Dune: The Machine Crusade

by Brian Herbert; Kevin J. Anderson

  “Needless to say,” he said with a grim smile, “I am a wanted man.”

  Farther down in the tunnels, assassin robots had taken human hostages; the commandos could hear their screams. But rather than using the squirming victims as bargaining chips, the machines simply tore them apart, as if expecting the mercenaries to fall back in terror. Handon moaned at the butchery.

  As the human force rushed toward them, the robots raised weapon arms flickering with high-intensity flames and ready to launch explosives.

  “Prepare to drop ranks,” the Jihad officer shouted. “Shields on again!”

  Handon huddled behind five Ginaz mercenaries, who temporarily powered on their body shields and formed an impenetrable barrier in the corridor. Since the shields proved unreliable if used for long periods, the mercenaries were forced to deactivate them whenever they were not expecting to face direct fire.

  The assassin robots launched round after round of explosives. Violent detonations fractured the walls and made the ceiling shudder. Debris pattered down, but the personal shields deflected the force of the blast.

  “Front line— down!” After the robots had exhausted their first round of projectiles, the shielded soldiers ducked out of the way. Noret pushed past them, yelling. Wielding a heavy launcher, he fired into the ranks of mechanical soldiers. The tunnel ceiling fractured, and large rocks crashed down. He didn’t dodge, didn’t protect himself with his own shield— just kept blasting away. Noret destroyed all of the assassin robots in the corridor. Unyielding, he looked for more enemies, then gestured to Handon. “Forward, quickly! Lead us to the target.”

  The front ranks of mercenaries ran along behind Noret and the guide. All the commandos were forced to switch on their shields to protect against falling rock. Only moments after they escaped the passageway, the ceiling collapsed behind them. Walls caved in, and clouds of rock dust spurted like smoky blood.

  Some looked back in dismay at the blocked passageway, but Noret shouted at them. “We won’t be escaping by that route anyway, and now it will block any pursuing robots from following us.”

  “Come! Up ahead!” Handon seemed anxious and terrified. “The Omnius citadel is above us.”

  Behind them, warhead engineers lugged a cylinder that encased an atomic explosive, small by planetary standards but adequate to vaporize a large section of the city Omnius had built.

  Primero Harkonnen was even now carrying on the gunship battle in space, but an equally important fight needed to be won down here. If he succeeded, Noret could slay Omnius.

  Handon gestured toward glassy fused rock where metal rungs marked a vertical shaft cut through the ceiling. “Hurry, before we lose our chance!” He scrambled up the metal rungs ahead of the others. “This will be the culmination of my plans to avenge the slaughter we have suffered.”

  Intermittently, the refugee looked down, and his shadowed eyes flashed. Noret climbed after him, suddenly suspicious, but the young mercenary was always wary and on guard. The sensei mek Chirox had taught him never to assume that he was safe.

  They entered the armored dome of the computer nexus, the evermind’s most secure pavilion. Machinery, pipes, ducting, and coolant cylinders turned the walls and ceiling into an industrial horror. Below, the survivors of Noret’s fighting team climbed up, grunting, hauling the heavy nuclear warhead. Finally the cylinder rested on the plated metal floor inside the nexus vault. Exhausted, they deactivated their overheating body shields, so that they could get to work.

  Noret looked around, expecting to see robotic defenders inside the vulnerable heart of Omnius. He was ready to kill them all, just as he had won a thousand practice fights against Chirox. Sonorous electrical pulses throbbed through the machinery. In the center of the chamber, a glowing pedestal encased the gelsphere computer mind.

  But he detected no armored sentinels or assassin machines. Something was not right about this.

  Noret crouched warily. He kept his personal shield activated, even though it flickered unreliably.

  Combat engineers knelt and cracked open the warhead case. One man opened a comline, transmitting to the Jihad warships in orbit. “Primero Harkonnen, group three is in position. Dispatch pickup shuttle immediately. We may have only a few minutes here.”

  “On its way down,” answered an officer from the lead ballista. “You’re earlier than expected.”

  “We had good guidance from Handon,” Noret said.

  “What have you heard from the other teams?” asked the warhead engineer as she worked to configure the nuclear trigger.

  “All contact lost,” the battleship responded. “You’re the only ones left. We weren’t sure anybody was going to make it.”

  “We’ll make it,” Noret said in a soft growl, barely wincing as he thought of all the other fallen mercenaries. But only Ginaz warriors could be expected to accomplish missions such as these. “Now we blow these machines into five separate hells.”

  Suddenly, as if the evermind had been eavesdropping, the tangled pipes and flashing components in the citadel walls began to shift, extending forward with clicking sounds. Disguised armaments locked into place: guns, projectile launchers, and other menacing weaponry.

  “Watch out!” Noret grabbed Handon, pulling him into the shelter of his personal shield.

  But the others did not react quickly enough. A hail of sharp slivers and hot bullets showered them, ripping the soldiers into red meat before Noret’s eyes.

  “Let me go!” Handon squirmed and howled.

  “Let you go? I’m saving you. Why would you—”

  Handon gave him a sharp kick, tried to free himself. Noret cursed, but the other man broke away. “Omnius! Protect me!”

  Enraged, Noret slammed the barrel of his weapon down on Handon’s legs, with a satisfying crack of bone before the man’s shriek of pain. Noret then dragged him back inside the protection of his own shield, as the hidden machine weapons continued to fire upon the already defeated commando force.

  “You broke my legs!”

  “I could have killed you on the spot, so count yourself lucky.” Under the hail of projectiles, the corpses of some Jihad fighters twitched. “For the moment.”

  Sharp projectiles hammered against Noret’s personal shield. The Holtzman barrier easily stopped them, though the system felt dangerously warm to him. As the hail of firepower continued, he wanted to blast back with his own weapons, but could not shoot through his shield. Nor did he want to let go of the traitorous Handon. Projectiles continued to spatter ineffectually against the barrier. He felt exposed, and could not fight back.

  Noret stood in the open chamber, shouting curses at the evermind. He looked in dismay at the lifeless, disfigured remains of his team, obliterated in a few moments. While the refugee Handon still squirmed in his iron grip, Noret noted the atomic warhead resting alone next to the torn bodies of the two engineers. A rescue shuttle would be racing down through the atmosphere, dodging the ongoing battle Primero Harkonnen was leading up there. Noret should have told them not to bother.

  Handon had led the brave fighters into a trap.

  Still under the protection of his shield, Noret wrapped his arm around the man’s scrawny throat. “We are fighting for human freedom. Why would you throw it all away?”

  The gaunt man struggled, but the injury to his legs had sapped his strength.

  “I know three ways to slit your throat with my fingernail,” he said close to the man’s ear. “And two techniques that use only my teeth. Should I kill you now, or would you rather explain how Omnius can reward you enough to pay for the lives of your comrades, your chosen mate, everyone you loved?”

  Handon sneered. “Love is an emotion for weak hrethgir. Once I’ve helped Omnius put an end to this insurrection, he will make me a neocymek. I will live for centuries.”

  “You will not survive the next few minutes.” Noret checked his chronometer, knowing he must time the move carefully. The rescue shuttle would arrive soon. Of equal concern, he didn’t know ho
w long he could keep his personal shield on before it overheated. He needed to move quickly.

  The voice of Omnius boomed through the chamber. “You shall fail. There is no chance of success.”

  “Recalculate the odds.” Noret wrestled the traitorous man toward the warhead. Before this mission, he and his team had been instructed in the use of the old atomics taken from the Zanbar stockpile. This one was a simple field unit with a one-kilometer vaporization radius.

  Perfectly sufficient.

  Omnius continued to fire his deadly projectiles at the single central target now. Noret could feel the stressed shield getting hotter, and he began to worry. Handon was keeping him occupied, wasting his time.

  Noret bent down and ripped a tight flexor cable from the utility pack of one of his slain companions. Swiftly, he lashed Handon’s arms behind his back, tightening the sharp cable around his elbows and crisscrossing it all the way down to his wrists. Then he reached slowly through the protective field and took a fallen comrade’s shield generator and clipped it beside his own. He switched on the new shield and saw that it held, reinforcing his old overheating unit.

  “That should give me all the time I need— more than you have left to live.” He shoved the struggling Handon away from him. “There, if you are so loyal, perhaps Omnius won’t cut you down. Though I doubt even an evermind can calculate the trajectory of each one of those projectiles as it strikes the uneven wall and ricochets again.”

  The bound man collapsed on his broken legs and crawled into the open. “Stop shooting, Omnius! Be careful. You’ll hit me!” While he waited for a response, he whimpered in pain.

  The projectile fire diminished, but one of the deflected bullets slapped into Handon’s left shoulder with the sound of a rock hitting wet mud. The man wailed and rolled, but with bound hands he could not reach his bleeding wound.

  Noret bent over the warhead and completed the sequence to initiate the detonation. He set the countdown for eight minutes and locked the controls. No way to stop it now.

  He hoped the rescue shuttle would be on time, but that concern was secondary as long as he accomplished his mission. He was expendable.

  With a final vengeful surge, he used another flexor cable to lash Handon up against the heavy warhead. Pushing the terrified man’s face close to the timer where he could see the remaining seconds of his life ticking away, Noret said, “Watch this for me, will you?”

  Hurling a pocket explosive toward one of the small hatches into the evermind’s protected vault, he blasted the door open and raced through the corridors, hoping the blueprints he had memorized were accurate. His replacement personal shield flickered and finally faded. Hot and useless.

  Even now Omnius was summoning defender robots, but Noret had no time to fight them. The timer was counting down, second by second. He could have warned away the rescue shuttle and remained here instead until his last breath, destroying the minions of the computer evermind. But by his actions alone, Jool Noret had annihilated the Ixian incarnation of Omnius— surely that was enough to satisfy his personal vow?

  Too late for such considerations now. The pickup craft was already on its way. The thought of those courageous jihadis risking themselves to retrieve him— men who could keep fighting against Omnius— forced him to make his best effort. Head down, Noret charged ahead, shouldering and knocking aside combat meks that tried to block his exit.

  Gaining speed, he leaped, screaming, and struck with a kick forceful enough to disconnect a robot’s head from its shoulders. He remembered every instant of his training with the supercharged sensei mek Chirox, and now took the opportunity to use all the tricks he had learned. The soul of the fallen mercenary Jav Barri seemed to fill him, transmuting his blood to pure adrenaline.

  He could have destroyed dozens more in the time remaining, but Noret made the choice to run instead, dodging the fight, making headway toward the opening at the end of a tunnel. He burst out into the cool Ixian air on the surface, dazzled by smoky daylight. He did not look at his chronometer to see how many seconds were left. Overhead, the sky flickered with colored flashes of lightning, like a weird electrical storm, but he saw no gray clouds— only a furious spaceship battle far overhead.

  His locator signal pipped silently across electromagnetic bands; Noret couldn’t hear it, but the machines could probably detect it as clearly as a signal bell. And so could the rescue shuttle.

  He saw its silver form descending like a raptor in mid-strike. Noret ran out into an open square between industrial warehouses and smoking factories. Though he was in clear view, he waved his hands to get the pilot’s attention. From nearby machine facilities, combat robots began to march, reinforcements streaming out through arched doorways. They could open fire at him or surround and overwhelm him, slowly and efficiently tearing him apart with inhuman strength.

  The lone rescue craft streaked down, engines roaring. The shuttle hatch was already open as he sprinted toward it. Two uniformed jihadis waved for him to hurry. Noret dove inside before the shuttle even landed and shouted for them to take off immediately. “Go! Not much time left!”

  “Only one of you?” said one of the men at the ramp. “Where’s the rest of your team?” The pilot didn’t want to leave yet.

  “There are no others.” Noret extended a hand and let them pull him up from the deck. “The warhead is placed and set. Omnius may have robots trying to disarm it, but they won’t succeed… notin time.” Finally he looked at his chronometer. “Two minutes before the detonation. Now go!”

  Alarmed, the rescue crew yanked him up from the deck and sealed the door hatch, shouting all the while for the pilot to take off. Acceleration slammed them all to the deck as the shuttle roared up into the Ixian sky.

  Noret breathed a sigh of relief and leaned back against a bulkhead. He shielded his eyes, looking away from the portholes as a dazzling nova burst into a glowing sphere of disintegration, taking out a large section of the city. It would leave only a radioactive, glassy crater and an obliterated Omnius.

  Though they would endure harsh times and a long recovery, the people of Ix were now free of the computer evermind.

  The Army of the Jihad would still need to follow up and retain a protective hold on this newly conquered world. But for now, with a grim smile, the exhausted Noret let himself begin to relax. He had done his part. Now, the Jihad battleships had to defeat the machine fleet in orbit.

  He had struck a significant blow, though not enough to satisfy the promise he had made, to fight for himself and his father, to fill the gaping hole in his heart.

  Jool Noret had survived, but only to wreak more havoc.

  The spirit of the fallen warrior Jav Barri moved through him, and Noret had proved he was worthy of being a mercenary of Ginaz. His father, and the sensei mek Chirox, would be proud.

  But it was only a start.

  Vermin breed vermin.

  — OMNIUS, Jihad Datafiles

  When Ix shuddered under the Omnius-killing nuclear blast, Primero Xavier Harkonnen saw an opportunity to escape cleanly with his Jihad fleet. And dismissed it. The thinking machines would just retake their industrial base, and the whole Ixian offensive would be for nothing.

  His ships remained in geostationary orbit above the fading flash of the city-killer atomics. From fast kindjal scout flyers, he received frequent updates about the robotic military divisions massing to respond to the ground attack, while the local rebels began to rally from their underground catacombs.

  Xavier had hoped the destruction of the local evermind would completely disorient the thinking machines. Unfortunately, the fighter robots were autonomous enough to converge upon their enemy, even without Omnius supervision. The scattered thinking machine battleships in orbit began to regroup. According to intercepted transmissions they were now led by a cymek. One of the original Titans.

  Very bad.

  He remembered the first battles on Bela Tegeuse, when the Army of the Jihad had withdrawn to safety, hoping they had caused
enough damage to declare victory… only to learn later that they had backed away too soon and lost every centimeter of ground they had gained.

  What a shame it would be if victory on Ix was also wasted. The Army of the Jihad needed the factories and resources on this planet.

  “Stand by,” he said to his bridge crew, and the command was relayed to the rest of the fleet.

  As he watched a steady flow of rescue ships speed back and forth between his fleet and the Ixian surface, Xavier knew that time was running out. He needed to fight or flee.

  On projection screens he saw enemy forces sweeping like angry wasps toward the outnumbered and outgunned Jihad ships. As a military man trained to determine the odds of success and take decisive action, Xavier’s obvious option was to cut his losses. His Jihad forces here could not possibly withstand the might Omnius had arrayed against him.

  He had only moments to decide. Fight or flee.

  Serena’s face flashed in his memory, and he thought of their murdered child. Against such a brutal opponent, there were no options. Delays only led to more deaths. If not here, then somewhere else. The forces of Omnius had to be stopped no matter where they were.

  “Victory, or nothing,” he muttered loudly enough for his bridge crew to hear. “We will not leave until Ix is secure. Until the people are free.”

  * * *

  WITH FULL ACCESS to the facilities on Ix, the Titan Xerxes had more warships and firepower under his command than the annoying hrethgir fleet, but he decided not to attack. Not yet. The swarm of machine ships slowed, moved into new positions closer to the enemy. He wanted to keep massing his forces until he achieved an overwhelming advantage, enough to deal a crushing blow. Xerxes would grind this defiant Jihad army into dust, the way he often crushed bothersome human insects beneath his metal feet.

  He wished Agamemnon could be here to see this. Xerxes had never gained much respect as a military commander, had not supervised any outright conquest since the fall of the Old Empire. But he was a Titan… and with the Ix-Omnius neutralized, he was now the only leader here.