Dune: House Corrino
Page 29
D’murr decided the next foldspace leap would smooth the disruptive wrinkles around him. The journey always comforted him, restored his place in the cosmos. He inhaled more spice gas, felt it burn within him, hotter than usual.
After sending a terse, impatient inquiry to the Guild crew, he finally received word that the loading process had been completed. It is time. The hangar-bay doors and loading-dock ports swung closed.
Anxiously, D’murr began his preparations and high-order mental calculations. Envisioning a safe path required only a few moments, and the Holtzman-jump would take less than that.
D’murr never slept, spent most of his time in contemplation, drifting in his tank. Thinking back to his times as a young man, times as a human.
Ideally, Navigators should retain no such memories. Steersman Grodin, his superior on Junction, said it took longer for some candidates to shed their atavistic fetters. D’murr did not want his performance hindered. He had already achieved the rank of Steersman and looked forward to each journey through foldspace with great anticipation. And now, with some concern.
He worried that this continued flood of recollections and nostalgia might make him begin to revert to something different, something hideous and useless, something primitive and human. But he had evolved past that. All other states of existence, including humanity, were far beneath him.
But was he devolving now? Could that explain the troubling sensations? He had never felt so… peculiar. The spice gas around him seemed only to enhance his long-buried memories of Ix and the Grand Palais, of his parents, of the Navigation test that he had passed and his twin brother had failed.
A buzzer sounded inside the navigation chamber, and D’murr saw a ring of bright blue lights overhead. The signal to proceed.
But now I am no longer ready.
From the depths of his disturbance, D’murr felt a single, powerful surge of internal strength, as if he were desperately trying to raise himself from a sickbed. It was a distant call.
“C’tair,” he whispered.
* * *
Concealed beneath an abandoned Ixian school, C’tair Pilru stared at the blackened parts of his rogo transmission machine. Since it had been damaged more than two years ago when he’d made his last contact with his brother, he had found some replacement parts and repaired the device as much as he could. But the remaining silicate crystal rods were of questionable quality, scavenged from technological waste dumps.
In that last transmission, C’tair had begged his Navigator brother to find help for Ix. That thread of hope had frayed, until now. Rhombur must be on his way. The Prince had promised. Help would soon arrive.
With a flick of a whiplike tail, a small lizard scurried from one dark corner to another, disappearing into a pile of scrap parts. C’tair stared after the tiny reptile, seeing its gray-green body vanish. Before the Tleilaxu came, there had been no pests— no insects, lizards, or rats— in subterranean Ix.
The Tleilaxu brought other vermin in with them.
C’tair located the milky white rod he had set aside earlier. His last one. He turned it over in his hands, felt its coolness, and stared at a hairline crack along one side. Someday, if House Vernius rose in his lifetime, C’tair would have access to new components, and he could resume contact with his brother. As children, the twins had been remarkably close; they often completed each other’s sentences.
But now they were so far apart— in time, distance, and physical form. D’murr was probably parsecs away, sailing through foldspace. And even if C’tair could reconstruct the unorthodox transmitter, it might not be possible to reach him.
He clung to the silicate crystal rod like a filament of hope, and to his surprise it began to glow in his hands with a warm incandescence. The hairline crack brightened and seemed to disappear altogether.
A voice enveloped him, sounding like D’murr. “C’tair…” But it couldn’t possibly be. Looking around, he saw no one with him. He was alone in this dismal hiding place. A shudder coursed through his body, but the crystal rod grew warmer. And he heard more.
“I am about to fold space, my brother.” D’murr sounded as if he were speaking through thick liquid. “Ix is on my route and Prince Rhombur is aboard. He is coming to you.”
C’tair could not comprehend how his brother’s voice could possibly have reached him. I am not a rogo transmitter! I am only a person.
And yet… Prince Rhombur was coming!
* * *
In memory, D’murr was inside his twin’s mind long ago as C’tair picked through the smoldering rubble of an Ixian building destroyed in the initial Tleilaxu attack. How many years had it been? Twenty-one? Out of that rubble a hallucination of Davee Rogo had emerged, the crippled genius who had befriended the twins and shown them his wondrous inventions. Back in peaceful, halcyon times….
But that ghostly image had been transmitted by D’murr’s uncontrolled human side— a powerful force that had refused to succumb to the changes in his body and mind. D’murr had not been fully aware of what he had done, what concepts his subconscious had developed in tandem with his connection to his twin. Using information provided by the apparition, C’tair had then been able to build the cross-dimensional transmission device, enabling two-way conversation between a pair of very different, but genetically linked, life-forms.
Even then, D’murr’s subconscious mind had wanted to remain in contact with his home and memories.
Inside his tank, he now stopped moving his stunted arms and legs. Within the fraction of a second that he stood on the precipice of foldspace, he recalled the excruciating physical pain caused by each transmission with C’tair— as if his own Navigator persona had been fighting the human side, trying to subdue it.
But now he activated the Holtzman generator and lunged blindly between dimensions, taking the Heighliner with him.
* * *
Deep beneath the crust of Ix, C’tair held the flickering crystal rod until it grew ice-cold against his fingers, and D’murr’s voice faded. He shook off his surprised paralysis and called his brother’s name. No response came, only staticky, popping sounds. D’murr had sounded so strange, almost sick.
Suddenly, ringing through his skull, C’tair heard a wordless, primal scream in the very depths of his soul. His brother’s outcry.
And then nothing.
One moment of incompetence can be fatal.
— SWORDMASTER FRIEDRE GINAZ
The Heighliner emerged from foldspace at the wrong point and plummeted into the atmosphere of Wallach IX.
Navigator error.
As large as a comet, the ship crashed into the envelope of air, scraping and roaring. Its outer hull turned molten from the friction. The passengers didn’t even have time to scream.
For centuries, the Bene Gesserit planet had been guarded by security screens that could vaporize any unauthorized vessel. The immense craft was already doomed by the time it struck the first overlapping energy-defense shield.
The out-of-control Heighliner sizzled in the atmosphere, its metal skin ripped away like the soft layers of an onion. Shrapnel smoked through the air and slammed into the landscape like a cannonade, leaving Heighliner components strewn across a thousand-kilometer swath.
The Navigator had no chance to send a distress signal or offer any sort of explanation before the whole craft was obliterated.
* * *
As data from the defense shield poured in, identifying the doomed ship, Mother Superior Harishka composed a high-priority message to be sent to Junction. Unfortunately, its delivery would have to await the next Heighliner, by which time the Spacing Guild might already know about the disaster.
In the meantime, within hours of the early-morning crash, Sister Cristane was dispatched with a team of Acolyte workers to the wild, poorly charted site. The Sisters converged on a mountainous region where the largest section of the Heighliner had impacted.
Her dark eyes squinting against the frigid whiteness, Cristane surveyed the collis
ion scars on the winter-etched mountainside. Snow and ice had melted around clumps of slag and twisted wreckage. Wisps of steam still curled up from the largest metallic masses. Using cutters and welders, her work crew might find a few scraps of bodies fused into the debris, but Cristane didn’t know if it would be worth the effort. There could be no survivors here.
All her life, she had been trained to respond to emergencies, but now she could do nothing more than observe. This Heighliner had been doomed the moment it emerged from foldspace.
Cristane was not yet a Reverend Mother, so she didn’t have the multigenerational memories her superiors experienced. But during their meeting to plan a response to the crash, Mother Superior had claimed that in thousands of years, none of the Sisters-within had ever witnessed an accident like this.
Historically, Navigators had made a few minor miscalculations, but serious mishaps were extremely rare— only a handful had been recorded since the formation of the Spacing Guild, well over ten thousand years ago. During the final battle of the Butlerian Jihad, there had been much risk using the first foldspace ships, before the prescient qualities of melange had been discovered. But since that time, the Guild had a sterling safety record.
The implications of this tragedy would have repercussions throughout the Imperium, for centuries to come.
* * *
When the guild inspection and recovery team arrived two days later, the men descended upon Wallach IX in swarms. Thousands of workers brought in heavy equipment. Laborers set about cutting up the wreckage and whisking away samples for analysis. The Sisters wanted to keep their secrets, and so did the Guild, which left behind no scraps of their vessel for any outsider to inspect.
Cristane sought out the man in charge of Guild operations. Square-bodied in his pale green singlesuit, he had close-set eyes and wide lips. Studying him, she saw how overwhelmed he was by the tragedy. “Do you have any suspicions, sir? Any explanation for this?”
He shook his head. “Not yet. It will take time to analyze everything.”
“What else?” Despite her youth, the commando Sister carried herself well, with authority. She spoke with enough inflection of Voice that the man answered reflexively.
“This was one of only two vessels in the Dominic Class, constructed during the last days of House Vernius, with an impeccable safety record.”
Cristane regarded him with her large eyes. “Do you have any reason why this Heighliner design might suddenly have become unreliable?”
The Guildsman shook his head, yet could not resist the command of Voice. His face contorted as he tried not to reply. But he lost the effort. “We have not yet had time to assess the details. I… should reserve further comment at present.”
As the effects of Voice wore off, he seemed flustered at what he had revealed. He fled Cristane’s presence.
The commando Sister ran the possibilities through her mind. She watched as armies of laborers dismantled the Heighliner piece by piece. Soon all of the tangible wreckage would be gone, leaving only ugly scars on Wallach IX.
Fate and Hope only rarely speak the same language.
— Orange Catholic Bible
Inside the pavilion’s demonstration room, Hidar Fen Ajidica stood at the dome-shaped enclosure. His mind sang with energy, and possibilities rippled around him like rainbows.
He checked the sealed sample chamber daily in order to monitor the progress of the new captive sandworm inside, another one that had survived here for a few months. He enjoyed feeding it additional ajidamal, which the creature devoured voraciously. During the years of experimentation, the tiny sandworm specimens had died promptly once they were taken from Arrakis. But so far this one had survived, even thrived. Ajidica had no doubt it was because of the synthetic spice.
With ironic humor, he had named the worm after the late Tleilaxu leader. “Let us take a look at you, Master Zaaf,” he said with a cruel smile. Just that morning, he had consumed an even larger dose of ajidamal himself, tapped directly from the tank-trapped body of Miral Alechem. He felt the drug’s workings now, the wild expansion of his consciousness and enhancement of his mental functions.
Glorious!
Pressing a button at the base of the tiny sandworm’s dome, the euphoric Master Researcher watched the foggy plaz clear. The sand became visible inside the enclosure. Dust had been thrown against the sides of the dome, as if the little beast had thrashed about in a frenzy.
The worm sprawled motionless atop the sand, its body segments split open, its round mouth agape. Pinkish slime oozed from between its gaping rings.
Flipping open an exterior panel on the dome, Ajidica read the life monitor frantically. His eyes bulged in disbelief. Despite regular doses of ajidamal, the worm had died horribly.
Fearless of the risk, he reached inside to retrieve the flaccid shape of the creature. The carcass felt soft and loose, and its rings peeled apart like sections of rotting fruit in his fingers, sloughing from its main body. The worm looked as if it had been flayed by an inept dissection student.
But Ajidica had been feeding it the same drug he had taken himself, in varying forms. Suddenly he did not feel so euphoric. He seemed to be plunging into a dark abyss.
Each man is a little war.
— KARRBEN FETHR, THE FOLLY OF IMPERIAL POLITICS
Spice. What Fremen could fail to find it, when necessary? The Guild had demanded more melange, and the desert people had to pay the price, or lose their dreams.
On his belly behind the crest of a towering dune, Stilgar peered through binoculars toward the abandoned village of Bilar Camp. Broken, bloodstained hovels lay at the base of a shifting mountain of sand, blocked from the rear by a small mesa that held a hidden cistern, which was now filled with sealed containers of contraband spice. The Baron’s spice.
Stilgar adjusted the oil lenses, and images sharpened in the crystalline dawn. A squad of blue-uniformed Harkonnen troops went about their business as if confident that no one would dare spy on them. All Fremen considered this place cursed.
While Stilgar watched, a large carryall set down near the abandoned village. He recognized the aircraft, with its retractable wings tucked against its body: a heavy-lift vehicle used to transport spice-harvesting factories out to melange-rich sands and haul them to safety when the inevitable sandworm approached.
He counted thirty Harkonnen soldiers, more than twice the number of raiders he had with him. Nonetheless, the odds were acceptable. Stilgar’s team would have the advantage of surprise. Fremen style.
Two soldiers used an arc-light device to repair the underside of the carryall. In the still air of morning, the hum of activity carried up the dune face. Nearby, the low rock-and-brick walls of the haunted village looked rounded, their edges softened by years of hard weathering.
Nine years ago, the villagers of Bilar Camp had been horribly poisoned by bored Harkonnen scouts. The scouring desert winds had erased most, but not all, marks of the catastrophe. The Bilar Camp villagers had died ripping their own bodies apart, maddened by the poison in the water supply. Fingernail scratches and bloody handprints could still be seen on a few protected walls.
The water-fat Harkonnens believed that superstitious desert dwellers would never come back to such a cursed place. The Fremen knew, though, that this evil had been committed by men, not desert demons. Liet-Kynes himself had witnessed the horrors with his revered father. Now, as the Abu Naib who led all Fremen tribes, Liet had sent Stilgar and his men on this mission.
Along the other side of the dune, Stilgar’s commandos crouched, each holding a slick sandboard. Wearing desert-stained robes, fitted so that the sun would not expose the gray stillsuit fabric beneath, the raiders put their face masks in place. They sipped from catchtubes at their mouths, building energy, readying themselves. Maula pistols and crysknives were strapped to their waists; stolen lasrifles were attached to the sandboards.
Ready.
Stilgar found himself amused at the ineptitude of the Harkonnens. For weeks he ha
d watched their activities, and he knew exactly what they intended to do this morning. Predictability is death— it was an old Fremen saying.
Liet-Kynes would pay the increased Guild spice bribe directly from hidden Harkonnen stockpiles. And the Baron could lodge no complaints.
Below, the carryall repair had been completed. The uniformed soldiers worked together in a brigade line to remove rocks covering the cistern, exposing a reinforced container. They chatted casually, with their backs turned to the high dune. They hadn’t even posted perimeter guards. Such arrogance!
When the Harkonnens had nearly finished uncovering the cistern, into which they would unload more stolen spice from the carryall’s cargo hold, Stilgar made a chopping motion with his hand. The commandos mounted their slick-bottomed sandboards, thumped over the edge onto the steep slope, and careened down the smooth dune face like a racing wolfpack. At the front, picking up speed and riding with bent knees, Stilgar unclipped his lasrifle. The other Fremen did the same.
Hearing the humming whine of sand friction beneath the boards, the preoccupied Harkonnen soldiers turned, but too late. Purple knives of disruptive light cut their legs out from under them, melting flesh and mangling bones.
Stilgar’s raiders jumped off their boards and fanned out to secure the big carryall. Around them, the mutilated soldiers screamed and moaned, thrashing their cauterized stumps. Because of Fremen marksmanship, all of the men still had their vital organs and their lives.
A young soldier with pale wisps of beard looked in terror at the dark-robed desert men and tried to scramble backward across the bloody sand, but he could not move without legs. These Fremen seemed to fill his heart with more fear than did the sight of the blackened stumps of his legs.
Steeling his resolve, Stilgar ordered his men to bind the Harkonnens and wrap their wounds in sponges and sealing cloths to preserve the moisture for the sietch deathstills. “Gag them, so we need not hear their childish crying.” Soon the whimpering voices were silenced.