Dune: The Machine Crusade (60 page)

Though she had expected the torment, Norma could not keep herself from crying out. She clutched the sweat-slick soostone as if it were an anchor, even as the agony intensified. The blanket film sizzled and sputtered as it burned its way into her tissues. Then, springing from the thick fibers of the blanket, a network of electronic probes pierced her skin. Hair-fine wires wormed their way into her muscles and made neuro-connections with her body.

Moments later the heat dwindled, leaving only a stench of roasted skin and burned hair in the frigid air. But Norma knew the worst torture was yet to come. Though tears stung her eyes, stubborn defiance hardened her face, and she found the strength to lift her head, albeit only slightly. “From the beginning, you have left me without hope, so I expect no compassion from you.” She forced a defiant yawn. “I must inform you, though, that the pain you inflict is… quite ordinary.”

Suspended above her, the individual cymekcanisters vibrated, as if in merriment. “Ordinary pain?” Xerxes sent another signal, and a bolt of agony erupted through her left arm. She cried out and nearly dropped the soostone, but squeezed it in a death grip. Her mind focused on one name, and the image of the man she held most dear.
Aurelius!

“Left leg,” Xerxes said.

Pain seared through her limb, and her head hit the deck again. Xerxes increased the artificial gravity, making Norma feel as if a giant invisible foot were crushing her. With the air squashed out of her lungs, she could make no sound, so the Titan released her and let her scream. An involuntary sound. She wished she could detach herself from the suffering. If only her thought processes could be independent of their biological pain. She had, however, no desire to be a cymek.

“Eyes,” Xerxes said, like a games man calling a shot. Gravity lurched again.

Unable to stop herself, Norma howled and covered her eyes with her stubby hands. She rained curses on Xerxes and all of his kind, but didn’t have the words to express the depth of her loathing.

The cymeks continued their sport, step by step increasing her anguish and torment, slacking off just long enough so that her mounting dread increased the next jolt of pain. With his diabolical companions, Xerxes worked on her, body part by body part. He was careful to keep her flayed mind conscious inside the tormented body so that she could experience every moment. Then he made it worse.

And worse again, wrenching up the intensity.

“We have already learned a great deal and gained a goodly amount of practice by playing with the slave ship captain and the two guards,” Xerxes said.

“She has a higher threshold than the other three,” said one of the dangling neos. “They were dead long before this point.”

“Shall we test her limits?” Xerxes asked, rhetorically.

Norma could barely comprehend the words echoing above her. The soostone in her grasp seemed to have fused to her flesh. She did not hear Xerxes’ answer, but she felt him unleash a firestorm of amplified pain through every major nerve in her small body. Increasing, increasing.

She heard the neo-cymeks scrabbling and chattering with glee.

Suddenly, Norma could no longer even scream. Her eyes screwed tight, and her brow furrowed at the pressure on her head, as if her skull was about to collapse and squirt out its brain. With both hands, she squeezed the soostone in a posture of prayer, until her hands and arms shook.

“How much pain can one fragile biological vessel sustain?” asked one neo-cymek.

“I wonder if she will explode,” said another.

Sparks arced around her body, crackling off her skin, burning her flesh, igniting her short brown hair. Still, Xerxes amplified the intensity to unimaginable levels. While the Titan hung suspended, the neos clamored, cackling with pleasure.

Abruptly, the induced torture focused on her brain itself, the brilliant mind that had incubated in the body of the Supreme Sorceress of the Jihad, Zufa Cenva. Flares jumped across synapses, overloading her cerebrum.

Norma’s eyes opened. It felt as if a billion tiny razors were cutting her cells open and slicing them smaller and smaller, into infinitesimal points of pain. The soostone glowed like a miniature sun in her hand and reflected back into her.

At the zenith of her agony something loosened in her brain, unlocking the inherited Rossak powers that had lain dormant since her birth. The soostone Aurelius had given her provided the key, breaking the barrier her mother had never been able to find. All the power of the soostone absorbed into her, and suddenly she felt nothing. The cymek’s pain transmitters continued bombarding her as before, but Norma easily deflected the energy from her body, directing it… accumulating it at a distance.

Her entire physical form pulsed, vibrated, and sparked blue. Norma Cenva’s flesh turned incandescent, melted away, and converted into pure, raw energy. Was this what her mother’s kamikaze Sorceresses had learned to do themselves, in order to annihilate cymeks?

No, Norma decided this was different in one fundamental way: she could
control
it.

She saw her own blood spattered all around— on the deck, on a bulkhead, on the gleeful brain canisters above her. She focused on the tormentor called Xerxes and felt a potent energy surge inside her transformed brain, like a weapon getting ready to discharge. Blue light lanced from her mind to the Titan’s, splitting the cymek’s canister open, detonating it like an organic bomb and boiling the brain inside.

Next, she detonated every neo-cymek simultaneously in a glorious backwash of mental energy that evaporated all organic tissue in a wide radius. It was only the beginning of her capabilities.

Gradually, the hurricane of mental energy subsided, and Norma felt an intense calm and euphoria about her, as if she were alone in the universe… as if she were God, with the act of Creation yet to come.

Though born of a powerful Sorceress of Rossak, Norma had previously displayed no telepathic aptitude. Yet the incredible torment, combined with the unexpected catalyst of the soostone, had awakened her inborn powers.

So serene. She could see forever, across millions of galaxies and the heavens. She saw all the way around the universe, until she looked at herself from behind: nothing more than the essence of a mind floating in the air, pulsing and throbbing. Anything, absolutely
anything,
seemed possible to her now.

Using the simmering energy available to her, she began to rebuild her body, creating matter out of nothingness, atom by atom, cell by cell. With invisible hands, as if she truly
were
God, she began to fashion a new physique to contain her consciousness, her powerful, exponentially expanded mind.

Then she paused to consider alternatives. Certainly her old form was a possibility, or a taller version, with her original features softened just a little, but not too much. She envisioned what she might look like.

There are other options, of course.

To Norma, the human body was no more than an organic receptacle, but most people saw it as much more than that. They reacted to others based upon appearances. Aurelius Venport was a notable exception. He saw through the external wrappings to Norma’s inner self and her heart, to all that she truly was and wanted to be.

But he was, after all, only a man. Why should she not make herself beautiful for him, since he had already earned her respect and affection? She held in her mind what she might create now, a lovely image.

With the cosmic storm flowing through her, Norma felt a sense of urgency as if she was at a critical nexus and needed to decide quickly or the opportunity might be lost forever. Was the decision reversible? Could she change it later? She was not certain. The power would have to rise up in her again.

Abruptly, the mental images shifted, and in their place she saw her mother Zufa. Tall, pale, and perfect in form and grace. And Norma’s maternal grandmother Conqee, one of the greatest Sorceresses in the history of Rossak. The old woman had always remained aloof from stunted, ugly Norma— even more so than her daughter Zufa. Conqee had died mysteriously while on a journey to the Unallied Planets; Norma had been only eight, but in all the years she had never forgotten the aging countenance, still so beautiful and so severe. In her thoughts now, Conqee’s pale blue eyes seemed to look completely through her, to something on the other side of existence.

Abruptly, Norma found herself looking through those eyes herself, at something beyond her grandmother. She envisioned distant stars, planets, and nebulas… and illuminated in the foreground the likenesses of women, one by one, each fading away into another. All of them were classically beautiful, and all looked eerily familiar to her. Norma tried to gain control of the images and lock just one into place, but could not. With a jolt, she realized what she was seeing.

My own ancestors.

The revelation astounded her, but she did not doubt its authenticity for a moment.

The women who preceded me… but only my maternal lineage.

She struggled again to assume control of the images, but the procession of females faded and appeared, faded and appeared, receding into the past. Back, back, back, but not like the mechanism of a computer searching its databanks. This was entirely different.

Fear enveloped her. What would she see if she kept going? Had her mind been damaged irreparably in the encounter with the cymeks? Was it spinning out of control?

Then, like a stack of riffled photos, the images accelerated, and the faces and bodies merged into a composite of all the women in her bloodline, going back thousands of years. Moment by moment, the images shifted in face and form, as if the flesh were being pulled this way and that. Finally the mental pictures stabilized, and she gazed at one person, brilliantly illuminated against the heavenly cosmos.

At last she had the image she wanted, and it was fitting, since it included an element of her own previous appearance in its faint and ghostly genetic markers. She was the sum total of her ancestry, the exquisite convergence of all generations… though only on the female side.

Her unseen hands worked swiftly, molding every feature, reshaping her new body with the available cellular material— into an icily beautiful, tall and statuesque female form, more stunning than any other Sorceress of Rossak. Even surpassing Zufa Cenva.

Her fiercely glowing eyes became a soft, seductive blue. The skin was ivory and creamy smooth over a perfect frame and sensual curves. None of her predecessors on Rossak had ever been able to accomplish anything approaching this. She let it happen, opening cellular doorways that had previously been barricaded to her.

Finally, she stood perfect and unclothed within the belly of the dead raptor ship. Boosted to supernatural power, the embryonic superbeing Norma Cenva took control of Xerxes’ vessel and flew it to an empty but habitable planet near the Rossak solar system, a world known as Kolhar.

From there, almost home, she sent a telepathic signal across the cosmos, an undeniable summons to her mother.

A
nd now there were three. Only three out of the twenty conquering rulers from ancient times… the magnificent Titans.

On the Synchronized World of Ularda, Agamemnon strode in his walker form through the flaming ruins of a slave encampment. The humans here had demonstrated no real threat of a long-standing uprising such as the cancer that had brought down Ix.

Still, the Titan general took no chances. Any evidence of unrest was dealt with severely. He blasted a globule of concentrated flame gel, igniting a fleeing woman into a candle of human flesh. She took two staggering steps before collapsing into a pile of stripped bones on the ground. Agamemnon strode over her, smashing remnants of her body between his mechanical toes as he searched for additional victims.

On either side of him the towering machine bodies of Juno and Dante marched across a precise grid, leveling the settlement. Tactically, it was dangerous to have all three Titans together in the same place where they were vulnerable— but the Ularda settlers had been broken long ago, and very little Jihad support had slipped through. After living for nearly eleven centuries, he knew how to recognize trouble.

Unlike certain other Titans.

“How could Xerxes have exposed himself to such danger?” he grumbled, his words discernible over the din of crackling fires, screaming victims, and crumbling structures. He amplified his speakerpatch, swiveled his head turret toward Juno’s powerful form. “He attacked a Sorceress of Rossak, the daughter of Zufa Cenva? What response did he expect?” With a swipe of his reinforced metal forearms, the angry general leveled a reservoir tower that the slaves had constructed, splashing water through the smoking streets. “The preeminent idiot of all time.”

Dante strolled along, wreaking significant damage in his own right, but almost as an afterthought. “The toll was higher than just Xerxes, though he was arguably the greatest loss. The victims included dozens of neocymeks, who were potential recruits for our own rebellion. Especially now, we cannot afford such an immense loss.”

Juno sounded conciliatory, “We can do without them. Our plans will proceed, just as before.”

“Of course we can do without Xerxes!” Agamemnon responded sharply. “At least it wasn’t Beowulf, who has proven himself so useful. We only kept Xerxes around out of loyalty to our own kind, a sense of honor.” The great Titan general sighed. “If only Xerxes had found a way to self-destruct earlier.”

Three young humans ducked into a low, half-collapsed structure. Noticing the movement, Agamemnon lurched toward them and blasted the building, but his intended victims escaped deeper inside the questionable shelter.

Angrily, the Titan general loomed over the building and used his armored limbs to rip off the roof and knock down walls, until he grabbed all three of the troublesome slaves and yanked them into the sunlight, squirming like exposed beetle grubs. He crushed them between his flowmetal fingers, watched their bodily fluids ooze out, and thought about how much more he would have enjoyed it, if Xerxes had not been on his mind.