Dune: The Butlerian Jihad (78 page)

Since he could not disregard his own projections, the Earth-Omnius responded accordingly. He launched robotic vessels in a full-scale defensive cordon to prevent the League warships from breaking through to Earth. He dispersed a swarm of mechanical watcheyes into orbit, to observe the engagement from all points of view. Through separate subroutines, he ran more than five thousand alternate simulations, until he was satisfied that he could choose the correct tactics for his robotic fleet.

But Omnius did not yet know about Holtzman’s shields.

When the thinking machines fired explosives and kinetic projectiles, the front line of Armada battleships simply shrugged off the counterattack. The blasts echoed harmlessly through the vacuum of space. And the League vessels kept coming.

Rebuffed, the robot ships regrouped and waited for modified orders, while Omnius’s internal gelcircuitry paths sizzled with his struggle to comprehend.

The first
hrethgir
bombers streaked into the atmosphere, hundreds upon hundreds of mismatched ships coming toward the surface. Each one of them carried an old-style nuclear warhead.

Omnius made new projections. For the first time, he considered the realistic odds of his own destruction.

INDEPENDENT AND DETERMINED, Vorian Atreides flew a small, shielded craft, one of the Salusan kindjals with augmented weaponry. He carried no atomics himself— Segundo Harkonnen did not trust him that far— but Vor could do his part to guard against enemy ships and allow the warhead-laden bombers to complete their mission.

This was quite different from his duties aboard the
Dream Voyager
.

Segundo Harkonnen had wanted to keep him tucked safely out of the way aboard the flagship, where Vor could provide tactical advice against the machines. But he had begged for hands-on participation in the defeat of Omnius. As the son of Agamemnon, Vor had already provided exhaustive information on thinking-machine warships, their armor, their integral weapons. Now it was time to put that knowledge to work.

“Please,” he had said to Xavier. “I brought Serena back safely to you. If for no other reason, won’t you grant me my request?”

The Segundo’s stricken expression told Vor that Xavier still loved her deeply. The officer had turned his back on Vor, as if to hide his emotions. “Take a ship, then. Get yourself in the thick of the fighting . . . but come back alive. I don’t think Serena could tolerate losing you on top of all the other pain she has suffered.” These were the first kind words Vor had heard from this enigmatic man, the first time anyone had suggested that Serena cared anything for him.

Xavier finally looked over his shoulder and gave him a guarded smile. “Don’t betray my trust.” Vor had sprinted to the ballista’s bays and chosen a kindjal of his own. . . .

Now, the human strike force funneled toward Omnius’s central computer complex. The thinking machines hammered the dispersed Armada ships with suicidal determination, destroying hundreds of unshielded bombers, patrol craft, and kindjals. Some of the shields failed, over-heated or poorly installed, and the battle grew more furious. Vor flew in the thick of it.

Then, in the midst of a free-for-all dogfight, Vorian saw a slower thinking-machine ship rising up, escorted by a dense cluster of automated vessels. The solitary guarded craft plowed through the swarm of Armada ships, avoiding direct confrontation.

Trying to sneak away.

Vor narrowed his gray-eyed gaze. At a time like this, why would a single robot ship be outbound, heading into space? Omnius should have been drawing together all of his resources. The young man’s instincts told him that this lone vessel should not be ignored.

Trying to concentrate on the fight around him, Vor fired his projectile weapons. Energy shells vaporized several robotic ships and disoriented others, allowing four more Armada bombers to get through.

All the while, high above him, the fleeing robot vessel continued out of the atmosphere on an escape trajectory, leaving the great battle behind. What could Omnius possibly be planning? What was that ship carrying? None of the other Armada fighters took any notice of it.

Vor knew he had to do something. This was vital— he could sense it in his gut.

Segundo Harkonnen had given him strict orders to accompany the warhead-carrying ships until they dropped their nuclear payloads. But things could change in the heat of battle. Besides, he wasn’t a machine, blindly following orders. He could innovate.

As he continued to watch the vessel climb beyond the thinning ionosphere, he had a sudden realization of what must be happening. It was an
update ship
, carrying a complete copy of Earth-Omnius, the thoughts and data of the evermind up to the very moment of the attack! It would include a comprehensive record and analysis of the slave uprising and the orders to exterminate all humans.

If such information were uploaded to other incarnations of Omnius, all Synchronized Worlds would be warned! They could prepare defenses against future League attacks.

Vor could not allow that to happen. “There’s something I have to do,” he transmitted on the local channel to his nearby escorts. “I can’t let that robot ship get away.” Abandoning the bombers under his protection, he swung his kindjal up and away, breaking from his original course.

Vor heard howls of outrage from the human captains he’d been assigned to guard. “What are you doing?” A robotic defender surged into the gap and fired upon the Armada ships.

“It’s an update ship! It carries a copy of Omnius.” He raced farther away, just as two robot vessels converged on the carriers Vor had been assigned to protect. His comrades cursed him as the robots opened fire, making short work of the human vessels. But Vor set his jaw, knowing his decision was morally and tactically right.

Seeing his departure, other Armada ships shouted curses after him. “Coward!”

“Traitor!”

Resigned, Vor said, “I’ll explain later.” Then he switched off his com-ystem so he could concentrate on his quarry. His background with thinking machines would always make humans think the worst of him. The prospect of censure and ill-will did not bother him. He had a job to do.

Within moments, Omnius’s fighters had struck one of the forsaken bombers, but fresh Armada escorts came in and shot two of the machine ships out of the sky. The remaining bombers kept flying, on course.

Earth’s open sky was filled with the ion trails of large and small Armada ships sowing nuclear warheads like kernels of grain. Robotic defenders targeted the falling atomics, exploding them in the air and dispersing clouds of radioactive shrapnel. This foiled the delicate detonator mechanisms and prevented nuclear chain reactions.

Even so, some of the atomics should get through.

AT THE HEIGHT of the battle, Earth-Omnius ran out of viable options. With the Armada fleet spread like a swarm of killer insects, the robotic defenders sacrificed themselves by careening into clusters of kindjals.

To Segundo Harkonnen, it became painfully obvious that only those vessels protected by Holtzman’s shields had any chance of survival. A few of the systems had failed, leading to the destruction of even the shielded ships. But there could be no turning back now.

The twenty largest Armada battleships hung in stationary orbit, dispatching wave after wave of small attackers, emptying the stockpiles of League atomics. At the same time, five destroyers descended to dump patterns of guided nuclear missiles. The wide dispersal created enough coverage from overlapping blast pulses to assure that all Omnius substations would be fried.

In a last vengeful attack, AI projectiles converged on the huge ballistas. Bombs with computer minds, the projectiles were intent on reaching their programmed targets. Ignoring the smaller bombers and kindjals, they looped back to intercept any evasive trajectories the battleship captains might attempt, and disregarded defensive decoys that were fired to draw the robots off.

On the receiving end of the defensive volley, Xavier Harkonnen stood on the bridge of his flagship, gripping the control rails, muttering a silent prayer to the genius of Tio Holtzman. “Let’s hope those overlapped shields hold! Hang on!”

Six self-guided projectiles slammed at near-relativistic speeds into the ballista’s Holtzman barriers and detonated. But the shimmering shields held.

Xavier’s knees felt weak with relief. The battleship crew cheered.

But around him, other Armada spacecraft— those without shields— did not fare so well. Although the hodgepodge of League ships fired a constant stream of suppressant shots, several AI projectiles broke through, vaporizing any unshielded human vessel in their way. Even one of the protected ballistas suffered from vulnerable spots when two of the small layered shields flickered, creating a chink in the armor. With the constant pummeling from the thinking machines, several robot missiles broke through.

Eleven of the largest battleships were vaporized into glowing wreckage, with all hands lost. Only eight of the huge vessels, each one covered by Holtzman shields, remained intact. A large percentage of the overall Armada fleet had already been annihilated.

Battered and shaken, Xavier watched the damage continue. He clenched his fists as he issued firm orders, maintaining a cool voice for the sake of his troops. His fingers felt sticky with the imagined blood of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers he had already sacrificed on this terrible day.

With sick anger, he watched Vorian Atreides flee the battlefield. At least the damnable spawn of Agamemnon had taken only a single kindjal, and the segundo could not waste time or energy pursuing him. Back on Salusa, Xavier would bring the deserter up on charges. If anyone made it back.
Damn his treachery!
Xavier had been right about him all along.

The thinking machines eliminated one League vessel after another, but Xavier kept sending his fleet forward. After so much effort and loss, he could not withdraw. Failure would bankrupt the human soul and lead to the end of freedom in the Galaxy.

It appeared to be a rout, in the machines’ favor. Only a fraction of the attacking human force had managed to reach their target points and drop cargo loads of nuclear bombs across the continents of Earth.

Then the first atomic detonations went off.

VOR RACED UPWARD and away with the update ship always in his sights. Acceleration pressed him against the pilot’s seat and forced his lips against his teeth. His eyes watered, his muscles stretched taut. But he did not relent. The lone Omnius vessel had already left the atmosphere and was streaking away from the unified Armada forces.

Below, multiple atomics began to detonate in a succession of dazzling nuclear flowers that illuminated the sky, sterilized the continents, and washed over every gelcircuit. . . .

Vor increased his kindjal’s speed and considered surprise tactics, knowing the update ship ahead of him would be captained by an inflexible robot. He was more than a match for any thinking machine’s methodical imagination.

Both ships pulled away from the embattled Earth. All across the dwindling blue-green sphere behind them, white-and-yellow fireclouds erupted in flashes that hurt Vor’s eyes. The major nuclear storm across the skies and land masses must have diverted the Armada’s attention from him. Nobody saw the vital importance of what he was trying to do.

The update ship climbed above the ecliptic, constantly increasing speed. The robot captain could endure accelerations that no human could survive. Nevertheless, Vorian shot after it, at the edge of consciousness, barely able to breathe against the crushing force. His League kindjal was faster than his prey— a mere update-class ship— and he closed the gap. With hands that seemed to weigh hundreds of kilograms, he powered up his ship’s weapons.

In the battle for Earth he had vaporized a dozen machine fighters, but in this case Vor meant only to cripple the targeted vessel. As an update ship, it would have only minimal armor, like the
Dream Voyager
. He intended to stop the vessel in space and board it.

As soon as his target came within range, high above the solar system and at the edge of the diffuse cometary halo, the fleeing robot captain went through a predictable set of maneuvers.

Vor opened fire. His precision shots damaged the exhaust ports so that the engines began to build toward an overload. Unable to properly vent its waste heat, the vessel would either explode or shut down.

As the wounded ship lurched forward, decelerating, Vor shot two warning projectiles across its bow. The shockwaves knocked the update ship off course. “Stand down and prepare to be boarded!”

The robot responded with surprising sarcasm. “I am aware of the various bodily orifices humans possess. Therefore, I invite you to take a power tool and insert it where the—”

“Old Metalmind?” Vor cried. “Let me come aboard. It’s Vorian Atreides.”

“That cannot be true. Vorian Atreides would never fire upon
me
.”

Vor transmitted his image, not surprised that Seurat would be captaining another update ship, since Omnius did not vary in his routines. Seurat’s mirror-smooth oval face emitted a colorful curse that Vor had often used after losing a military game.

Vor linked his craft with the damaged vessel. Knowing the risk, he entered via the main access hatch and marched through the confined interior toward the command bridge.

F
rom deep within his widely distributed citadels of power, the Omnius evermind watched over Earth. His mobile and stationery watcheyes recorded every facet of the bold human attack. He saw the tide of battle turn.

Omnius studied the trajectories of the thousands of spacecraft that came in, counted the numbers that his robotic defenders destroyed.

Even so, some of the atomics got through.

With a separate subset of calculational routines, Omnius maintained a tally of the thinking-machine vessels he had lost. Individually, those robot ships were expendable and could easily be replaced from stock materials and designs. Fortunately, Seurat’s update ship had broken through the descending masses of
hrethgir
vessels and escaped outward into the solar system. His important thoughts and decisions would be distributed among the Synchronized Worlds.