Dune: The Machine Crusade (76 page)

When asked about his legendary victories, Noret said nothing… which forced the students to learn and embellish the tales for themselves. He alone knew the full truth. On battlefield after battlefield, he charged into harm’s way, seeking ever more dangerous confrontations, more lethal foes. Shattered robots lay strewn in his path wherever he fought. Jool Noret never held anything back, became nearly invincible because he simply did not care if he survived or not. His death wish had grown plain for all to see, yet he continued to live.

He fought for the beauty and release of the battle, for the artistic expression of violence. It was what he had been born to do, carrying the spirit of Jav Barri within him, building upon the inherited instincts, turning himself into a superlative fighter. It was what the death of his father had imposed upon him.

Noret had become a one-man rebellion on several of the weaker Synchronized Worlds, infiltrating imprisoned human populations, providing them with scrambler weapons to fry gelcircuitry, or more conventional explosives and weapons to initiate sabotage. Noret would also slip in among the machines, deactivating and destroying scores of robots like an assassin in the night. And when the hornet’s nest had been stirred and he had inflicted enough damage, he would slip away and return to the League Worlds.

Yet it was never enough.

Scaling this sheer cliff was a far simpler exercise than overcoming the self-imposed conditions he had placed on his life and his worth. On the most difficult section of rock, a perilous overhang, Noret even
increased
the pace of his treacherous ascent.

He realized that demonstrations like this always carried great danger— not to himself, but to any of the young mercenaries who might try to emulate him. But the lesson was valid: in life there were few safety nets, and there were certainly none during war, when unpredictable violence could change any situation in a matter of seconds.

On the rare occasions when he returned to Ginaz, he conducted these exercises for his own benefit, honing his skills while giving the others something to strive for. He still isolated himself, keeping away from the shining eyes of the students. Merely by succeeding, Noret gave them the certain knowledge that the human body could indeed achieve remarkable things. Human beings should kill with precision and refinement, an art form that even the most efficient of thinking machines could never master. He flung sweat out of his pale hair and kept climbing, approaching the top of the cliff.

Abruptly he slipped silently to the side, into the thick shadow of a rift in the rock where moonlight did not penetrate, then darted beneath the overhang and the waiting students. Noret scampered along a narrow ledge, then resumed his ascent. He did not care what others said about him, or about his aura of mystery that only increased people’s curiosity and fascination. As far as he was concerned, his reasons for training so relentlessly were private.

“Where is he?” he heard one of the trainees ask. “I don’t see him anymore.”

“He is behind us,” Chirox answered, turning to greet Noret. “In this game, he has killed all of us.”

Twenty sets of eyes turned to look.

Jool Noret stood poised in a fighting stance, his scarred, bronzed face made more enigmatic by night shadow. Without warning, he bounded past the students— his long hair flying— leaped off the edge of the cliff, and disappeared from view.

A
fter more than seven years of the massive construction project, the Kolhar shipyards finally produced their first fleet of space-folding merchant vessels. Numerous prototypes had already been tested, and now Venport was ready to adapt them for widespread commercial use, delivering cargoes needed by the League of Nobles.

Despite her uneasiness at the very concept, Norma had no choice but to develop partially computerized guidance systems for the sophisticated spacefolders. The Holtzman calculations and the generation of the distortion field required such complex mathematics that no normal human could hope to solve the equations unaided. And she had enough data points from years of rigorous testing to show that the flights were already high-risk, with an unacceptable destruction rate.

She hoped the sophisticated navigation devices would help, but she was careful not to create any potentially independent AI gelcircuitry systems. Norma would rather scuttle the entire VenKee merchant fleet, than inadvertently create another Omnius. She was the only one with access to the navigation rooms of the new space-folding vessels; not even her husband Aurelius could get into those sealed areas.

Locked inside the black-walled guidance chamber of her newest ship, Norma inserted a small cylinder into an activation port, then watched a three-dimensional holoscreen as it showed the myriad coordinates of every charted astronomical body. It seemed to her that no human, not even a genius of her caliber, could ever chart a safe course through all the convolutions of folded space and the hazards lurking everywhere in the vast universe. She had no choice but to rely on computers, however dangerous they might be.

The detailed library of mapped coordinates finished loading, and she removed the programming cylinder, hiding it in a large pocket of her pale green laboratory smock.

Despite the enormous drain of funding and resources here on Kolhar, so far the League of Nobles was unaware of the remarkable new ship design. People would suspect something, though, when hundreds of small, fast VenKee ships began to dramatically outstrip their competition. As soon as news got out— and it would, inevitably— she would make certain that Aurelius Venport was trumpeted as the driving force behind the revolutionary technology. She had never cared for fame or power, preferring to avoid the associated waste of time. With a front row seat at a real-life Grogyptian tragedy, Norma had seen how hubris and a struggle for fame could twist and destroy genius, as it had the once-great Tio Holtzman.

Since her husband had always had faith in her and provided the necessary funding, she was happy to grant him full credit. Aurelius was a savvy politician and could make greater strides if he had the clout and cachet. He would find a way to enjoy the attention, while deflecting questions about the nature of the technology. She cared only about the success of the project anyway.

Over a hundred small spacefolder cargo carriers had already been dispatched, flown by mercenary pilots who knew and accepted the risks. After many years and a colossal infusion of capital, Aurelius was on the verge of making immense profits, despite the frequent losses of ships and cargo. And without his Tlulaxa partner, Venport controlled the large commercial empire himself, thanks to Norma.

The first runs had been made, to great profit, despite a handful of horrendous accidents. VenKee Enterprises was swiftly transporting vital products across vast distances in the holds of the new ships. Rare and perishable drugs and foods came from Rossak, delivered everywhere around the League Worlds in less time than it took to order them. The trade in melange had increased exponentially as its use spread throughout the League, and each spice run practically paid the entire cost of one of the spacefolder cargo ships.

Hopefully, the safety record would improve. Within the bounds of industrial secrecy, he did inform crews in advance of the great dangers posed by the “new ships,” and paid them high hazard pay. Privately, he told Norma that he wished they didn’t have to risk human lives, that it could all be done by machine. Then he added, after a long thought, that this was an impossibility. Thinking machines could not be trusted.

League citizens had begun to see Venport as a savior and a patriot, and his competitors were desperate to find out his veiled method of rapid space travel. Tio Holtzman had confiscated all of her work and designs, but he’d been vaporized in the pseudo-atomic explosion of Starda, and Norma knew that no one else could even come close to understanding the system.

After studying evidence of the crater and wreckage in the Poritrin city, Norma privately believed she understood what had occurred there. Let the rest of the League think that the insurgent Zenshiite slaves had somehow found a nuclear device, but she remembered a controlled test on a small moonlet almost forty years earlier. She had seen the results of a laser weapon interacting with a Holtzman shield. Norma suspected that the devastating explosion had been caused by a mistake, perhaps even one committed by Holtzman himself.

She did not want to make any similar mistakes.

She ran the nav-system through its self-check test cycles, taking the swift space-folding vessel on simulated trips through deep space. Oval screens appeared on the chamber walls all around her, showing nebulas, comets, and novas.

Aurelius had never failed her, had never drifted away. Even when she examined their relationship in a detached and intellectual manner, she was surprised that he had remained with her, just as he had promised. The man truly loved her, and had been a wonderful father to their one son. Exactly as she had wanted.

But Norma’s greatest creation was still the new engine design. She sensed strongly that this technology— if the problems and dangers could ever be resolved— would become the basis of a commercial enterprise that would dwarf the League Worlds, far more important than a simple trading company.

However, some of the numerous vessels had gone off course, some suffering severe damage, some vanishing entirely. Yet another ship on a shakedown voyage had inadvertently passed through the heart of a sun, obliterating the craft. As more and more cargo runs were made, more ships— and more pilots— would be lost.

The excessive accident rate highlighted the risks of the innovative technology. Norma had sifted her brain for a solution, but no safety systems seemed feasible other than navigation accuracy. There seemed to be no way around it— the great vessels crossed immense distances in moments, and a ship was doomed the instant any errant course was set. No human, probably not even a computer mind, could calculate or react to a fatal course in an eyeblink of time.

But Venport still found the profit-loss ratio acceptable, since enough ships got through. Aside from his concern about crew deaths, which he assuaged by paying them well, he described profitability as a “numbers game.” He only had to adjust his prices to take into account what he called “shrinkage of inventory.”

Now, in the navigation room, Norma watched the simulated journey past a mock space battlefield, where Jihad warships were destroying robot forces. Just a little touch she had added for amusement.

“Busy, as usual. I’m amazed that you can do this for days without rest.”

She had sensed her husband’s approach, and now felt self-conscious about the sophisticated computer systems arrayed before her. “You shouldn’t distract me. How did you get in?”

“Hidden surveillance showed me how you enter these rooms.”

She frowned, feeling an instinctive storm within her. “I’ll have to tighten security, then. This area is off-limits to everyone— even you.”

Venport furrowed his brow. Thanks to heavy melange consumption, he still looked like a man in his late thirties, rather than sixty-two. “Including your son, apparently. Adrien has been trying to reach you for days, and you haven’t responded. He’s smart for a six-year-old, but he’s still just a child.”

The image of her son flashed in her mind. The boy had his father’s smile and dark, wavy hair. His genetics were perfect, thanks to Norma’s internal tinkering during the process of conception. She had found that she could visualize and guide her reproductive system, permitting only the optimum sperm and egg to unite.

Norma lowered her gaze. “I’ve been preoccupied with trying to understand the navigation shortcomings. With such a high loss factor of our ships, we can’t afford to turn space-folding ships to the war effort. That was my original intent for the vessels. My mother has been pressing me to contact the Army of the Jihad about our technology, so they can transport troops to battle zones— but I don’t want so many deaths on my conscience.”

“Norma, you’ll figure out a solution.” He smiled, then kissed her. “We’ll license the technology to the military as soon as it’s safe enough.”

“Please apologize to Adrien for me?”

He looked closely at the instruments, the screens, controls, and data-reader wheels. “This is the computer system you told me about?”

“Yes.”

“May the gods protect us!”

“Aurelius, please. I have work to do. We already talked about the reasons for the strict controls I’ve instituted.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” She watched him, warily, then saw him take a deep breath. “If anyone can put a leash on thinking machines, it’s you,” he said. “But I don’t like it.”

“Neither do I, but for now there is no alternative.”

After her husband’s departure, Norma resealed the door and practiced entering various destinations into the navigation machine, letting the computer calculate each course to avoid suns, planets, and other obstacles in space. Though she had created this computer herself and loaded it with safeguards, the close proximity of thinking machines still made her uneasy. And she didn’t dare install such a system in the actual ships being flown.

If only she could find a way to guide the space-folding ships with a human mind, instead of a mechanical one. But the concept seemed an impossibility.

A
cold, bleak planetoid with a barely breathable atmosphere, Hessra had furious winds that drove ice crystals like needles against the skin; slow but inevitable glaciers crept across its landscape. Few people would have wished to live there for as long as a week, much less two millennia, but the Ivory Tower Cogitors had selected this as the best place to continue their infinite ruminations, with the least likelihood of outside events intruding on their solitude.