Sisterhood of Dune (40 page)

He glanced down again, scanning the desert as he completed his broad circle. Still no sign of a worm, only the skirl of a dust-devil pirouetting on top of a dune.

A burst transmission came across the comm line, crackling with static in Vor’s cockpit. There was always static because of the dust and the ambient charge in the atmosphere, but now he heard shouts, a gabble of frightened voices, a loud blow.

“Gods below, what the—”

“We’re under attack!”

Then a scream and a surge of static filled the comm line before falling silent.

Vor’s fingers paused just above the transmit button as he wheeled the aircraft about and streaked back toward the sheltered valley. He wanted to ask for details, demand explanations, but caution advised him to remain silent, sensing this might not be a sandworm encounter. Vor didn’t want to let the attackers, if human, know he was coming. He was dozens of kilometers away, but he pushed the skimcraft engines to their peak acceleration.

When he approached the bottleneck valley, though, he reduced power to the aircraft’s roaring intake engines to make them much quieter. From afar, he could still see the dissipating dust plumes from the excavator’s exhaust stack. He swooped down into the valley and saw three of the dune rollers smoldering, their engines blasted, human bodies strewn on the sand. The engines of the excavator had been shut down in the middle of the valley, and the huge metal hulk sat, dust-covered, on its treads, a few bare patches of its metal hull glinting in the sunlight.

Another person might have panicked and sped back to Arrakis City to make a report and call for reinforcements, but Vor was not the sort of man to let a crisis continue without his intervention. Although his aircraft probably had enough fuel to reach another settlement, by the time he made his report and brought help, it would be far too late. By then, sandworms might have erased all evidence.

He had to find the answers to what had attacked the spice crew, and help anyone who might still be alive. It had happened so fast, and there was no cause in sight! Less than fifteen minutes had passed since he received the emergency signal. If a paramilitary force from a rival spice operation had struck the excavator, Vor had no weapon except for his own wits and fighting skills. Even his personal shield belt was sealed inside his locker aboard the large excavator.

Vor landed on the tread-marked sands and left the skimcraft’s take-off engines active but on standby. Whatever force had hijacked and devastated the operations out here must have seen his scout craft land—if they were still here. Anyone familiar with how the melange business worked knew that at least one flyer scouted each harvesting operation.

He sprang out of the cockpit and landed on the soft dunes, then sprinted toward the towering metal machine. Three burned corpses lay sprawled next to an overturned dune roller—bodies of men he knew. Vor didn’t let himself think of their names. Not yet. He had seen bodies on battlefields before … but this wasn’t supposed to be a battlefield.

He felt an eerie reminder of when he’d tried to stop the slavers on Kepler, how he’d arrived too late to prevent the human cargo ships from taking his family and neighbors, from lifting off into the sky with them.

The spice-filled cargo pods remained intact, and no one had pulled the emergency launch; the evacuation pod was still locked in the upper bridge.

The entry ramp was open, showing the huge excavator’s cavernous, dark interior, but Vor decided instinctively not to enter that way. Instead, he ran around to the front of the giant machine. During active operations, a broad, sand-covered scoop and conveyor gobbled the top layer of the desert, then dumped the sand into the processing bins and centrifuges.

Ducking, Vor scrambled up the conveyor and entered the processing machine through the intake ramp, climbing out through the first boxlike hopper. Covered with dust, he fought back the urge to cough from the strong cinnamon smell of spice in the air. He crept forward.

The bodies of three more workers lay on the stained metal deck. A container of harvested spice had been smashed open, the reddish powder spilled recklessly onto the floor. He looked from side to side, deconstructing shadows, but saw no movement, heard no noise.

It must have been a surgical operation, a powerful assault and retreat before countermeasures could be employed. He remembered his fellow crewmembers talking about the enemies Josef Venport had created when they ran roughshod over competitors in the melange business. This reeked of a retaliatory strike.

The excavator creaked and thrummed, even though the engines had been shut down. The heat from the sun and the cooling metal caused it to settle. With no one outside spotting for wormsign, Vor realized that a sandworm could venture through the bottleneck in the cliff walls at any time. But he was more concerned about a different sort of enemy now; someone had murdered his crewmates, his friends, and honor impelled him to discover who.

With soft footsteps he crept up the flat metal steps to the shadowy crew deck, which should have been empty, since all workers were required to be on duty during active spice-harvesting operations. Even so, Vor discovered a single body there, a man sprawled on the deck, his neck broken. Moving as silently as he could, he retrieved his shield belt from his locker and clipped it on, but did not activate it yet.

He also secured a flare gun from an emergency locker, took a heavy pry bar from a tool kit and, carrying the makeshift weapons in each hand, made his way up one more level to the operations deck. Although fear made Vor cautious, his emotion drove him forward. Was the whole spice crew dead? He had to see if anyone needed rescuing. He was only one man, but accustomed to acting alone. He had secured numerous victories in the Jihad, brought down entire machine planets through prowess and clever ideas. He felt ready to face the murderers and saboteurs who had done this, though he realized he could not defeat an entire paramilitary force. He began to feel he had overcommitted himself, and he always had to worry about a sandworm.

Creeping up the metal stairs to the entrance hatch of the operations deck, he froze. Just inside the door, old Calbir’s face stared at him, his eyes open and mouth partly agape—but it was the head only, propped up on a communication panel. The rest of the crew chief’s body lay slumped in the chair two meters away. Judging by the ragged stump of the neck, it looked as if Calbir’s head had been
torn
from his body. Another man lay dead inside the open hatch of the escape pod, his body sprawled facedown and a gaping, bloody wound on his back.

At the main control panel, with arms crossed over their chests, stood a young man and woman who looked to be about twenty years old. Wiry and feral, like panthers, they were covered with blood from their hands to their shoulders. “You must be Vorian Atreides,” said the man. “We knew you wouldn’t run away.”

The young woman’s lips curled in a smile. “He looks like you, Andros. The resemblance is striking.”

Vor had expected to see an entire army, considering the damage they’d left in their wake, but these two were apparently alone. He noted something oddly familiar in their faces, their gray eyes, their dark hair. The deadly pair uncoiled their arms, like cobras preparing to strike, and their skin flickered with an underlying metallic sheen. They moved forward in unison, approaching him with a fluid, predatory gait.

“Stun only, Hyla,” the man said.

The young woman pulled out a stubby hand weapon. “We want to talk with you, Vorian … and maybe toy with you a bit, until we obtain some answers. You can’t possibly know this, but we have a lot in common, and so much potential together.”

Not caring what they meant, Vor activated his personal body shield, and the thrumming ripple appeared around him a fraction of an instant before the woman fired her stunner. The burst struck ineffectually against his shield.

“I thought you said no one used shields in desert operations!”

Many decades ago, Vor had seen those types of weapons when the cymeks quelled disturbances among their captive human populations. He also knew they had much more lethal settings.

When the stun failed to incapacitate Vor, the young man threw himself forward. Vor swung the pry bar—and when the thick metal rod struck Andros in the ribs, he could tell the man wore no shield of his own. Seeing all the death and mayhem, Vor did not hold back his strength. The impact was solid, and Andros winced, but he grabbed the pry bar and yanked it out of Vor’s hand.

Vor staggered away. The blow should have smashed the young man’s rib cage, but he didn’t even appear bruised! Now Hyla launched herself at him, and Vor fired the flare gun at her chest. The flash of the exploding projectile threw her back into Andros and caught both of them on fire. They still came at him, with flames consuming their clothing.

Vor swung over the railing and dropped down to the lower deck. If these two—
two!
—had slaughtered the entire crew, it was foolish for him to stand and fight them. Only a few seconds ahead of the pair, Vor ran into the crew quarters, sealed the heavy bulkhead door, and moved to the opposite end of the deck.

The eerie, murderous couple began battering at the metal door, and then an explosive burst shattered the lock. He had hoped to gain more time than this, but the two followed him, rushing forward with their clothes smoldering and skin blackened, not acting as if they were injured at all.

He didn’t underestimate them, though he had no idea who they were or how they had obtained such powers. He had to think of some way to incapacitate them, or at least get enough of a head start so he could make it back to his waiting skimcraft.

Questions clamored in his mind: Who were these people? They did not seem to be saboteurs from a rival spice operation. Andros and Hyla—he did not recognize their names, but they had been sure he wouldn’t know anything about them. What did they want? And that odd familiarity in their faces, as well as the similarity of appearance between Vor and Andros, an observation Hyla had made. A coincidence, or did it signify something more?

Vor raced the length of the excavator, dropped down another deck, and made his way to the spice-filled cargo pods, where an emergency exit hatch would let him back outside. He reached the sealed metal door, popped it open, and stepped outside onto a catwalk along the outside of the excavator. Hot wind whistled around the melange cargo pod; he was more than fifteen meters above the ground.

Normally, the ejection mechanism for an emergency launch of the cargo pods would be operated from the excavator’s bridge, but the manual, secondary controls were here. Facing an oncoming worm and the loss of the giant vehicle, Vor doubted many spice workers would have the presence of mind to save the melange cargo when they themselves were doomed, but now he was glad for the fail-safe. He activated the sequence; he had less than a minute.

Andros and Hyla emerged from the escape hatch and ran after him onto the catwalk around the cargo pod. “We just want to talk with you,” Hyla called in a flat, emotionless voice. “If you’re useful, we may decide not to kill you.”

Vor reached an escape pole and a thin metal ladder that ran down the outside of the spice harvester. He began to slide, but the rungs interfered, slowing him.

When he was three meters above the sand he let go and dropped, just in time to see Andros and Hyla stop at the ladder. The young man fired his weapon, and the beam’s impact melted a round patch of sand into glass half a meter to his left.

At that moment, the ejection procedure blasted the anchor bolts free and heaved the melange cargo pod up into the air, hauling his two pursuers with it.

Vor sprawled on the ground, got to his feet again, and ran across the cloying sand toward his landed scout flyer. He looked back, watching the cargo pod rise into the air. The young man and woman clung to the catwalk, dangling, as the cargo pod rose higher, fifty meters above the ground. Andros and Hyla both let go at the same time, as if by mutual decision.

As he swung into the cockpit, Vor watched the two plummet to the ground. They landed simultaneously in crouch positions, even from such an impossible height, and then bounded up again, springing toward the aircraft without the slightest injury or hesitation.

Vor punched the craft’s engines, lifting off vertically from the sands even before the cockpit canopy sealed. Flying such a craft was second nature to him, and now he wheeled it around and headed toward the rocky outcroppings that encircled the valley. If he could get out to the open desert, he would fly straight toward Arrakis City—

Before he gained much altitude, a small explosion struck the undercarriage of his aircraft, and one of the engines coughed, roared, then failed. The pursuers had fired their antique cymek weapons, damaging the engines. The flyer began to spin, but Vor wrestled with the controls, trying to maintain altitude, not sure whether it was better to crash on the open sands beyond the bottleneck, or in the rocks where he could at least hide.

Smoke poured from both engines. The young man fired again, but missed. Vor was very close to the ground now, but with a burst of auxiliary power he was able to streak away, trying to get as much distance as possible from his pursuers. His mind rushed. There was no place to hide out in the dunes, but he could take cover in the rocky ridge, maybe set up an ambush, though Andros and Hyla would not be easy targets.

In the rear imager, he saw the two tiny figures racing across the open valley, literally
running
after the wounded flyer as it tried to escape. The belly of his slowing craft scraped a high dune, sending a rooster tail of dust and sand into the air. Vor held on, jarred by the impact, and tried to keep flying, but the aircraft struck the ground again and plowed into the sand. He managed to pull up a final time, closing in toward the line of rocks that formed a barrier around the valley. Finally, he skidded into the soft sand and slewed to an abrupt, jarring stop against the first rocks. His body shield protected him from heavy bruising during the crash.

He popped open the canopy, leaped out, and ran onto weathered slabs of rock, picking his way, using hands and feet to climb when necessary. He glanced over his shoulder to see the two figures relentlessly jogging toward him, leaving lines of footprints across the soft sand.