Sisterhood of Dune (13 page)

“Let’s hope they left something for us to trash,” Swordmaster Alon said with a chuckle. “Otherwise this was a long and wasted trip.”

“If there’s anything left, we’ll get rid of it.” Ellus turned to his pilot. “Find a place to land so we can make our way inside.”

They found the core of the laboratory facility still intact, and the ship managed to dock with an access hatch. The atmosphere inside read as frigid, but surprisingly breathable. The power was still on and life-support systems functioning. “Everyone, join us inside and assist with the operation,” Ellus announced. They would all want their chance.

“They must have conducted experiments with humans here,” said Kelian, the third Swordmaster, “or they wouldn’t have bothered with heat and air.”

“If we find records inside, maybe we can discover what the cymeks were doing and what happened during this battle,” said one of the Butlerians. Ellus had not bothered to learn all of their names.

He raised his voice, brisk and businesslike. “Such answers don’t concern us. We just have to get rid of this place, for it is inherently dangerous.” He shuddered to think what might happen if some ambitious person, such as Josef Venport, were to find this site and try to recreate the abominable work of the cymeks.

Once the entire team crossed over to the outpost, the Butlerians began to move through the chambers, ransacking and destroying. They needed no explicit orders.

Swordmaster Alon discovered experimental logs kept in a set of nonsentient computer databases, but the Butlerians pummeled the machines into wreckage without reading them. Specimens, frozen tissue samples, dissected brains, gelcircuitry patterns, and reservoirs of vibrant-blue electrafluid filled shelves and storage lockers.

The full destruction took hours. Ellus could have bombarded the whole outpost from the hunter ship, but he believed in doing things properly, providing him and his comrades with emotional satisfaction that they could pass on to their superior. Ellus included as many details as he could remember in his reports to Manford, so that the Butlerian leader could imagine that he had participated.

As the destruction continued, Ellus and the other two Swordmasters made their way to the center of the complex, a nightmarish chamber filled with glistening, forbidden machinery and computer technology. Looking like an intaglio etched in the glass, frost covered the inner window of a thick door that led to a sealed vault. Ellus bent closer, wondering what further horrors the cymeks might have been working on, and peered through the frost-dusted window into the armored vault. Was there some specific reason the thinking machines had come to eradicate this secret cymek place?

Inside, he saw two standing forms: the slender human figures of a man and a woman. The two had no wristbands or shackles holding them prisoner. Both were petrified, sheathed in a thin coating of frost.

Ellus summoned Alon and Kelian to his side while he studied the chamber controls, trying to determine the most likely way to unseal the door. With only clubs, battering rams, and pry bars, the three Swordmasters would never get through that massive hatch. Fortunately, even though he knew little about technology, the controls were intuitive, perhaps even willingly cooperative, as if some small demon still lived within the computer system and wanted to cause mischief. In only a few minutes, the vault door hissed open with a gasp of roiling, chemical-scented air. Ellus held his breath for fear the gas might be poison, but it dissipated quickly.

A small glow of station lights lit the cold vault without flickering, illuminating the preserved man and woman. They were about twenty years old, trim and perfect in appearance, with dark hair, delicate features, and a line of frost on their eyebrows and lips. Both were naked.

Ellus felt disgust like a heavy weight inside. “These poor people. They must have been victims of experiments.”

Kelian said, “Manford would want us to give them a respectful burial.”

“The mind of man is holy,” Alon intoned.

In seeming disagreement with the assessment of their deaths, the young man and woman simultaneously opened their eyes, gray orbs that stared unfocused, then sharpened. The duo shivered, twitched their shoulders, and inhaled a loud drowning-person’s breath. With a shout, Ellus rushed to catch the young woman before she could collapse, but she brushed aside the assistance with unexpected strength and went ramrod straight.

The young man stepped forward, gave a cobweb-clearing shake of his head. “That was a long time waiting. Has it been decades … or centuries?”

“We’ve released you now. You’re safe,” Ellus said. “Who are you?”

The young woman spoke up. “I am Hyla, and this is my twin Andros.”

“Are we free now?” the man asked.

The Swordmasters led them out of the cold chamber. “Yes, you’re free—we saved you,” Ellus said.

Kelian added, “Omnius and the thinking machines are no more. The cymeks have all been destroyed, every last one of them. We were victorious! You are safe—your long nightmare is over.”

The twins looked at each other, cocking their heads to listen. In other chambers of the complex, Ellus could hear wanton smashing as the Butlerians destroyed the machinery, the computers.

“Fortunately, we found you in time,” Ellus said. “We will soon finish demolishing this base.”

Andros’s eyes narrowed, and his face went tight. “They shouldn’t be doing that.”

“We travel to every known machine base and erase all vestiges of the cymek reign of terror,” said Swordmaster Alon. “That is our mission. Once we grind everything under our heels, those dark memories will never bother us again.”

A ripple of rage swept like a dust storm across the strange young man’s face. His skin flickered, the pale flesh tone taking on a metallic cast, as if mercury flowed just beneath the skin. Andros flattened his hand, which became as rigid as steel, and he slashed sideways in an effortless karate chop that cleanly decapitated the Swordmaster.

Even before blood could spurt from the stump of Alon’s neck, the young woman sprang into motion. Hyla shoved her fist through Kelian’s chest, crushing his sternum and pushing all the way through his spine.

Swordmaster Ellus had just enough time to bring up his sword, and Hyla parried the blade with her armored-skin forearm. A metallic sound rang out, and the unexpected jarring nearly dislocated Ellus’s arm. He had fought against the most sophisticated combat meks on Ginaz; his sensei-instructor had challenged him with the highest and fastest settings in the battle robot’s memory. But none of that had prepared him for these twins.

The young woman grasped Ellus’s sword with both hands and snapped the blade in half, then struck a hard blow on the base of his neck, crushing his spine and paralyzing him. The last Swordmaster dropped to the floor, still awake, still aware.

Three flushed and giddy Butlerians entered the room just as Ellus fell. Grinning, Andros leaped forward and began tearing them limb from limb.

Hyla stood over the paralyzed Ellus, gazing down at him, her face young, beautiful, and inhuman. The Swordmaster heard screams as her brother finished murdering the three Butlerians in the chamber, then bounded down the connecting passages to hunt the rest of them. None of those people stood a chance.

Hyla leaned closer to Ellus and said, “We are the children of Agamemnon. My brother and I have been awake here for decades with nothing to do but wonder, and question, and wait. Now, before I finish killing you, tell me exactly what has happened in the intervening years. We need to know.”

The Swordmaster clamped his mouth shut.

In the adjoining module, another set of horrified screams rang out, echoing off the curved metal walls.

“Tell me.”
Hyla bent down, extended a forefinger, and began to toy with his eye.

Slavery can take many forms. Some are overt, while others are discreet. All are reprehensible.

—
VORIAN ATREIDES
,
The Legacy Journals,
Kepler period

The slave markets on Poritrin covered a vast area of the muddy and humid Isana River plain. Vorian felt discouraged to see the clutter of ships landing and departing, the burgeoning crowds in the marketplace. Locating one group of captives in all this would be nearly impossible, yet he had led the generations-long fight against Omnius—and the human race had won, beating all odds. Yes, he would find his people.

But it was going to take some effort.

Poritrin had long engaged in the buying and selling of slaves. During the crusade against the thinking machines, many planetary populations had refused to join the fight, hiding from the most important battle mankind had ever faced. For that reason, other humans had felt justified in forcing the pacifists to work for the greater good.

Now, however, the Jihad was over and the thinking machines defeated. As Vor walked among the jostling people, he could no longer imagine any rationale for slavery, but the practice continued anyway. Too much money and power was involved in the operations, and some of Imperial society still depended on these slave markets. Morally obsolete, but still profitable. He knew, however, that a new justification had developed as an unexpected side effect of the antitechnology fervor. With many planets naïvely abandoning sophisticated machinery in the wake of the growing Butlerian movement, they required a large labor pool to do the work. To some people, he supposed, slaves were more palatable than machines.…

Vor had been to many planets in his life, more than he could remember offhand. In his early years, he had accompanied the robot Seurat all across the Synchronized Worlds in an update ship, delivering copies of the Omnius evermind. Once he switched his loyalties to the League Worlds, he had fought the thinking machines on planet after planet, for more than a century. Here, on Poritrin, he had carried out an ambitious scheme of building a gigantic fleet of faux warships—a massive bluff that had intimidated the Omnius fleet, a wonderfully successful trick.

He hadn’t been to Poritrin in many, many years.

As a sideshow in the middle of Serena Butler’s Jihad, a massive slave uprising on this planet had wrought great devastation. A pseudo-atomic explosion annihilated much of the city of Starda and killed the legendary scientist Tio Holtzman, a great blow to humanity’s defenses.

But the explosion had merely cleared a crowded section of town. The lowlands were now paved over, the ground fused, the pooling waters constrained within rigid canals. A kaleidoscope of temporary structures crowded the open areas where slavers brought their cargos, offered them for sale, then took down the tents and flew away as new flesh merchants swooped in to grab the opened space. Catering to them, vendors offered lodging, food, drugs, massage services, prostitutes, and moneylending.

In a sad way, he realized that not much had changed.

Keeping his eyes open and forming a plan for his search, Vor found himself swallowed in a stew of humanity as he moved through New Starda, absorbing the size and structure of the place. He was surrounded by grit and odors and city noises, and just walking along the streets and alleys felt like making his way through a pitched battle against combat meks.

Vor longed for the quiet and peace of isolated Kepler, hunting gornet birds in the hills. Now he had to hunt for his family, friends, and neighbors, and bring them home. They were captives here—surely still alive because dead slaves had no value. He needed to find them quickly before they were split up and sold off to dozens of different buyers. He would free them at whatever cost, take them back with him … and find some way to protect the world he had adopted as his own for the past half century.

During his flight from Kepler, recalling all the photos Mariella had spread around in their home, Vor had painstakingly assembled a list of his sons and daughters, his adult grandchildren, their spouses, the neighbors, the fellow farmers in the valley, missing friends, anyone he could remember. He had to make certain he left no one behind.

As he walked through the slave market, he found a roly-poly slave vendor setting up a stand. When Vor showed him the list of names, the man pursed his lips, looked at him in surprise. “Your first mistake, sir, is thinking that we keep track of individual names. The items offered for sale are not individuals with separate identities. They are mere tools to do a task.” He raised his eyebrows. “Would you name a pry bar or a hammer?”

Remembering how Xavier Harkonnen would have laid out a detailed battle plan, Vor next went to a Poritrin tourism office, where guides advertised tours of the canyons upriver or zeppelin flights over the open plains. He expected the government-sponsored office to know the layout of the slave markets, perhaps offering a map or guide, but the smiling official was no help at all.

Vorian Atreides made further inquiries and paid bribes. Over the centuries, he had amassed quite a fortune, now dispersed in various far-flung accounts around the Imperium. The wealth meant little to him, since he had everything he needed and did not live an extravagant lifestyle. Fortunately, the new banking system offered by VenHold linked those accounts, so Vor had access to his funds. He could be generous with his inducements, but simple questions raised too many questions of their own.

Despite his increasing sense of urgency, haunted by the faces of all the people he had lived with on Kepler, the social tapestry that had made his life feel so complete, he decided to take a different tack, thinking like a businessman rather than an aggrieved party. Vorian Atreides had deceived entire armies of thinking machines; he could certainly outwit a few slavers.

Among the crowded stalls, the tall, dark-haired man spoke to one of the dragoon police guards who patrolled the markets. “I’m willing to pay for solid, verified information. I have a large construction project in a particularly hot and humid area of my planet. Surely, you keep track of where the slaves come from? I don’t want to buy a workforce from a cold world, or an arid one. I’ve done my research, and I need people accustomed to the climate, or I’ll lose half of my workers in a week.”