Dune: House Harkonnen

by Brian Herbert; Kevin J. Anderson

  So Abulurd had waited. He despised bureaucratic corruption and preferred to inconvenience himself rather than bow to the unfortunate standards of Shaddam IV’s court. He disliked long-distance travel, would rather have stayed home tending his own affairs or playing board games with Emmi and the household staff, but the requirements of noble status forced him to do many things he came to regret.

  Perhaps today he would change all that for the better.

  Within the Hall of Oratory, meetings were held by representatives of the Great and Minor Houses, CHOAM directors, and other important officials who had no noble titles. The business of the Imperium continued daily.

  Abulurd expected his appearance to draw little attention. He’d not forewarned his half-brother, and knew that the Baron would be upset when he found out, but Abulurd continued into the enormous hall, proud and confident— and more nervous than he had ever been in his life. Vladimir would simply have to accept this.

  The Baron had other problems and obligations. His health had failed greatly over the years, and he’d put on such an enormous amount of weight that he now walked with the aid of suspensors. How the Baron kept going despite all that, Abulurd didn’t know; he understood little of the engines that drove his half-brother.

  Abulurd quietly took a seat in the gallery and called up the agenda to see that the meetings had already fallen an hour behind the time slots— which was to be expected, he supposed. So he waited, straight-backed on the plastone bench, listening to dull business resolutions and minor adjustments to laws that he didn’t pretend to care about or even understand.

  Despite the light shining through stained-glass windows and the heaters mounted under the cold stone, this enormous hall had a sterile feel to it. He just wanted to go home. When they finally called his name, Abulurd emerged from his distraction and marched toward the speaker’s podium. His knees were shaking, but he tried not to show it.

  On their high bench, the council members sat in formal gray robes. Glancing over his shoulder, Abulurd saw empty seats in the section where formal Harkonnen representatives should have been. No one had bothered to attend this minor daily meeting, not even Kalo Whylls, the long-standing ambassador from Giedi Prime. No one had thought to inform Whylls that the day’s business would involve House Harkonnen.

  Perfect.

  He faltered as he remembered the last time he’d intended to address a group of people— his citizens rebuilding Bifrost Eyrie, and the horrors that had befallen them before he could speak his piece. Now, Abulurd drew a deep breath and prepared to address the Chairman, a lean man with long braided hair and hooded eyes. He could not remember which House the Chairman belonged to.

  Before Abulurd could speak, however, the Master of Arms rattled off his name and titles in a long and droning sequence. Abulurd hadn’t known so many words could follow his name, since he was a relatively unimportant person in the faufreluches system. But it did sound impressive.

  None of the sleepy members of the council appeared the least bit interested, however. They passed papers among themselves.

  “Your Honors,” he began, “sirs, I have come to make a formal request. I have filed the appropriate paperwork to reclaim the title that is due me as subdistrict governor of Rabban-Lankiveil. I have effectively served in this capacity for years, but I never . . . submitted the proper documents.”

  When he began to lay forth his reasoning and his justification in a voice rising with passion, the Council Chairman raised a hand. “You have followed the formal procedures required for a hearing, and the necessary notices have been dispatched.” He shuffled through the documents in front of him. “I see the Emperor has received his notice as well.”

  “That is correct,” Abulurd said, knowing that the message intended for his own half-brother had been sent by a slow, circuitous Heighliner route— a necessary sleight of hand.

  The Chairman held up a single sheet of parchment. “According to this you were removed from your position on Arrakis by the Baron Harkonnen.”

  “Without my objection, your Honor. And my half-brother has filed no objection to my petition today.” This was true enough. The message was still en route.

  “Duly noted, Abulurd Harkonnen.” The Chairman looked down. “Nor, I see, does the Emperor object.”

  Abulurd’s pulse accelerated as he watched the Chairman study the papers, the legal notices. Have I forgotten something?

  Finally, the Chairman lifted his gaze. “Everything is in order. Approved.”

  “I . . . I have a second request,” Abulurd announced, somewhat unsettled that things had gone so rapidly and smoothly. “I wish to formally renounce my Harkonnen name.”

  This caused a brief titter among the attendees.

  He summoned the words he had rehearsed so many times with Emmi and imagined her there beside him. “I cannot condone the actions of my family members,” he said, without naming them. “I have a new son, Feyd-Rautha, and I wish him to be raised untainted, without the black mark of a Harkonnen name.”

  The Council Chairman leaned forward, as if really seeing Abulurd for the first time. “Do you fully understand what you’re doing, sir?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” he said, surprised at the strength in his voice. His heart swelled with pride at what he had just said. “I grew up on Giedi Prime. I am the second surviving son of my father, Dmitri Harkonnen. My half-brother, the Baron, rules all Harkonnen holdings and does as he chooses. I ask only to keep Lankiveil, the place I call my home.”

  His voice softened, as if he thought a compassionate argument might move the bored men listening to his speech. “I want no part of galactic politics or ruling worlds. I served my years on Arrakis and found that I didn’t like it. I have no use for riches, power, or fame. Let such things remain in the keeping of those who desire them.” His voice choked in his throat. “I want no more blood on my hands, and none for my new son.”

  The Chairman rose solemnly and stood tall in his gray robes. “You renounce all affiliation with House Harkonnen forever, including the rights and privileges pertaining thereto?”

  Abulurd nodded vigorously, ignoring the muttering voices around the chamber. “Absolutely and without equivocation.” These people would have a great deal to talk about for days to come, but it mattered nothing to him. By then he would be on his way back home to Emmi and their baby. He wanted nothing, only a normal, quiet life and personal happiness. The rest of the Landsraad could continue without him. “Henceforth, I will take my wife’s honored name of Rabban.”

  The Council Chairman rapped his sonic gavel, which echoed with a boom of finality through the hall. “So noted. The council approves your request. Notification will be sent immediately to Giedi Prime and to the Emperor.”

  While Abulurd stood stunned by his good fortune, the Sergeant at Arms called the next representative, and he found himself ushered out of the way. Rapidly leaving the building, he put the Hall of Oratory behind him. Outside, sunshine splashed his face again and he heard the tinkle of fountains and the music of chime kites. His step had a new lightness, and he grinned foolishly.

  Others might have trembled at the momentous decision he had just made, but Abulurd Rabban felt no fear. He’d achieved everything he’d hoped to accomplish, and Emmi would be so pleased.

  He raced to pack up the few possessions he’d brought with him and headed for the spaceport, anxious to return to quiet, isolated Lankiveil, where he could begin a new and better life.

  There is no such thing as a law of nature. There is only a series of laws relating to man’s practical experience with nature. These are laws of man’s activities. They change as man’s activities change.

  — PARDOT KYNES, An Arrakis Primer

  Even after six months on Salusa Secundus, Liet-Kynes still marveled at the wild and restless landscape, the ancient ruins and the deep ecological wounds. As his father had said, it was . . . fascinating.

  Meanwhile, in his underground hideout, Dominic Vernius studied records and pored over st
olen reports of CHOAM activities. He and Gurney Halleck scrutinized Spacing Guild manifests to determine how best to sabotage business dealings in ways that would cause the most harm to the Emperor. His occasional contacts and spies who gave him scant details of the Ixian situation had vanished. He had once received occasional intelligence from his lost ancestral home, but finally even that source had dried up.

  Dominic’s reddened eyes and frown-creased face showed how little sleep he had been getting.

  For himself, Liet finally saw beyond the intrigues of the desert people and interclan rivalries for control of spice sands. He observed the politics between Great and Minor Houses, shipping magnates, and powerful families. The Imperium was far more vast than he had imagined.

  He also began to grasp the magnitude of what his father had accomplished on Dune, and felt a growing respect for Pardot Kynes.

  Wistful at times, Liet imagined what it would take to return Salusa to the glory it had enjoyed long ago, as the focal point of the Imperium. There was so much left to understand here, so many questions still unanswered.

  With some well-placed weather installations, along with hardy colonists willing to replant prairies and forests, Salusa Secundus might live and breathe again. But House Corrino refused to invest in such an enterprise, no matter what rewards they might reap. In fact, it seemed that their effort was directed toward keeping Salusa the same as it had been for all these centuries.

  Why would they do that?

  As a stranger on this world, Liet spent most of his free time with a pack and survival gear, wandering across the ravaged landscape, avoiding the ruins of long-destroyed cities where prisoners inhabited the ancient Imperial government buildings: towering museums, immense halls, great chambers with collapsed ceilings. In all the centuries Salusa had been a Corrino prison world, no one had tried to rebuild. Walls were leaning or tumbled over; roofs had huge holes.

  Liet had devoted his first weeks to studying the underground smuggler base. He instructed the hardened veterans in how to erase traces of their presence, how to alter the collapsed hangar so that it looked as if it were inhabited by only a few feral refugees, attracting nothing more than a cursory glance. When the smugglers were safely hidden, and Dominic satisfied, the young Fremen went out exploring on his own, as his father had done. . . .

  Moving with great care so as not to dislodge pebbles or crumbled dirt that might leave a mark of his presence, Liet climbed a ridge to look down upon a basin. Through binoculars he saw people moving under the crackling sunlight: soldiers in mottled tan and brown uniforms: desert camouflage used by the Emperor’s Sardaukar troops. Extravagant war games, again.

  A week ago, he’d watched the Sardaukar root out a nest of prisoners barricaded in an isolated ruin. Liet had been hiking nearby and saw the Imperials attack with all their might, wearing full body shields, using flamethrowers and primitive weapons against the convicts. The one-sided battle had gone on for hours, as well-trained Sardaukar fought hand-to-hand against hardened prisoners who boiled out of the stronghold.

  The Emperor’s men had slaughtered many prisoners, but some had fought back extremely well, even taking down several Sardaukar, commandeering their weapons, and prolonging the fight. When only a few dozen of the best fighters remained holed up and ready to die, the Sardaukar planted a stun-bomb. After the troops fell back behind barricades, a pulse beacon of intense light, coupled with the motivational force of a Holtzman field, knocked the surviving prisoners unconscious . . . allowing the Sardaukar to swarm inside.

  Liet had wondered why the Imperial soldiers didn’t just plant a stunner in the first place. Later, he wondered if the Sardaukar might have been culling the prisoners, selecting the best candidates. . . .

  Now, days later, some of those surviving captives stood out on the scorched basin wearing tattered, mismatched clothes, the remnants of prison uniforms. Around them, the Sardaukar formed regimented lines, a human grid. Weapons and pieces of heavy equipment were parked at strategic positions around the perimeter, tethered down with metal spikes and chains.

  The men seemed to be training, prisoners and Sardaukar alike.

  As he crouched on the top of the ridge, Liet felt vulnerable without his stillsuit. The dry taste of thirst scratched in his mouth, reminding him of the desert, of his home, but he had no catchtube at his neck for a sip of water. . . .

  Earlier that day they had distributed another load of melange smuggled from Dune, selling it to escaped prisoners who hated the Corrinos as much as Dominic did. In the common room, Gurney Halleck had raised a cup of spice-laced coffee in a salute to his leader. He strummed an F-sharp chord on his baliset, added a minor chord, and then sang in his bold, gruff voice (which, though not melodious, was at least exuberant)—

  Oh, cup of spice

  To carry me

  Beyond my flesh,

  To a distant star.

  Melange, they call it—

  Melange! Melange!

  The men cheered, and Bork Qazon, the Salusan camp cook, poured him a fresh cup of spice coffee. The broad-shouldered Scien Traf, formerly an Ixian engineer, patted Gurney on the back, and the onetime merchant Pen Barlow, ever-present cigar in his mouth, laughed boisterously.

  The song had made Liet want to walk on the spice sands himself, to savor the pungent cinnamon odor as it wafted up from a sandworm he rode. Perhaps Warrick would come to escort him back to Red Wall Sietch, once they returned from Salusa. He hoped so. It had been too long since he’d seen his friend and blood-brother.

  Warrick and Faroula had been married for nearly a year and a half. Perhaps by now she was even carrying his child. Liet’s life would have been so different if only he had won her hand instead. . . .

  Now, though, he crouched in the rocks of a high ridge on a different planet, spying on the mysterious movements of Imperial troops. Liet adjusted the binocular’s high-definition oil lenses for the best possible view. As the Sardaukar drilled across the barren basin, he studied the speed and precision with which they moved.

  Still, Liet thought, a desperate group of well-armed Fremen might be able to defeat them. . . .

  Finally, the surviving prisoners were led out onto the training field in front of new Sardaukar barracks, alloy tentments clustered like bunkers on the open flat, metal sides reflecting hazy sunlight. The soldiers seemed to be testing the prisoners, challenging them to keep up with their exercises. When one man faltered, a Sardaukar killed him with a purple blast from a lasgun; the others didn’t pause.

  Liet-Kynes turned his gaze from the military drills to the bilious sky, which bore ominous patterns he’d been taught to recognize. The air looked soupy as it roiled a deep orange edged with streaks of green, as if from indigestion. Clumps of ball lightning drifted across the sky. Clusters of static like huge snowflakes channeled the flow of wind toward the basin.

  From stories told by Gurney Halleck and the other smugglers, Liet knew the dangers of being exposed in an aurora storm. But part of him— the curious part he’d inherited from his father— watched in awed fascination as the electrical and radioactive disturbance flowed closer. The tempest was accompanied by tendrils of exotic color, ionized air and cone-shaped funnels known as the hammer-wind.

  Uneasy at being so exposed, he found cracks in the outcropping behind him. The talus caves provided enough shelter for any resourceful Fremen to wait out the harsh weather, but the troops below were unprotected. Did they have the gall to think they could survive against such raw, elemental power?

  Seeing the clouds and discharges approach, the ragged prisoners began to break ranks, while the uniformed troops stood firm. The commander barked orders, apparently telling them to return to their places. Seconds later, a powerful gust of precursor wind nearly toppled the craggy-faced man from his wobbly, levitating platform. The tall leader shouted for everyone to fall back to their metal bunkers.

  The Sardaukar marched in lockstep, perfectly trained. Some of the prisoners tried to emulate the soldiers, while others jus
t fled into the reinforced shelters.

  The aurora storm struck only moments after the last of the tentments had been sealed. Like a living thing, it ripped across the basin, flashing multicolored lightning. A great fist of hammer-wind pounded the ground; another slammed into one of the tentments, flattening the metal-walled shelter and crushing everyone inside.

  Boiling, crackling air swept toward the ridge. Although this was not his planet, Liet had understood the potentially lethal nature of storms since childhood. He ducked down from his exposed vantage, slid along the rocks until he could worm his way between two tall boulders and deep into a crack of rock. Within moments, he heard the demonic howling, the crackle of air, the discharges of ball lightning, the pounding slams of hammer-wind.

  In the narrow slice of visible sky between the rocks, Liet watched a kaleidoscope of colors that flashed with retina-searing glare. He huddled back, but sensed he was as safe as he could be.

  Breathing calmly, patiently waiting for the storm to blow over, he stared at the frenzied intensity of the aurora storm. Salusa exhibited many similarities with Dune. Both were harsh worlds, with unforgiving lands, unforgiving skies. On Dune, ferocious storms could also reshape the landscape, crushing a man into the ground or stripping flesh from his bones.

  Somehow though, unlike this place, those terrible winds made sense to him, linked as they were to the mystery and grandeur of Dune.

  Liet wanted to leave Salusa Secundus, to return to his homeworld with Dominic Vernius. He needed to live in the desert again— where he belonged.

  • • •

  When the time was right, Dominic Vernius took part of his smuggling crew back in his frigate, accompanied by the two small lighters. Dominic piloted his own flagship, guiding the vessel into its assigned berth in the hold of the Guild Heighliner.

  The renegade Earl went to his stateroom to relax and contemplate. Though he’d spent years operating in the shadows of the Imperium, a gadfly to annoy Shaddam IV, he had never struck a clear and decisive blow. Yes, he had stolen a shipment of the Emperor’s commemorative coins, and he’d floated the hilarious balloon caricature over the pyramid stadium on Harmonthep. Yes, he had scrawled the snide hundred-meter-tall message on the granite canyon wall (“Shaddam, does your crown rest comfortably on your pointy head?”), and he had defaced dozens of statues and monuments as well.