of his life with Miral Alechem were short-lived. Following the holoprojection of Rhombur, they had separated for security purposes, finding different bolt-holes in which to live. They hoped to maximize the odds of at least one of them surviving and continuing their important work. By prior arrangement, they met regularly for furtive looks and muffled words in the cafeteria in which she worked.

  On one occasion, however, when he arrived at the appointed time, a different, dull-eyed woman stood at Miral’s position in the food-distribution line. He took his plate of sliced vegetable matter and sat down at the table they usually shared.

  C’tair watched the line, but Miral did not appear. Still staring, he ate in concerned silence. Finally, when he took his empty dishes back to where workers scrubbed them for the next shift, he asked one of the food workers, “Where is the woman who was here three days ago?”

  “Gone,” came the gruff answer. The older woman with a squarish face frowned. “Is that your business?”

  “I meant no offense.” He bowed, taking one step back-ward. A Tleilaxu guard looked over, noticed the discussion. His rodent eyes narrowed, and C’tair moved with careful steps, focused in his demeanor so that he called no further attention to himself.

  Something had happened to Miral, but he dared not press the issue. He could ask no one.

  When the guard walked over and spoke to the old food server, C’tair increased his pace just enough so that he disappeared into a milling crowd, then ducked to a side shaft, descended into the suboid tunnels, and hurried out of sight. He could feel impending doom pressing around him.

  Something had gone terribly wrong. They had captured Miral, and now C’tair was alone again— without an organized resistance, without someone to cover for him and help in his private rebellion. Stripped of outside resources, what chance did he have? Had he been deluding himself all these years?

  He’d worked alone before, had sheltered his emotions, but now his heart was filled with longing for her. At times he wished he’d never gotten involved with Miral, because now he worried about her constantly. But in the quietest hours, when he lay alone in his bed, he was thankful for the moments of love they had shared.

  He never saw her alive again.

  • • •

  Like angry wasps protecting a hive, the Tleilaxu instituted a brutal crackdown far more repressive than any they had previously enacted. They executed thousands of workers on mere suspicion, just to heighten their reign of terror. It soon became clear that the invaders did not care if they exterminated the entire Ixian population. They could wipe the slate clean, and bring in their own people: gholas, Face Dancers, whomever they chose.

  Soon the rebellious Ixian spirit was crushed all over again. C’tair had not struck a blow for six months. In a close call, he had escaped from a Sardaukar trap only by surprising them with a handheld needlegun. Afraid the Tleilaxu might trace his fingerprints or genetic patterns, he had lived in constant fear of arrest.

  Nothing ever got better.

  After he’d projected Prince Rhombur’s smuggled message, communication with the outside had been blocked off more vigorously than before. No observers or messages were allowed. All independent shipping captains and transportation workers were turned away. He had no way of sending even the briefest message back to Rhombur in exile on Caladan. Ix became little more than a black box that produced technology for CHOAM customers. Under Tleilaxu supervision, much of the work was inferior and there had been cancellations, adversely affecting sales revenues. This was only small consolation to C’tair.

  Cut off again, he was unable to find allies, unable to steal the equipment he needed. In his new bolt-hole, only a few components remained, enough that he could perhaps use his rogo transmitter a final time or two. He would make a desperate request to his ethereal Navigator brother for assistance.

  If nothing else, C’tair vowed that someone had to know what was happening here. Miral Alechem had been his only glimmer of friendship or emotional warmth, and she had vanished from his life. He feared the worst must have happened to her. . . .

  He had to transmit his message, had to find a listener. For all his enthusiasm, Rhombur had not been able to do enough. Perhaps D’murr, with his skills as a Guild Navigator, could locate the long-lost Earl of Ix, Dominic Vernius. . . .

  C’tair’s dirty clothes smelled of sweat and grease. His body had been too long without rest or decent food. Hungry, he huddled in the back of an armored storage container that held sealed crates of rejected Ixian chronometers, timepieces that could be programmed to accommodate any planet in the Imperium. The instruments had been set aside for recalibration, and had gathered dust for years. The Tleilaxu had no use for frivolous technological toys.

  Working under the dim light of a fading palmglobe, C’tair reassembled the stored components of his rogo transmitter. He felt the ice of fear in his bloodstream, not because he was concerned he might be caught by Tleilaxu snoopers, but because he feared the rogo would not function. It had been a year since he’d tried to use the communications device, and this was his last set of pristine silicate crystal rods.

  He wiped a drop of sweat from his shaggy hair and inserted the rods into the receptacle. The battered transmitter had been repaired many times. With each use, C’tair strained the jury-rigged systems— as well as his own brain— to the limit.

  As youths, he and his twin had shared a perfect rapport, a brotherly connection that had allowed them to complete each other’s sentences, to look across the room and know what the other sibling was thinking. Sometimes his longing to recapture that empathy was almost too strong to bear.

  Since D’murr became a Navigator, the brothers had grown farther and farther apart. C’tair had done his best to maintain that fragile thread, and the rogo transmitter allowed the two minds to find a common ground. But over the years the rogo had faltered, and finally the machine was on the verge of breaking down completely . . . as was C’tair.

  He slipped in the last rod, set his jaw with determination, and activated the power source. He hoped the armored walls of the cargo container would prevent any leakage that Tleilaxu scanners could detect. After setting off his explosive wafers two years ago, he no longer had his scan-shielded chamber. As a result, his risks grew greater every day.

  Commander Garon and his Sardaukar were searching for him, and others like him, narrowing the possibilities, getting closer.

  C’tair placed receptors against his skull, smeared on a dab of gel to improve the contact. In his mind, he tried to summon a connection with D’murr, seeking the thought patterns that had once been so identical to his own. Though they still shared a common origin, D’murr was vastly changed . . . to such a degree that the twins were now almost members of different species.

  He sensed a tickle in his consciousness, and then a startled but sluggish recognition.

  “D’murr, you must listen to me. You must hear what I am saying.”

  He felt a receptiveness in the images, and he saw in his mind the face of his brother, dark-haired, large-eyed, a snub nose, with a pleasant smile. Exactly as C’tair remembered him from their days in the Grand Palais, when they had attended diplomatic functions and both had flirted with Kailea Vernius.

  But behind the familiar image, the startled C’tair saw a strange and distorted shape, a gross, startling shadow of his brother with an enlarged cranium and stunted limbs, suspended fo
rever in a tank of rich melange gas.

  C’tair drove the image back and focused again on the human face of his twin, whether or not it was real.

  “D’murr, this could be the last time we speak.” He wanted to ask his brother for any news of the outside Imperium. What of their father, Ambassador Pilru, in his exile on Kaitain? If alive, the Ambassador was still trying to rally support, C’tair theorized, but after so many years it would be a lost, almost pathetic, cause.

  C’tair had no time for chatting. He needed to communicate the urgency and desperation of the Ixian people. All other forms of communication had been cut off— but D’murr, through his Guild connections, had another outlet, a tenuous thread across the cosmos.

  Someone must understand how desperate our situation is!

  Frantically, C’tair talked at length, describing everything the Tleilaxu had done, listing the horrors inflicted by Sardaukar guards and fanatics upon the captive Ixians.

  “You must help me, D’murr. Find someone to take up our cause in the Imperium.” Rhombur Vernius already knew the situation, and though the Prince had done what he could with secret Atreides backing, that had not been enough. “Find Dominic Vernius— he could be our only chance. If you remember me, if you remember your human family and friends . . . your people . . . please help us. You are the only hope we have left.”

  In front of him, only half-seeing with his eyes because his mind was so far away, stretched across the paths of foldspace to his brother, C’tair saw smoke curling from the rogo transmitter. The silicate crystal rods began to shiver and crack. “Please, D’murr!”

  Seconds later, the rods shattered. Sparks sizzled from cracks in the transmitter, and C’tair tore the connectors from his temples.

  He jammed a fist into his mouth to cut off a scream of pain. Tears filled his eyes, squeezed out by the pressure in his brain. He touched his nose, then his ears, and felt blood leaking from ruptures inside his sinuses. He sobbed and bit his knuckles hard, but the agony was a long time subsiding.

  Finally, after hours of dazed pain, he looked at the blackened crystals in his transmitter and wiped the blood from his face. Sitting up and waiting for the throbbing to fade, he found himself smiling despite his hurt and the damaged rogo.

  He was sure he had gotten through this time. The future of Ix depended on what D’murr could do with the information.

  Beneath a world— in its rocks, its dirt and sedimentary overlays— there you find the planet’s memory, the complete analog of its existence, its ecological memory.

  — PARDOT KYNES, An Arrakis Primer

  In tight formation, armored Imperial prison ships dropped out of the Heighliner hold and fell toward the festering planet like an airborne funeral procession.

  Even from space, Salusa Secundus looked gangrenous, with dark scabs and a filmy cloud layer like a torn shroud. According to official press releases, new convicts sent to Salusa had a sixty-percent mortality rate in the first Standard Year.

  After the new cargo of prisoners and supplies had been shuttled down to guarded unloading points, Spacing Guild crewmen held the bay doors open long enough for another battered frigate and two unmarked fast lighters to emerge. Leaving no record of their passage, Dominic Vernius and his men proceeded to the planet through a gap in the satellite surveillance net.

  Liet-Kynes sat in a passenger seat of the frigate, fingers pressed to the cool pane of the viewplaz. His eyes were as wide as those of a Fremen child on his first worm ride. Salusa Secundus!

  The sky was a sickly orange, streaked by pallid clouds even in the noon brightness. Ball lightning bounced across the heavens, as if invisible titans were playing electrical ninepins.

  Avoiding Imperial detection beacons, Dominic’s frigate skimmed across the puckered and cracked wastelands as it headed for its landing area. They crossed expanses of vitrified rock that sparkled like lakes, but were actually puddles of granite-glass. Even after so many centuries, only sparse brown grass pried upward through the blasted fields, like the clawed fingers of men buried alive.

  Between one heartbeat and the next, Liet understood how his father had been so profoundly moved by the unhealed wounds of this forsaken place. He made a low sound in his throat. When Dominic turned toward him with a curious expression, Liet explained, “In ancient times the Zensunni people— the Fremen— were slaves here for nine generations.” Staring at the blistered landscape, he added in a quiet voice, “Some say you can still see their blood staining the soil and hear their cries carried on the wind.”

  Dominic’s broad shoulders sagged. “Weichih, Salusa has endured more than its share of pain and misery.”

  They approached the outskirts of a once-sprawling city that now looked like an architectural scar. Stumps of buildings and blackened milk-marble columns lay as detritus of the splendor that once held dominion here. Off in the scabrous hills, a new wall zigzagged around a portion of reasonably intact structures, the remains of an abandoned city that had survived the holocaust.

  “That wall was meant to enclose the prison population,” Dominic said, “but after it broke down and the prisoners escaped, the functionaries and administrators sealed up the barrier again and lived inside it, where they felt protected.” He coughed out a snorting laugh. “Once the prisoners realized they were better off in a place where they were at least fed and clothed, they tried to break back in.”

  He shook his shaved head. “Now, the toughest ones have learned to make their own lives out here. The others just die. The Corrinos imported dangerous beasts— Laza tigers, Salusan bulls, and the like— to keep the survivors in check. Convicted criminals are just . . . abandoned here. No one expects to leave.”

  Liet studied the landscape with a Planetologist’s eye, trying to remember everything his father had taught him. He could smell a sour dampness in the air, even in this desolate place. “Seems to be enough potential, enough moisture. There could be ground cover, crops, livestock. Someone could change this place.”

  “The damned Corrinos won’t allow it.” Dominic’s face darkened. “They like it this way, as a suitable punishment for anyone who dares to defy the Imperium. Once prisoners get here, a cruel game begins. The Emperor likes to see who toughens up the best, who survives the longest. In his Palace, members of the Royal Court place bets on renowned prisoners, as to who will survive and who won’t.”

  “My father didn’t tell me that,” Liet said. “He lived here for years when he was younger.”

  Dominic gave a wan smile, but his eyes remained dark and troubled. “Whoever your father is, lad, he must not know everything.” The weary exile guided the frigate above the rubble of the outer city, to a broken hangar where the roof had sagged into a spiderweb of rusted girders. “As the Earl of Ix, I prefer to be underground. No need to worry about aurora storms down there.”

  “My father also told me about aurora storms.”

  The frigate descended into the dark hole in the hangar— and kept going down into cavernous warehouse spaces. “This used to be an Imperial repository, reinforced for long-term storage.” Dominic switched on the ship’s running lights, splashing yellow beams into the air. A settling dust cloud looked like gray rain.

  The two mismatched lighters swooped in beside the frigate and landed first. Other smugglers emerged from within the hidden base to lock down the craft. They unloaded cargo, tools, and supplies. The pilots of the small ships hurried over to stand by the frigate ramp, waiting for Dominic to emerge.

  As he followed the bald leader down, Liet sniffed, still feeling naked without stillsuit or nose plugs. The air smelled dry and burned, tinged with solvents and ozone. Liet longed for the rough warmth of natural rock, like a comfortable sietch; too many of the walls around him were covered with artificial sheets of metal or plastone, concealing chambers beyond.

  On a ramp that circled the landing zone, a well-muscled man appeared. He bounded down a stairway to the ground with a smooth and feral grace, though his body was lumpy and unwieldy-looking. A
startling, beet-red inkvine scar marred his squarish face, and his stringy blond hair hung at an odd angle over his left eye. He looked like a man who had been broken and then reassembled without instructions.

  “Gurney Halleck!” Dominic’s voice echoed in the landing chamber. “Come and meet our new comrade, born and raised among the Fremen.”

  The man grinned wolfishly and came over with startling swiftness. He extended a broad palm and tried to crush Liet’s hand with his grip. He quoted a passage that Liet recognized from the Orange Catholic Bible, “Greet all those whom you would have as friends, and welcome them with your heart as well as your hand.”

  Liet returned the gesture, speaking a traditional Fremen response in the ancient language of Chakobsa.

  “Gurney comes to us from Giedi Prime,” Dominic said. “He stowed away on a shipment bound for my old friend Duke Leto Atreides, then switched ships on Hagal, moving through commercial hubs and spaceports, until he fell in with the right comrades.”

  Gurney gave an awkward shrug. He was sweaty, his clothes disheveled from rigorous sword practice. “By the hells, I continued to dig myself deeper, hiding in more and more miserable places for half a year before I finally found these thugs . . . at the very bottom.”

  Liet narrowed his eyes suspiciously, ignoring the good-natured banter. “You come from Giedi Prime? The Harkonnen world?” His fingers strayed toward his belt, where he kept his crysknife sheathed. “I have killed a hundred Harkonnen devils.”

  Gurney detected the movement, but locked gazes with the bearded young Fremen. “Then you and I will be great friends.”

  • • •

  Later, when Liet sat with the smuggler band in the drinking hall of the underground base, he listened to the discussions, the laughter, the gruffly exchanged stories, the boastings and outright lies.