There was no feasible means to impose order upon the frenzied exodus. Within two weeks, everyone who wanted to leave and who had access to a ship had departed, but many of the vessels did not have much range or adequate supplies to keep the passengers safe for the duration of the emergency, since no one knew exactly when Omnius’s battle fleet would arrive.
A completely separate effort involved digging in and hoping for the best. Engineering crews from the Army of the Jihad excavated giant underground shelters, reinforced them with alloy mesh and support girders, and filled them with stockpiles of supplies. Those who did not make it off the planet in time would be rushed into the underground warrens, where they would take shelter from the initial bombardment by the extermination fleet.
Based on previous experience, the thinking-machine army would attack and then likely retreat. If, however, the robots decided to obliterate all vestiges of the League capital and establish a new Omnius network here, then the survivors would be trapped underground with little likelihood of survival. Even so, they had no other choice.
Many people whose families had lived for generations on Salusa did not want to leave. They chose to remain here and take their chances against the invading machines, though Abulurd thought they would change their minds as soon as they saw the incoming robotic warships.
The task seemed impossible, hopeless. But Abulurd would do no less than his utmost. Vorian Atreides had entrusted him with this task— that was all the incentive Abulurd needed.
Evacuation ships continued to depart from Zimia Spaceport and other landing pads across Salusa. At first, teams of monitors attempted to keep records of who had escaped, where they had gone, and who still needed to be rescued. But the overwhelming numbers quickly crushed the effort. Abulurd and his comrades spent their days simply getting people off-planet. If they survived, they could sort it all out later.
If the Great Purge worked perfectly and all incarnations of the Omnius evermind were destroyed, Abulurd’s father, Supreme Commander Atreides, and whatever remained of the space-folding Jihad fleet would return here for a final stand against the now-leaderless robotic extermination force.
For now, as a last tenuous line of defense, the few League warships without Holtzman engines remained in orbit, a pathetic defensive cordon around the world. All of the jihadi soldiers who had stayed behind knew they would die here. They had seen the size of the fleet Omnius had launched against them.
But Abulurd would not give up— not yet. Out there somewhere, Vorian Atreides and Quentin Butler were leading the Purge. Day after day, world after world.
He watched more ships streak to the skies. Each one of those vessels contained a handful of human survivors that would likely escape Omnius’s wrath. It would have to be good enough. Somehow, together, they would wrest a victory from this moment of hopelessness.
The human imagination is infinite. Not even the most sophisticated machines can understand this.
— NORMA CENVA,
thoughts recorded and deciphered by Adrien Cenva
At the edge of a trance but not quite there, Norma chewed two more melange capsules. The essence of spice filled her mouth and nostrils, made her eyes water. Then, in her mind, she traveled far from Kolhar….
The Great Purge continued across the Synchronized Worlds. She knew that bombing raids were obliterating the fringe Omnius incarnations in lightning ambushes. Machine-dominated planets were dying, strike after strike, before the rest of the everminds knew what was happening.
Her space-folding technology made it possible.
But instead of complete pride, Norma sensed a deep disturbance in her psyche. Strange echoes of disaster tumbled through her spice-induced visions, and she felt terrible guilt.
Since she had never adequately solved the spacefolder navigation problem, many soldiers were losing their lives. Each time the battle groups jumped from one target to the next, their numbers were decimated. And decimated again before they reached the next target. Oh, the incredible cost!
In her perfect, beautiful body, looking like an avenging angel, Norma stood alone on one of the vast, flat rooftops of the spacefolder assembly plant. She gazed up at a night sky filled with glistening stars and bright planets. Some of them were League Worlds, others dominated by thinking machines… still others were now radioactive cinders, completely dead.
The vast distances called to her. A cool breeze blew her long blond hair behind her. Norma had figured out a way to bridge the entire galaxy, folding the fabric of space. Every star system she could see, and more, now lay within the range of human exploration. The Holtzman engines worked, as she’d known they would. But an elusive something lay beyond her grasp.
My ships are still flawed.
With her body so saturated with melange, she rarely slept anymore, not the way she had as a small child in the warm caves on Rossak. In those days, she’d gone to bed with few problems on her mind, even though her mother rarely paid any attention to her. To compensate for Zufa’s disapproval, the girl had retreated into other realms, dabbling with mathematics so esoteric that they approached the realm between physics and philosophy.
With help and encouragement from Aurelius, important ideas had begun to trickle into Norma’s hungry, receptive brain, like the first droplets of water in an eventual ocean. By the time she was seven years old, as the reservoir of her intellect filled, she always went to bed with her mind brimming with problems or challenging mental exercises; many solutions danced closer in the half-waking fugue state just before sleep took her, and she rarely woke up without having considered them in detail.
Now, somewhere behind her, she heard the whine of a Holtzman engine as workers tested it inside one of the buildings. As she focused on the sound, it grew more distant. Pulsing through her tissues, the massive dose of melange soothed her, muffling sensory perceptions while heightening other abilities. Gradually the distracting sound faded entirely, and she no longer felt the cool breeze, either. She seemed to drift upward in her thoughts, into the starfield.
Out there, ship after ship in the Jihad fleet folded space and plunged across dimensions from one Synchronized World to the next. Now, in her mind, she heard another crew vanish and die, their souls torn apart— because she could not help them find their way. She wished the Supreme Commander had been able to install her forbidden computer systems in more than his twelve primary ships. If a computer was designed to assist in the destruction of Omnius, was it still inherently evil?
Or perhaps she should have designed paths for them, made the fleet’s jumps shorter, across more predictable lines of space. It would be like a sprint, covering safe distances in a flash, and then moving more slowly across uncharted jumps. But such caution would cost a great deal of time. Time! The Army of the Jihad did not have that commodity.
Her vision remained vivid, letting her see the nuclear storms dropped by the League ships, hurricanes of pulse-atomics that devastated the Omnius enclaves…. Human captives cheered at first and then saw that they too were doomed.
Another machine world gone, another Omnius erased. But with each transit through folded space, fewer and fewer of the Jihad ships survived.
Emerging from her daze, Norma realized that the expansive rooftop was bathed in artificial light from blazing glowglobes. Adrien was nearby, watching her, looking worried. She wondered how long he had been there. The sounds of manufacturing and testing suddenly came sharp and loud across the shipyard.
“So many casualties.” Her throat was dry and raspy. “They can’t see where the spacefolders will take them, and so they are lost. Too many brave fighters for the Jihad, too many innocent prisoners on the Synchronized Worlds. My ships. My failure.”
Adrien looked at her with dark eyes full of stoic resignation. “It is another price of this long and bloody war, Mother. When the Jihad is finally over, we can get back to business.”
Still, all through the night, she heard the screams of the dying as they echoed through— and between— space.<
br />
The way of the warrior, moment by moment, is the practice of death.
— SWORDMASTER ISTIAN GOSS
Under the plan that Vor had established with Primero Quentin Butler before departing from Salusa Secundus, fast messengers were dispatched from each battle group after every engagement at a Synchronized World. Due to the known attrition with each space-folding jump, the Army of the Jihad did not dare risk sending all the components of their fleet to a single meeting; however, Martyrist volunteers in spacefolder scouts were considered expendable.
Flurries of the small ships bearing news and records converged at established rendezvous points, placing their detailed logs in buoys, which were retrieved, copied, and disseminated by the scouts from other battle groups, keeping the commanders apprised of the progress and losses. Vorian Atreides had modeled the system on Omnius’s pattern of dispatching update ships throughout the Synchronized empire to keep the everminds current. He found the irony satisfying.
As technicians tallied the information, the blanks were filling in, each report of success a small victory, an indication of survival, a reason to hope. But there were other reports as well. One hundred eighty-four ships lost… two hundred seventeen… two hundred thirty-five… two hundred seventy-nine. Each space-folding flight in the nuclear blitzkrieg was a terrible, unpredictable game of Russian roulette: a lightning strike if it went well, but lightning-swift death if it did not.
For a moment, Vor allowed himself to mourn one of the lost ships, the LS Zimia, and its captain, a fine soldier and a great drinking buddy. They had shared many tall tales of battles and women, in numerous spaceports across the League. Other faces and personalities whirled through his mind, all dead heroes, but for the sake of the mission he had to set such thoughts aside.
He thought of young Abulurd back on Salusa, safe from this ordeal, yet facing a threat of his own that was just as terrible. He and Faykan had to evacuate an entire population.
Cursing under his breath, Vor wondered how many more jumps his fleet could survive. He could estimate the number using only the statistics— but that was how a machine would analyze their chances. Nothing about war was perfectly predictable. When the Great Purge was all over, how many ships would remain? Would he himself make it? Norma Cenva’s augmented navigation device gave him a better chance than most, but would it be enough? Already his fleet had left a graveyard of space trash in its wake.
And once they had finished crushing the undefended Synchronized Worlds, and then Corrin, the remnants of the Jihad fleet would need to race back to Salusa. There, they would make a stand against the oncoming thinking-machine battleships, which were still programmed to attack, even if the evermind was erased. The Jihad battle fleet would cause as much damage as possible, die in flames, and hope to deflect the machines’ attack.
He and all of his fighters expected to die before this engagement was over. But he would sacrifice himself with the satisfaction of knowing he had defeated the computer evermind at last. Maybe he would even be with Leronica again in Heaven, if the Martyrists were correct in their religious beliefs….
Vor shook his head, staring at the newly updated tactical projection on the bridge of the LS Serena Victory. Out there, in the vast but silent battleground of empty space, he knew the strikes continued, and continued. By now, more than three-quarters of the five hundred and forty-three Synchronized Worlds should have been slagged.
As each group of fast messengers brought back summaries from the ninety battle groups, Vor updated the picture of their progress across enemy territory. In scanning the scattered reports, he saw that some Synchronized Worlds had put up heavier-than-expected resistance, drawing upon leftover ground-based systems. Five of the Jihad Purge groups had failed at specific targets, which would necessitate a second offensive to the same coordinates. In another instance, due to the quirks of space-folding travel, four of the remaining ships in a battle group had vanished in a single jump; only two of the fast messengers had survived to deliver their fateful reports.
We will have to make up for it.
“My battle group will do it,” Quentin Butler transmitted. His voice sounded bleak, as if he no longer cared whether or not he survived. “If you give me two of your ships, Supreme Commander, we’ll go back and finish mopping up the targets that were missed.”
Quentin’s flagship had survived one of the disastrous passages. Already down to only six capital ships in his battle group, he had then lost three of them in a single space-folding jump to a Synchronized target. He had seen the robots’ defensive emplacements there, calculated the odds, and realized he could not succeed in destroying Omnius. Disappointed, he had rallied his three surviving ballistas and gone to rendezvous with Vorian at the Supreme Commander’s projected location. They pooled their ships, sterilized another Synchronized World together, and then paused to assess their situation. Quentin was anxious to be on the attack again.
“Very well, Primero. Go with my blessing. We can’t leave a single enemy world intact.”
Verified estimates indicated that over a billion human slaves and trustees had already died in the Great Purge— people toiling under horrendous conditions, beaten down by the depraved thinking machines. Those sacrifices had been disquieting, but entirely necessary. And even more were bound to die.
The first planetary systems annihilated in League nuclear attacks had all been lesser machine worlds, primarily military strongholds and resupply points for Omnius forces. Now, with the remainder of his battle group, Vor would go after the more important Synchronized Worlds, eventually making a final assault on Corrin. Then it would all be over.
After Quentin departed, Vor’s re-formed group made its next leap. Space folded around his attack force in what would either be an embrace or a strangulation. He would know in a few moments….
As his warships came within range of the immense planet Quadra with its silvery moons, he dispersed the vessels and approached in a crescent formation, with the LS Serena Victory on one wing, then deployed his first squadrons of bombers. Scanners picked up incoming missiles, and Vor ordered the Holtzman shields up.
Though the Great Purge had been under way for weeks already, no slow-flying robot ship could have traveled to other Synchronized Worlds swiftly enough to deliver a warning. But the Quadra-Omnius had automatic defensive systems in place, which responded to the arrival of the Jihad fleet.
The robot missiles struck the Holtzman shields and deflected off their targets to spin harmlessly away into space. Before the local evermind could launch a second volley, Vor ordered his ships to shoot back through their pulsing flicker-and-fire shield systems, choosing some of their targeted multiple-blast atomic warheads. Moments later ten artificial moons crackled with the impacts, cascading silvery fireworks into the vacuum of orbital space. He could already see that this battle would take hours, maybe even days….
After pounding the artificial battle moons, still unable to break through to the ground defenses and Omnius strongholds on Quadra, Vor stepped back with surprise as his bridge screen shuddered with static. His communications officer said, “We’re being contacted by people below, Supreme Commander— a transmission from humans. They must have seized a com-network down there.”
The screen filled with a sequence of images, an overview of the continents and cities below. Vor observed close-up images, apparently from surveillance watcheyes in one of Quadra’s cities. He knew what he had to do. “We can’t save them. Continue with full warhead deployment, per our plans.”
One of the Martyrist volunteers manning the flagship’s scan station nodded. “They will be accepted into Paradise if they give up their lives for the Holy Jihad.”
“After today, Paradise is going to be a very crowded place,” Vor muttered as he stared at the screen.
* * *
UP IN THE smoke-filled skies of Quadra, silvery moons hung low over the Synchronized metropolis. The robots marching through the streets paid no attention to the looming battle moons, but t
he enslaved humans felt the overbearing observation. Even with all the robotic warships withdrawn and sent to Corrin for the final assault on the League, the threat remained in place.
But some of the slaves had made whispered plans, always hoping….
When dazzling sparks and flashes unexpectedly erupted on the artificial satellites, humans in the streets of Quadra City turned to stare. Many flicked their glances up to the sky, then nervously returned their attention to assigned tasks, refusing to believe.
The man named Borys, though— a former swordmaster of Ginaz captured twenty-one years ago at a skirmish on Ularda— knew exactly what must be happening. His hope swelled, and he dropped his tools on the hot open-air packaging line where he was forced to labor. He shouted, knowing he dared not hesitate. “This is what we have been waiting for! Our rescuers have come. We must throw off our chains and fight with the liberators before it’s too late.”
Gasps and mutters rippled like a shock wave through the work gangs. Borys immediately grabbed one of his heavy tools and jammed it into the whirring machinery that moved the production line. Sparks flew and smoke poured out. The complex system ground to a halt with a shriek that sounded like machines in pain.
Around him, sentinel robots and combat models paused, receiving urgent new instructions from the Quadra-Omnius. Borys did not think his meager disturbance had caught the notice of the evermind: Something up in orbit consumed all of the giant computer’s attention.
Over the years of his captivity, Borys’s fellow mercenaries captured with him at Ularda had been slain, some for good causes, others pointlessly. Borys was the last of his team, and he had grander hopes. Now, as he rallied the people working in the streets, he understood this was their only chance.
Borys had never stopped spreading his plans among the cowed humans, gauging the other prisoners. As a swordmaster who followed the teachings of Jool Noret, he had been bred to fight, trained in combat techniques by the sensei mek Chirox. Borys knew his abilities and his limitations. He had carefully culled out those willing to fight for their freedom, separating them from the captives too fearful to risk harm. By now, his handpicked lieutenants were dispersed across Quadra.
Dune: The Battle of Corrin Page 26