Dune: The Butlerian Jihad (17 page)

Norma hurried off to the business district of the cliffside settlement. She found Venport in a tea shop, concluding a meeting with a seedy-looking trader. As the dark-skinned man rose from his seat, Norma hurried over with her off-kilter gait and slid into his place at the table.

Venport smiled warmly at her. “You look excited, Norma. You must have found the letter from Savant Holtzman?”

She thrust the parchment forward. “My mother tried to prevent me from seeing his offer!”

“Zufa is a maddening woman, I know, but you must try to understand her. Since neither of us can do the things she values most, Zufa disregards our abilities. Oh, she’s aware of your mathematical talents, Norma, and she knows I’m a competent businessman, but our skills do not count for anything with her.”

Norma squirmed on the seat, not wanting to give her mother the benefit of the doubt. “Then why did she hide this letter?”

Venport laughed. “She was probably embarrassed by the attention you received.” He squeezed her hand. “Don’t worry, I will intervene if your mother attempts to block this. In fact, since she’s so preoccupied with the other Sorceresses, I can’t see how she would object if I were to complete the necessary paperwork for you.”

“You would do that? Doesn’t my mother—”

“Let me take care of everything. I’ll handle her.” He gave Norma a quick, warm hug. “I believe in what you can do.”

Acting in Zufa’s stead, Aurelius Venport dispatched a formal letter of response to the famous inventor, agreeing to send Norma away. The young woman would study with him on Poritrin and assist him in his laboratories. For Norma, it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

Her mother might not even notice she was gone.

E
ven in the wasteland, with wind whipping around him, Selim’s luck continued to hold. Survival itself became a wondrous game out in the desert.

Leaving the dead sandworm behind, he’d tried to find a small cave or gully in the rocks where he could crouch from the approaching storm. Desperately thirsty, Selim poked around for any signs of human habitation, though he doubted any other man had ever set foot so far out in the arid wilderness.

Certainly no one who had lived.

After wandering from planet to planet, the Zensunni had come to Arrakis, where they scattered in widely separated settlements. For several generations, the scavenger people had scraped a meager existence from the desert, but only occasionally did they venture from their protected areas, fearful of giant worms.

The wild sandworm had taken Selim far from the spaceport, far from the vital supplies that even the most resourceful Zensunni would require. His prospects for survival seemed bleak indeed.

So when he stumbled upon an ancient botanical testing station camouflaged in the rocks, Selim could hardly believe his good fortune. Undoubtedly, it was another sign from Buddallah. A miracle!

He stood before the domed enclosure erected by long-forgotten ecologists who had studied Arrakis and found it wanting. Perhaps a few Old Empire scientists had lived here and recorded data during a storm season. The rugged structure consisted of several low outbuildings built into the rocks, half-disguised by time and windblown sand.

As the howling tempest peppered him with stinging sand, Selim scrambled around the abandoned station. He saw tilted weather vanes, dented wind collectors and other data-gathering devices that looked long dead. Most important, he found an entry hatch.

With sore hands and aching arms from his worm-riding ordeal, Selim pounded against the barrier, searching for a way inside. He scooped powdery debris away, looking for some sort of manual mechanism, since batteries would have long since died. He needed to get into the shelter before the storm wind slammed into him with full intensity.

Selim had heard of such places. A few had been found and raided by Zensunni scavengers. These self-reliant stations had been placed on Arrakis during humanity’s glory days, before the thinking machines had taken over, before Buddislamic refugees had fled to safety. This automated facility was at least a thousand years old, probably more. But in the desert, where the environment remained unchanged for millennia, time ran at a different pace.

Selim finally located the mechanism that controlled the hatch. As he had feared, the power cells were dead, providing only enough of a spark to make the door groan open the barest crack.

The wind howled. Blown sand hung like fog on the horizon, obscuring the sun. Dust tingled against his raw ears and face, and Selim knew it would soon become a deadly scouring.

Growing more desperate, he wedged his sandworm tooth into the dark opening and used it as a pry bar. The aperture widened a little, but not enough. Cold, stale air gasped out. He used the aching muscles in his arms, dug his feet against the rocks to throw his body weight into the effort, and pushed hard on the makeshift lever.

With a last groan of resistance, the hatch grated partway open. Selim laughed and tossed the curved worm fang into the interior, where it made a tinkling clatter on the metal floor. He squirmed through into the station, heard the muffled roar of the sandstorm increasing outside. It was on top of him.

Impeded by wind and blown sand, Selim grasped the lip of the hatch and pushed hard. Incoming sand fell through a grating in the floor, into a receptacle below. He needed to hurry. The wind let up for only a second, but that was enough. He got the door shut, sealing himself in, away from the violent weather.

Safe . . . unbelievably safe. He laughed at his good fortune, then gave a prayer of thanks, more sincere than any he had uttered in his life. How could he question such blessings?

Selim used the shaft of wan daylight to look around. Luckily, the abandoned station had plaz windows. Though scratched and pitted from prolonged exposure, they allowed fading illumination inside.

The place was like a cave of treasure. Guided by the dust-filtered light from the windows, he found a few old glowstrips which he coaxed into brightening the small shelter. Then he ransacked cupboards and storage vaults. Much of what remained was useless: unreadable data-plaques, dead computerized recording systems, strange instruments that bore the names of archaic corporations. He did, however, find capsules of well-preserved food that had not deteriorated even in all the time this facility had been abandoned.

He broke open a capsule and ate the contents. Though the flavors were unusual, the food tasted wonderful, and he felt energy seeping back into his weary flesh. Other containers held concentrated juices, which were like ambrosia to him. Most valuable of all, he found distilled water, hundreds of literjons of it. Undoubtedly it had been collected over the centuries by automated moisture extractors left behind by the long-ago scientific expedition.

This was personal wealth beyond anything Selim had imagined possible. He could pay back the brackish water he’d been accused of taking from the tribe a thousand times over. He could return to the Zensunni as a hero. Naib Dhartha would have to forgive him. But Selim had never committed the crime in the first place.

While Selim sat comfortable and satisfied, he vowed never to give Dhartha the satisfaction of seeing him return. Ebrahim had betrayed his friendship, and the corrupt Naib had falsely condemned him. His own people had exiled him, never expecting him to survive. Now that he had found a way to live by himself, why would Selim ever want to go back and surrender it all?

For two straight nights, the young man slept. At dawn on the second day he awoke and opened more of the sealed boxes and cabinets. He discovered tools, rope, durable fabric, construction material. The possibilities filled him with joy, and Selim found himself chuckling all alone inside the botanical testing station.

I’m alive!

The storm had rattled past as he slept, unsuccessfully scratching against the walls of the shelter like a monster trying to get in. Most of the sand had been deflected, so very little was piled around the enclosure. From the vantage of the station’s largest window, Selim gazed across the desert sea that he had crossed on the back of the sandworm. The dunes were fresh and spotless. All signs of the dead worm had been erased, scoured clean. Only this solitary young man remained.

He envisioned a long journey ahead of him, and thought he must have a particular calling. Why else would Buddallah have gone to so much trouble to allow poor Selim to live?

What do you want me to do?

Smiling, the outcast looked out upon the desert, wondering how he could possibly cross such an expanse again. The vista filled him with a sensation of supreme solitude. He made out a few rocks in the distance, etched by eternal winds. Here and there were a few hardy plants. Small animals scurried into burrows. Dune merged into dune, desert into desert.

Enthralled by his own memories and feeling recklessly invulnerable, Selim decided what he must do, sooner or later. The first time had been an incredible fluke, but he understood better how to do it now.

He must ride a sandworm again. And the next time it would not be an accident.

W
earing a new warrior-form designed to strike terror into the humans on Giedi Prime, Agamemnon strode on armored legs through the broken industries and flaming ruins of the city. The
hrethgir
hadn’t stood a chance.

Giedi Prime had been conquered easily.

The invading machine troops plodded forward, targeting habitation complexes and setting them aflame, blasting parks into blackened fields. In accordance with Agamemnon’s orders— citing the glory of Omnius— the neo-cymeks and robotic warriors left the Giedi City industries essentially intact.

Agamemnon had sworn that Giedi Prime would make up for the cymeks’ humiliation on Salusa. Even now, watcheyes flew overhead, recording the carnage, seeing how efficiently the two Titans guided the military operation.

Accompanied by his comrade Barbarossa, Agamemnon scanned the topography of the metropolis and located the Magnus’s magnificent residence. It was an appropriate place to establish the new center of Synchronized government, a symbolic gesture of domination as well as an affront to the defeated populace.

The cymek general’s warrior-form was the most monstrous multilegged system he had ever conceived. Electrical discharges fired through artificial muscles, pulling fiber cables taut and moving weapon-studded limbs. He flexed his flowmetal claws and crushed construction blocks in his grip, imagining them to be the skulls of enemies. Following in his own ferocious configuration, Barbarossa laughed at the showmanship.

Marching forward on many limbs, the cymeks thundered through the wreckage-strewn streets. Nothing stood in the way of these former warlords. The situation reminded both of them of a thousand years before, when twenty Titans had conquered the Old Empire by trampling the bodies of their foes.

This was the way it should be. It only whetted their appetite for more.

PRIOR TO THE attack, Agamemnon had studied Giedi Prime’s defenses, analyzing images taken by spy watcheyes that zoomed through the system like tiny meteoroids. From those readings, the cymek general had concocted a brilliant tactical move, exploiting a slight weakness in planetary defenses. Omnius had been willing to pay the necessary price to take over a League World, and it had not cost the life of a single Titan, not even one of the lesser neo-cymeks. Only a single robotic cruiser. Perfectly acceptable, as far as Agamemnon was concerned.

The humans had erected scrambler fields here like those on Salusa, centering their transmitting towers in Giedi City. The field-generator facility had been guarded by kindjal fighter craft, supposedly impregnable embankments, and massively armored ground vehicles. The feral humans had learned a lesson on Salusa Secundus. But it was not enough to protect them from obliteration.

Giedi Prime’s first-line orbital protective forces had been brushed aside by the unstoppable force of the giant machine fleet. All robot losses were acceptable. When Agamemnon led the cymek ships in, along with the sacrificial cruisers, the planetbound human defenders could not hope to drive them back.

To begin the assault, the huge robotic cruiser had positioned itself above Giedi Prime, its cargo holds filled with explosives. Dozens of other robot cruisers moved with machine grace, sleek and streamlined, lining up for the assault. Guided by a thinking machine intelligence, the enormous craft fired its engines and accelerated at full speed toward its target.

“Descent approach in progress,” the battleship’s robot mind had reported, transmitting images to the waiting fighters. Ahead, thirty decoy vessels shot downward, also hoping to strike the target but designed to be targets for the ground-based missile defenses. The plan relied on brute force and overwhelming numbers, not finesse. Nevertheless, it would be effective.

With its engines at full speed, the sacrificial vessel had accelerated white-hot into Giedi Prime’s atmosphere, faster than any ground-based human missile defenses could target and respond. The other cruisers approached the invisible scrambler shield. Already, gray-white blossoms of smoke and explosions marked where the ground-launched missiles had found targets. The numbers dwindled, as did the distance. The humans could never stop all the invaders.

The doomed robot ship sent final images back to the watcheyes so Omnius would have a complete record of the conquest of Giedi Prime. Every nanosecond— until it passed through the scrambler net, which effectively erased the AI guidance brain. The transmissions became static, then an empty carrier wave.

Still, the juggernaut had continued to descend. Even with its gelcircuitry brain neutralized, the plummeting cruiser fell like an asteroidsized hammer.