Dune: The Machine Crusade (56 page)

The slaves smashed open display cases and grabbed weapons, taking even knives and swords. Finally, drunk with anticipation, Aliid removed a heavy polished weapon of a type that had been developed centuries before but abandoned for military applications because of its power inefficiency. The enhanced laser-projecting rifle was capable of discharging a high-energy beam that could cut down many enemies from a distance— for as long as its powerpak lasted.

Pleased with the feel and balance of it, Aliid took the lasgun as his own, sensing the level of havoc and destruction it could cause. Then he ran through the streets with his followers. Above, he saw the blufftop laboratories of Tio Holtzman, and knew where to begin his ambitious mission of personal revenge.

ALONE IN THE center of an angry Zensunni mob in the isolated hangar, Tuk Keedair panicked. “Take you in the space-folding ship? Impossible! I’m just a merchant. I know the basics of how to fly, but I am not a professional pilot or navigator. This is an unproven ship, too. Its engines are experimental. Everything is—”

Rafel grasped the flesh merchant’s arms tighter and shook him violently. “It is our last and only hope. We are desperate people. Do not underestimate us.”

Ishmael’s voice was cold and angry. “I remember you and your cronies, Tuk Keedair. You raided my village on Harmonthep. You threw my beloved grandfather into the marshes with the giant eels. You destroyed my people.”

He pressed himself close to the Tlulaxa merchant’s face. “I want my freedom and a new opportunity for my daughter and for all of these people.” He gestured to the restless crowd in the hangar bay. “But if you force us, I will have to be satisfied with crude revenge.”

Keedair swallowed hard, looked at the angry slaves, and said, “If death is my only other option… then I may as well try to fly this thing. But be aware that I do not know what I’m doing. The new space-folding engines have never been tested with a real cargo and passengers.”

“You would have experimented on us slaves anyway,” growled Rafel, “as test subjects.”

Keedair pursed his lips, nodded. “Probably.”

At a gesture from Ishmael, slaves hurried into the ship. They would hide and wait there inside sleeping quarters, communal cabins, and corridors that were not piled with packaged supplies. They would grab blankets, hold on to each other, and hope for the best.

“Another thing.” Keedair struggled to regain his confidence. “I only remember the coordinates for one destination: Arrakis. It’s a backwater planet where I made most of my recent merchant runs. We were going to test this ship by taking it there.”

“Can we make a home on Arrakis?” asked Chamal, her eyes bright. “Is it a land of paradise and peace, a place where we can be free— and safe from people like you?” Her expression darkened.

Keedair looked as if he wanted to laugh at the suggestion, but did not have the courage to do so. “For some it is.”

“Then take us there,” Ishmael commanded.

The Zensunni captors herded the frightened Tlulaxa man up the ramp and into the piloting deck. One hundred and one Zensunnis filed aboard and sealed the hatches, leaving the hangar’s interior empty as dusk gathered over the Isana River.

Keedair looked at the makeshift controls that Norma Cenva had installed, each with labels in her strange shorthand language. He knew the basic principles of the ship’s operation and understood how to enter the desired coordinates.

“I have no way of knowing that a human being can endure instantaneous passage through the dimensional anomaly of folded space.” Keedair was obviously both frightened of the unknown and intimidated by the slaves’ threat. “In fact, I don’t even know if this ship will fly at all.”

“Set the coordinates,” Ishmael commanded. He knew that on the Starda docks and the river delta, the real violence was about to begin. He prayed that Ozza and his other daughter would be safe, far from Aliid’s mayhem and bloodshed. But he could not save them now, could never hope to see them again. “We must be away from Poritrin, before it is too late.”

“Remember, I warned you.” Keedair tossed his long braid over his shoulder. “If these Holtzman engines plunge us into another dimension where you writhe in agony for eternity, do not curse my name.”

“I already curse your name,” Ishmael said.

Looking grim, Keedair activated the untested space-folding engines.

In less than an eyeblink, the ship disappeared into the void.

TIO HOLTZMAN SAT relaxed and pondering, until the sky ripened with the colors of a setting sun. Downriver, crowds were gathered in front of speaking platforms to listen to droning pronouncements while bands thumped music in the distance.

He pushed his chair away from the table just as a breeze caught his napkin and carried it out over the bluff. As the scientist watched it sail away, he absently noted the warehouses burning on the opposite bank and in the slave market, but he wasn’t concerned. Lord Bludd’s people would take care of it.

Upon returning to work inside, Holtzman called for his household slaves. No one responded. Annoyed, he continued trying to decipher Norma Cenva’s confiscated documents, scanning the mathematical symbols and ignoring other markings and crude drawings.

He became so engrossed in her frenetic notes that he did not hear the commotion in his house— men shouting, glass breaking. Finally, at the sound of gunfire, he jerked his head up and bellowed for his Dragoon guards. Most of them were gone, working security for the riverside festival. Gunshots? Through the windows he saw more buildings burning down in the main city, and heard a distant roar, followed by screams. Grumbling and uneasy, the inventor donned his personal shield as was his habit, and went to see about the disturbance.

RACING DOWN A corridor on the top level of Holtzman’s elegant home, Aliid fired bursts from his stolen antique lasgun, incinerating fine statues and paintings all around him. From behind he heard the gleeful shouts of his supporters as they liberated house slaves.

Just ahead of him two Dragoon guards attempted to block the corridor, but Aliid cut them to pieces with the lasgun, melting the flesh off their bones. Despite its age, this weapon was quite a useful piece, with impressive firepower.

Because Aliid had served here years ago, he was able to guess where he would find the pompous Savant. Moments later he burst into the private residence suite with twenty angry men behind him.

A gray-bearded man stood in the middle of the room, his arms in voluminous sleeves crossed over his chest. Something shimmered around him, distorting his facial features. Indignant, Holtzman faced the wild-eyed rebels, not recognizing Aliid. “Go away, before I call my guards!”

Undeterred, Aliid advanced with the lasgun. “I will go away, but not until we have crushed you slave masters.”

Recognizing the outdated weapon, Holtzman’s face became a mask of terror, which only seemed to encourage Aliid. This was exactly the way Aliid had envisioned it.

Without remorse, he fired at the cruel old slave owner.

The burst of white-purple laser struck Holtzman’s personal shield, and interacted in a titanic explosion. The inventor’s bluffside home, along with most of the city of Starda, flashed white-hot, in pseudoatomic incandescence.

A
s he guided the band of heavily armed offworld mercenaries to their target— and his own vengeance— Naib Dhartha faced the growing realization that these surly, hard-bitten men viewed him as nothing more than a servant. To them, the Zensunni leader was merely someone who could lead them to their target. He was not a commander.

Once the convoy of flyers had departed from Arrakis City, the hired fighters had shown him little respect. Dhartha sat in the ship with five Zensunni warriors who had joined him for a kanla vengeance party. The hardened mercenaries saw this group as primitive nomads, amateurs play-acting at being soldiers. But they all had the same goal— to destroy Selim Wormrider.

All together, the fighters had enough firepower and explosives to slaughter every one of the bandits without ever setting foot on the ground and dirtying their hands. Personally, Naib Dhartha would have preferred to grasp his enemy by the hair, yank back his head, and slit his throat. He wanted to watch the light fade from Selim’s eyes as thick, warm blood gushed out on his own fingertips.

However, Dhartha was willing to forego such luxuries in exchange for the assurance that the Wormrider and his band would be eradicated.

Thermals rose like smoke from the heat-rippled dunes, and the flyer bounced along in the heavy air currents. A thickline of cliffs and broken rocks loomed before them like an isolated continent far out in the desert.

“Your nest of vermin is just ahead,” the mercenary captain said.

To Naib Dhartha, this officer and his men were all infidels. They came from a handful of planets across the League of Nobles. Some had trained as mercenaries on Ginaz but were found wanting and had never been accepted into the elite group of warriors. Nonetheless, they were fighters and killers… exactly what the situation required.

“We could just bomb the cliffs,” suggested another mercenary. “Swoop in and turn the whole rockpile into burning dust.”

“No,” Dhartha insisted. “I want to count bodies, cut off fingers for trophies.” Some of the men from his kanla party muttered in agreement. “Unless we can show the body of Selim Wormrider for all to see, unless we can prove he was weak and mortal, his followers will continue their sabotage.”

“What are you worried about, Raul?” another mercenary asked. “They don’t stand a chance, probably have only three Maula pistols among them, and our personal shields will protect us against projectiles. We’re invincible.”

“Right,” said another soldier. “An old woman could fly overhead and bomb the hideout into the ground. Are we warriors or bureaucrats?”

Dhartha pointed ahead of the pilot. “You can land on the sand close to the rocks there, where the worms can’t go. We’ll swarm up and find the outlaw caves and smoke them out. The Wormrider will probably try to hide and protect himself, but we will kill their women and children one by one until he comes to face me.”

“Then we can shoot him down,” Raul cried, and they all erupted in laughter.

Dhartha scowled. He tried not to think overmuch about what he was doing, how he had been forced to beg for help from Aurelius Venport. Always the problem of Selim Wormrider had been a private matter, a vendetta between the two of them.

Zensunni elders from distant tribal villages made no secret of their scorn for Dhartha and his easy cooperation with unclean offworlders. The Naib did business with foreigners, sold them all the spice they asked for. He had even installed offworld conveniences in his own cliff village, forsaking the old ways. By hiring these mercenaries to help him take personal vengeance, Dhartha realized he had forsaken everything that had once mattered to him. In this instance, he no longer cared about the traditions or tenets of Buddislam. He ground his teeth, realizing he might be cursed to Heol for his actions.

At least Selim Wormrider will be dead.

The armed transport landed against a tumble of rocks, and the vehicle’s doors opened to the hot, dry air. Dhartha stood ready to issue orders, but Venport’s mercenaries ignored him as they scrambled out into the open. They shouted to each other, shouldered projectile weapons, adjusted personal shields. Moments later, the men bounded up into the rocks and made a coordinated, vigorous charge toward the honeycomb of caves.

Dhartha felt like a spectator. Finally, gruffly, he commanded the five kanla men, and they set out with him, hurrying to keep up with the advance fighters. They wanted their share of the bloodshed as well.

For many months Dhartha’s spies had gathered clues and information, until he was convinced he had found the lair of the Wormrider’s band. They could not possibly have received any warning of the attack.

When the offworld soldiers charged into the caves ahead of him, Dhartha was puzzled that he heard no sounds of fighting, no shouts, no blasts from Maula pistols. Had the bandits been sleeping? He advanced with his band of Zensunnis into the cave openings.

Clearly, this was where the outlaws had settled. Rooms had been carved out of sandstone, with decorative hangings and stolen glowglobes still in place, along with cooking utensils and other household possessions.

But no people were in the chambers. The outlaws had escaped.

“Someone told them we were coming,” the mercenary captain growled. “We are betrayed.”

“Impossible,” Naib Dhartha said. “No one could have gotten here faster than our flyer. We assembled this war party only fifteen hours ago.”

Venport’s mercenaries gathered in one of the main chambers, their faces ruddy with anger. They surrounded Naib Dhartha, clearly blaming him for the failure. One, a man with a scar on his forehead, spoke for the others: “Then explain to us, desert man, where they have all gone.”

The Naib tried to control his breathing. Anger and confusion simmered around him. He knew this was the right place. Thick, lingering odors proved that people had lived here— many of them— until recently. This was no decoy, no long-abandoned settlement. “Selim was here. He can’t be far away. Where could they all go in the desert?”

Before anyone could answer, they heard a faint, distant pounding like a heartbeat… or a drum. With his companions, Dhartha rushed to one of the window openings and saw a lone person far out on the open dunes, a pathetically small, impotent figure.

“There he is!” Dhartha howled.

Shouting battle cries, the mercenaries charged back toward their flyer. “But what if it’s a trap?” one of the soldiers asked.

Filled with furious scorn, Dhartha looked at the mercenary. “He is only one man. We must capture him to learn where the others have gone.”

In a sneering tone, the mercenary captain said, “We’re not afraid of anything these desert scum can throw against us.”