Dune: The Machine Crusade (37 page)

“Yes!” Iblis’s eyes shone. “You can help us turn a lost cause into a victory.”

He explained what he had in mind.

W
hile Primero Harkonnen’s fleet prepared to face the machine warships above Ix, Jool Noret and a small team of commandos fought a pitched battle in caves that laced the planet’s crust.

The Primero had given them their orders before they boarded a cannonball shuttle and plunged to the surface of the embattled Synchronized World. “Five separate teams will try to fight their way through the tunnels beneath the central computer nexus of the Ix-Omnius. Each team will carry a compact, city-killer warhead. Your jobis to deliver it to the Omnius stronghold. With luck, at least one of the teams will achieve the objective.”

“Won’t atomics cause a great many casualties?” Jool Noret asked.

“Yes,” the Primero admitted. “But Omnius is attempting to exterminate all humans in the catacombs of Ix. This city-killer bomb is designed to deliver an intense localized vaporization pulse that will wipe gelcircuitry brains. It’s a tactical weapon, so the number of wounded will be minimal, and the damage to Ixian industrial facilities will be restricted.” His expression seemed about to fall, but he masked his look of dismay. “It’s the best we can do. But because of the need for precision, we’ll have to send in several teams to make sure the device is delivered exactly on target. This will not be an easy task.”

It seemed to be a suicide mission, with overwhelming odds against success. Jool Noret had been the first to volunteer….

Following uniformed jihadis into the fray, Noret hurled his last scrambler-pulse grenade. It clattered as it rolled down the slight incline toward a squad of assassin robots that thundered toward them. The grenade detonated with a disruptive Holtzman pulse that turned the fighting robots into motionless sparking hulks, like scrap-metal statues.

But the twisted tunnels and thick stone walls made each scrambler grenade dissipate too quickly. And other robotic killers kept coming.

Without pause or question, Noret bulled his way ahead, carrying his array of weapons and his father’s pulse-sword. Grenades seemed like a coward’s path to victory, and he preferred to vanquish his foes one by one, in hand-to-hand combat.

If only there weren’t so many of them.

Though he was just a young mercenary and not in charge of the commando team, Noret led the charge anyway, bypassing the cluttered hulks of deactivated robots. The cave walls still thrummed with echoes from the last scrambler pulse. Behind him, other jihadis paused to pummel and kick the neutralized combat robots, but the impatient Noret urged them ahead. “Spend your energy on real opponents that need killing, not on ones that have already been vanquished.”

According to schematics from Ixian survivors, these catacombs passed beneath the primary machine industries and computer centers. The team’s gaunt and haunted-looking contact man, an Ixian named Handon, had lost his companions, his mate, and children during the recent bloodbath spearheaded by the Titan Xerxes.

The unfortunate man gave them horrific details, then led the way through the cramped passageways. If the determined mercenaries could plant their small atomic in the central fortified complex that held the local evermind’s primary gelsphere, they could free Ix, once and for all.

Handon’s clothes were tattered, his arms and chest skeletal, his hair long and unkempt. But the refugee’s expression remained dedicated. “This way. We are almost there.” He had lived for six months underground, eluding killer robots, destroying thirty-one of them himself.

“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 how 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?”