Francella’s eyes turned feral. She shoved Meghina aside and fired a bright yellow charge at Noah’s chest, ripping through flesh and searing a ragged, bloody hole. He fell back on the walkway, shuddered, and stopped moving. The electronic handcuffs sparked, and lifeless hands flopped loose.
Meghina and Anton cried out, as did several travelers who had gathered to see what was going on. One of them quipped facetiously, “You don’t want her mad at you.”
Francella glared in that direction, then looked down at her brother, with fascination burning in her eyes. An officer knelt to check the victim’s carotid artery, and announced, “He’s dead. Shot straight through the heart.”
Slipping the gun back into the officer’s holster, Francella said, “Just tidying up a little family business.”
Doge Lorenzo grunted in amusement, then pointed down and exclaimed, “Look! He moved!”
On the walkway, Noah felt his own body regenerating, and the intense, burning pain of the chest wound fading. His cellular structure repaired itself more quickly than before, fusing bones and organs together and sealing the injury with new skin, while leaving blood on his clothing. In less than a minute, he rose to his feet and smiled stiffly at his sister. He still had nasty, bright red scars on his chest, but they were changing with each passing moment.
With a squeal, Francella stumbled backward, as if she had just seen the devil incarnate.
“I guess he passed his lie detector test,” Princess Meghina said. “Bravo!”
“For your own good, you’d better listen to me,” Noah said, stepping toward the Doge. “We need to set our differences aside and work together on this.” The pain of the wound was already gone, lingering only as an unpleasant memory.
Reluctant to touch Noah, the soldiers did not attempt to intervene. Everyone stared in disbelief as the scars on his bare chest continued to smooth over and fade.
In his bloody, ragged tunic, Noah stood face to face with Lorenzo, and said to him, “I want you to send nehrcom messages to every planet in the Alliance. Tell them to fit every pod station with customized sensors to detect arriving podships, and guns to blow them out of space the instant they appear. This needs to be done fast!”
Noah glanced over at the Doge’s Hibbil attaché, who had been attempting to conceal himself in a forest of much larger onlookers. “I understand there are Hibbil machines … hibbamatics … used for entertainment in every royal court. Can those machines be set to manufacture what we need, in a hurry?”
The Royal Attaché shot an uneasy glance at Lorenzo, but received no response from him.
“I think he can arrange it,” Noah said to the Doge. “Have the sensors set to blast every podship to oblivion. Don’t let anyone disembark, and don’t let them off-load any ships—especially not any merchant schooners. The Mutatis have planet-busting bombs aboard them.”
“This is preposterous!” Lorenzo said. “I will do no such thing. The Merchant Prince Alliance needs the podships; we can’t destroy them. If the Mutatis have a scheme, we must deal with it in a different manner.”
“There is no other way!” Noah shouted.
“The podships are living creatures,” Lorenzo said. “If we start killing them, they will signal their brethren, and they will no longer serve our transportation needs.” He stared with wild fascination as Noah’s body continued to heal itself, eliminating the scars.
“Podships have already died,” Noah said, “one in each planetary explosion.”
“Then we should capture the disguised merchant ships,” Lorenzo said. “The moment each podship docks at a pod station, we move in and … “
“We don’t know how much time elapses between the arrival of a podship and the destruction of a planet,” Noah said. “Maybe the Mutatis don’t wait for each podship to dock.”
Without warning, Noah felt a change of air pressure, and heard a firm click. A podship floated into one of the docking bays and connected to a berth.
Hanging over the walkway, a glyphreader panel flashed, calling for all Timian One passengers to board.
“Your ship, Sire,” one of the officers said.
Lorenzo did not move.
Noah was agitated at the podship’s arrival, and hoped that he had not given his warning too late. Were there any Mutatis aboard?
The passengers began to offload through an airlock, while vessels in the cargo hold slipped into the docking bay. There were no schooners, and no signs of Mutatis. But the shapeshifters were tricky, and might have disguised the vessels he had seen earlier.
Just then, a Red Beret lieutenant ran from the Doge’s grid-copter, which had remained in a protective position, with its weapons activated. Reaching the Doge, the officer said, breathlessly, “Timian One has been destroyed, Sire! No one knows how.” He held a mobile transceiver in one hand. “The planet and its pod station have been wiped out, leaving only space debris. We have eyewitness reports of people who barely escaped with their lives. The crew of a conventional spacecraft saw a huge explosion from outside the star system, then went to our nearest base to make a report.”
“Sire, issue your commands to all planets!” Noah said. “Set up defensive perimeters at the pod stations! Now!”
Reluctantly, the Doge nodded. “Fire off a nehrcom message to General Poitier,” he said to his Royal Attaché. “Tell him I need sensor-gun specifications, exactly as Mr. Watanabe described.”
The dispatch was sent, and a short while later the reply came, with the needed information.
Suddenly animated, Doge Lorenzo barked orders to the Red Berets. All over the pod station, uniformed soldiers jumped into action. Urgent messages were relayed to the Canopa nehrcom station and dispatched all over the Merchant Prince Alliance. The podship floated out on its regular schedule, and Noah watched it disappear in a glimmer of green, into another dimension of Timeweb. Without the Doge or his entourage.
Noah hardly noticed his sister slinking away.
A short while later, the Doge’s troop transports arrived, eerily silent in the vacuum of space. Hundreds of soldiers disembarked.
Soon the Royal Attaché was operating a hibbamatic to create the necessary sensor-guns, and furry little Hibbil technicians hurried to install them around the perimeter of the pod station, set to pick off any podships automatically as they came in. Merchant prince warships moved into positions in orbital space, near the station.
Noah felt a terrible emptiness in the pit of his stomach. Timian One! Billions of people had been killed.
* * * * *
Only moments after the defensive mechanisms were set up, a podship emerged from deep space in a burst of green light. The defensive units opened fire and the sentient spacecraft broke apart, scattering thick pieces of the fleshy hull in orbit, along with passengers and fragments from on-board vessels.
From the pod station, Noah gazed out on scattered particles and broken bodies floating in the airless vacuum of space. What looked like a merchant prince schooner floated by, with its hull split open to reveal gleaming alloy tubes and a dead Mutati pilot. Soon, two more podships appeared, and were blasted away. Then they stopped coming.
Almost oblivious to Red Beret guards beside him, Noah felt immense pain and sadness for the loss of life, but knew he could not have taken any other course of action. As a galactic ecologist, he hated having to interfere with the podships in this way, but he was convinced that the measures he recommended would save more of the beautiful creatures than they would harm. The same held true with regard to the members of other races who had to be sacrificed. Many more of them would die if he did nothing.
Noah’s corporeal future was as uncertain as that of the rest of the galaxy. He expected to be taken into custody and blamed for the huge economic fallout that would result from the cessation of podship travel. Through their political wiles, Doge Lorenzo and Francella would spin the facts to make it look as if the entire crisis was Noah’s fault. He didn’t know exactly how they would fabricate the story, but knew they would.
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Deep in his psyche, a part of Noah no longer concerned itself with such details, for he was evolving into something unique in the annals of history, changing moment by moment.
The End
About the Author
Brian Herbert, the son of Frank Herbert, is the author of numerous New York Times bestsellers. He has won many literary honors and has been nominated for the highest awards in science fiction. In 2003, he published Dreamer of Dune, a moving biography of his father that was nominated for the Hugo Award. After writing ten DUNE-universe novels with Kevin J. Anderson, the coauthors created their own epic series, HELLHOLE. Brian began his own galaxy-spanning science fiction series in 2006, TIMEWEB. His other acclaimed solo novels include Sidney’s Comet; Sudanna, Sudanna; The Race for God; and Man of Two Worlds (written with Frank Herbert).
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