Dune: The Machine Crusade (57 page)

The mercenaries rushed out to crush Selim Wormrider.

THE SANDS WERE soft beneath his booted feet, and the noon sun shone bright and harsh, as if to burn clean everything it touched. On this day no shadows would accompany Selim; he walked in complete illumination. He paused in the middle of the emptiness, where all the world could see him. He sat under the dazzling sunlight, drew out his drum, and waited.

Naib Dhartha and his war party could not fail to notice.

The day before, all of the nearby caves had been a flurry of activity as his followers packed supplies, taking only what they would need for a journey out into the deepest bled. The young wormriders had looked breathless and determined, fearful of what was about to happen, but not daring to question Selim’s vision or commands.

The last to leave, Marha had clung to Selim, and he held her tightly in return, thinking of the growing life within her womb, wishing he could stay with his wife and raise this child. But the call of Shai-Hulud was greater. He knew what he must do, and had no choice but to heed Buddallah’s demand.

“I made the right choice in joining your troop,” Marha had said with a mixture of sorrow and wonder in her eyes. “I pray for your safety on this day, but if the worst happens, Selim, I will make our child proud of you.”

He had touched her face and did not reassure her with false bravado. He did not know what Shai-Hulud had in store for him. “Care for our
son
.” He placed a gentle hand on her belly. “The melange has told me that you will give birth to a healthy boy. You will name him… El’hiim. Someday he will be a worthy leader in his own right, if he makes the proper choices.”

Her face had brightened with hope, but Selim made her leave.

Now, out in the open, he felt alone and small, but Shai-Hulud was with him. His entire life, everything he had ever done or ever could do, had converged at this point. Selim felt more confident in his success than at any time since experiencing his first vision almost three decades ago.

Naib Dhartha was his sworn enemy and the foe of Shai-Hulud. The Zensunni leader had sold his soul to offworld merchants and bartered away the lifeblood of Arrakis— melange— letting it flow where it did not belong. In spice visions, Selim could see across the landscape of time from a point of view that only a god or his messenger could match. In the far future he saw what would be a slow, lingering death for the sandworms….

Today’s battle would be remembered for many generations, repeated around story fires through the centuries. Selim’s name might be forgotten, the details blurred by repeated tellings, but the substance would be incorporated into the mythos of the desert wanderers. Invoking his memory, the people would continue to prey upon the spice scavengers with even more enthusiasm.

In the larger scheme, what he did today was entirely necessary.

He watched the hated offworld troops land in their military flyer and swarm up rockpaths into the caves Selim had used for so many years as his base of operations. His lips curled downward when he saw that Naib Dhartha had shamed himself even more by consorting with strangers, hired fighters from foreign planets. Well armed, they moved with animalistic ferocity.

Selim hated to see them defiling his home, the caves where he and his believers had met and celebrated, the chamber where he and Marha had first made love. These intruders did not deserve to live.

He sat cross-legged on the sands and waited while they ransacked the abandoned settlement. Finally, impatient because no one had seen him yet, he seated the bottom of the drum in the soft sands. With brisk flat slaps, he pounded the drumhead, sending a loud echo into the clear desert air and down into the stratified dunes.

A sharp call, a challenge.

Selim heard faint shouts of alarm and anger, and then the fighters scurried down out of the rocks. They hurried back aboard their flying craft. Engines whined and plumes of dust spat out as the vessel lumbered into the air.

Naib Dhartha and his personal war party raced out onto the dunes on foot.

Selim pounded his drum harder in a relentless, insistent rhythm. The drum was a precision instrument he had made himself. Loyal Jafar had shown him how to create the device using metal scraps for the cylinder and tightly woven skins from kangaroo mice for the drumhead. This drum had served him for years. It had summoned many worms.

The armed flyer swooped overhead, cruising low so that he could feel the rush of air and a wave of heat from its engines. Blown sand stung his face, but Selim did not flinch. They could have taken potshots at his position or dropped explosives to obliterate him. But the pilot seemed to be determining whether the outlaw was indeed alone. Naturally they would suspect a trap— but would not be able to see it. The flyer circled again, and then landed in a flat expanse of sand well away from him. The mercenary soldiers poured out.

As if they were racing the soldiers from the flyer, Naib Dhartha and his Zensunni warriors stumbled quickly across the landscape. All of these arrogant men believed themselves a match for the rigors of the desert, but Selim knew that any human life on Arrakis was less significant than a grain of sand in the open bled.

He kept pounding his drum. In response, he could feel the deep, deep tremors… growing louder, closer.

From the opposite side, the approaching Zensunni fighters ran forward waving their weapons, forgetting the stutter-step they had learned as children. He could hear curses, challenges, threats. Though he was older than most of his fighters, Naib Dhartha led the way himself. As Selim had hoped, the Naib’s rage had overcome his good sense.

“I challenge you, Selim Demonrider,” Dhartha bellowed as soon as he was in earshot. His voice was deep and laced with gravity, just as it had been when he’d falsely condemned Selim for stealing water. “You have caused enough harm to my people, and I have come to end your outlaw life.”

Because they were trained to do so, the offworld soldiers switched on personal shields. Selim had never fought with a shield— no real warrior depended on such cowardly protection— and he sensed a jolt deep underground as the men came toward him. They did not know that their shields were sending out a louder, more insistent summons to Shai-Hulud than Selim’s drum could ever issue.

“Are you a man without sin who is fit to judge me, Naib Dhartha?” Selim shouted back. He beat more on his drum. “A man who knowingly exiled a young boy who was innocent of any crime? You have continued to act against Shai-Hulud, despite your clear knowledge of the harm you are causing. You have far more blood on your hands than I do.”

Some members of the Zensunni war party shouted with alarm and pointed toward the distance. Selim did not turn. He felt the vibrations increasing, the deep passage of approaching sandworms. Many of them.

The mercenaries stumbled to a halt and circled in confusion like riled ants, as the sandy ground beneath them began to vibrate and boil. With a whine of engines, the retreating flyer heaved itself off the unstable dune and rose into the dusty air.

A moment later, a huge sandworm, driven into a frenzy by the personal shields on the mercenaries, lunged out of the ground like a projectile, its gaping mouth scooping up all of the maddening soldiers in one sweep.

Selim remained seated, listening to the rush of disturbed sand and the hopeless howl of men plunging into the endless gullet.

The pilot raised the flyer higher and hurtled toward the enormous sandworm that had killed most of the mercenary party in a few seconds. He launched explosive projectiles from nose guns, and the blasts struck the encrusted skin of the worm segments, exposing raw pink flesh beneath. The eyeless worm writhed and surged, blindly seeking a new enemy.

As the flyer streaked in for a renewed attack, a second sandworm exploded from the depths of the desert. In a sinuous, cobra like movement, it hammered into the flyer, knocking it out of the air. The worm plunged into the desert as the military craft crashed, and the momentum sucked the wreckage into the sand.

On the opposite side of Selim, the Zensunni warriors dropped their weapons, turned in a panic, and fled. As they left him alone to face Selim, Dhartha looked back at them with anger and disgust.

Selim did not fear Shai-Hulud. He had faced the worm many times, and knew what Buddallah had in store for him. “There is only one way for a Wormrider to die, Naib Dhartha.”

Selim had done his best to fulfill the destiny chosen for him. He knew in his heart, though, that what he was about to do would accomplish far more. He would step beyond reality, into the realm of mythos. The tale of Selim Wormrider and his sacred quest would endure for centuries.

Then a third monster swam through the sands and rose up in front of the fleeing Zensunni kanla party. The creatures were notoriously territorial, never entering a rival’s domain… but
three
of them had answered Selim’s summons. He doubted it anyone had ever witnessed such a spectacle.

The kanla fighters could not run from the third worm. The creature thrashed about and devoured them in a flurry of sand.

As if entranced, Selim continued to drum. Dhartha, the only survivor now, screamed at him. Finally, the sand began to tremble beneath him, signaling the emergence of the fourth and largest worm of all, and the Naib turned and tried to escape.

Too late.

As the dune slumped and sand shifted beneath his feet, Naib Dhartha spun to face Selim. Beneath them both, Shai-Hulud emerged, his yawning mouth a huge maw filled with crystal teeth.

In a single gulp, the worm swallowed tons of sand. Naib Dhartha, slid into the bottomless pit.

The sandworm kept rising, kept coming forward.

Selim held onto his drum while the creature surged like an angel toward the heavens, its mouth reeking of all the melange on the desert planet. Finally, the beast swallowed him, too.

The Wormrider took his last ride, a ride into eternity, down the fiery gullet of Shai-Hulud.

EARLIER, THE SULLEN members of the outlaw band had followed their leader’s orders and gone to set up a new encampment in a distant section of rocks. With an aching heart, Marha had remained behind. She felt the child growing within her and wondered if the baby would ever see its father. No matter what happened, she vowed the child would know all the stories about Selim Wormrider.

Her husband had explained to her what she must do. She had not relished her obligation, but truly believed in Selim’s cause. She accepted his visions as genuine messages from Buddallah, so she could not discard them for her own convenience, or for her love.

In order to better see Selim, she had ascended Needle Rock, a tall outcropping that gave her a commanding vantage of the desert. Long ago, when she had first run away from Naib Dhartha’s village and found her way across the desert, Needle Rock had been a significant landmark, close to the caves of Selim. Very few of those wishing to join the outlaw band made it this far without being picked up by Selim’s scouts. But Marha had done it.

Now she watched as Selim sat alone on the dunes, pounding his drum, facing his hated adversaries.

None of the offworld mercenaries or Zensunni traitors had imagined that Selim could so easily command Shai-Hulud, whose destructive power far surpassed that of any of the soldiers’ weapons. She witnessed the massacre, saw the frenzy of the demonic worms— four of them, all together!— as they destroyed the enemy.

Then she watched with her heart in her throat and her spirit sinking into despair as the greatest sandworm of them all, a manifestation of Shai-Hulud Himself, rose up to destroy Selim’s lifelong enemy, Naib Dhartha… and her beloved Selim.

She cried out in the wailing scream of a widow, and then fell silent, trying to find inner peace. Shai-Hulud was absorbing the great Wormrider into his own flesh, and now Selim would live forever as part of their god. A fitting end for a man— a
hero
.

And the perfect beginning for a legend.

U
ndoubtedly there were older, more decrepit spaceships than this one traveling among the League Worlds, but Norma had never seen one. It made the decommissioned vessel that Aurelius had provided for her space-folding project look modern.

Leaving its parking orbit around Poritrin, the old craft vibrated as it accelerated out into open space. The bare interior smelled of scorched insulation, human sweat, and stale food. Stains marked the deck and wall plates, which appeared to have been only half-heartedly cleaned. She wondered if this ship was used for hauling slaves, though now she was the only passenger, aside from the guards.

It would be a long, uncomfortable voyage, adding to Norma’s shame and misery.

Two sullen-looking Dragoon guards sat to either side of her on a long metal bench, as if wondering what they had done to displease Lord Bludd and receive this long, slow assignment. Crates of cargo (including her own belongings), had been hurriedly loaded into the open spaces and stacked against the walls. She was surprised Tuk Keedair hadn’t been forced to join her.

The open passenger compartment was filled with utilitarian bunks and benches; Norma had seen banks of coffin like chambers on the cargo decks below, presumably stasis beds. If filled to capacity, the austere vessel could carry at least a thousand people.

“This is a slave ship, isn’t it?” she asked the nearest Dragoon.

He gazed down at her with heavy-lidded eyes and said nothing. He didn’t need to respond.

With her vivid imagination, Norma envisioned sweating, crowded Buddislamic captives on board, forcibly removed from some hinterland world. She sensed their lingering, ghostly misery. People had died on these decks.

The thought put her problems in perspective. Yes, she had been sent away against her will, but at least the guards were taking her home… even if it was in disgrace. Her mother would make certain Norma understood how great a failure she was. Yet things could have been worse. Sighing, Norma wished she had Aurelius there to keep her company on the long voyage.