Sisterhood of Dune (41 page)

The sun-heated rocks burned Vor’s fingertips, but he kept climbing. Once he reached a vantage point, he watched the two pause to study his crashed flyer, but within seconds they began to ascend into the rocks. He kept an eye out for the telltale ripples of worm movement: Drawn by the commotion, sooner or later one of the beasts would find its way through the bottleneck into the enclosed valley. But for now, the sands remained placid.

Vor’s heart was pounding as he climbed to the top of the ridge—where he was startled to encounter a strange woman standing, apparently waiting for him. She wore desert garb camouflaged to look like the rocks, and she carried a backpack with tools attached to it. She was so close, Vor couldn’t believe that she had sneaked up on him. The woman was of indeterminate age, her skin weathered, but her eyes bright. Wisps of brown hair flitted around the hood that covered her head.

“You must be from the spice crew down there,” she said casually, as if asking his favorite color. Noseplugs sealed her nostrils, giving her voice a nasal twang.

“I’m the only survivor.” Vor indicated the figures who were now coming into the rocks. “Those two ambushed the harvester and murdered everyone. I don’t know who they are, but they’re as strong as combat meks.” He turned his attention to her. “And who the hell are you?”

“I am Ishanti. I work for Josef Venport, keeping watch on some of the outer spice operations. But I never expected this. We have to get away and make our report.”

Still breathing heavily, Vor looked to the expanse of tan desert beyond the rocks. “Do you have a flyer? How can we escape?”

“I have no vehicle.”

Vor blinked. “Then how did you get all the way out here?”

“I used what the desert has to offer—which we’ll use again now. Follow me. I have an idea.” Ishanti flitted along the rocks, keeping herself low and hidden by her desert robe, but she told Vor to let himself be seen. They passed a rocky notch filled with loose gravel. Up a slope ahead of them, several boulders were precariously balanced at the top of a chute.

Seeing Vor’s silhouette, Andros and Hyla scrambled like spiders up the rocky notch. Ishanti watched them and smiled. “All it takes is a little push.” She and Vorian both pressed their weight against the boulders, knocking the two largest ones loose. The heavy rocks began to bounce and tumble, caroming off the walls. The small avalanche picked up momentum, rushing downward.

Andros and Hyla were caught in the funnel, and though they tried to scramble up the rocky walls, the boulders swept them away. Vor expected them to be mangled into pulp, but somehow the young man and woman flowed along above the falling boulders for a time, their feet moving rapidly, until they could no longer keep up and were hurled down the hillside. Vor didn’t allow himself time for a sigh. At the base of the cliff, he saw the two moving toward him again, tossing broken rocks aside, unburying themselves.

“We have to go,” Ishanti said, “down the other side of the ridge and out into the open desert. Or would you rather wait and fight?”

“I already tried that. What’s out in the open desert?”

“Safety. But first, turn off your shield—unless you want to die.”

“It’s kept me alive so far.”

“Out on the dunes it won’t. The field will attract a worm and drive it into a frenzy. The monsters are hard enough to control as it is.”

Control?
Vor didn’t know what she meant, but he dutifully switched off his shield. The woman loped down the steep slope, descending like a mountain goat until they reached the desert floor. Without pausing, she ran out onto the open expanse of sand.

He panted after her. “Where are we going?”

Ishanti turned to look at him, her eyes a deep blue-within-blue that Vor had come to recognize as a sign of lifelong spice addiction. “Trust me—and trust what I know of the desert.”

He didn’t hesitate. “All right, I’ll trust you.”

Though she used few words, Ishanti explained as they headed into the dunes. “With the spice operations in the valley, there should be a worm already nearby. We’ll have to hope it comes for us before those two do.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a choice.”

At the top of a dune crest, she shaded her eyes to scan the line of rocks they had just left. Andros and Hyla were already picking their way down toward the sand. Vor wondered if they were androids, with armored skin and enhanced fighting abilities.

“Normally I’d advise against regular or heavy footfalls,” Ishanti said, “but right now we want to draw their attention. Just run.” Her pack was stuffed with tools and strange instruments, poles, hooks; a coil of rope hung down from the pack. Without slowing, the desert woman pulled out the items she needed. “Keep your eyes open for wormsign—that means Shai-Hulud will be upon us, and we won’t have much time.”

Behind them, Andros and Hyla reached the sand and burst forward, not seeming to tire. Vor could see that his lead was rapidly dwindling. Then he turned forward to see a shimmer like a shock wave, accompanied by vibrations that rumbled through the sand. He pointed. “A worm!”

Ishanti nodded. “Good. The approach is from exactly the right direction. We can make do.” She dropped to her knees, removed more items from her pack. “Stand next to me, and do as I do. There’s a very good chance we’re both about to die, but there’s also a chance we’ll get away.”

Vor didn’t have time to ask questions as the ripple of disturbed sand raced toward him like a frothy whitecap during an ocean storm. Ishanti removed something that looked like a small sonic grenade. She activated its blinking light and tossed it into a hollow in the dunes not far from them. She crouched down on the crest. “Wait and watch. Be ready.”

“I’m ready,” he said, but he didn’t know what to be ready for.

The sonic grenade detonated, sending out a loud pulse that throbbed into the sand, nearly deafening Vor. The approaching sandworm surged from beneath the sand, lifting a cavernous maw large enough to swallow even the largest spice harvester. Though he had lived for centuries and had seen many incredible things, Vor caught his breath, standing there on the dune crest in awe. The eyeless worm turned toward the source of the pulse, scraping its ridged back so close to them that Vor could have thrown a rock and hit it.

Ishanti was actually running
toward
the sandworm, and he was right behind her. “Come, we only have a few seconds!” Like a madwoman she loped along and sprang onto the lower ridge of the worm, using a hook-tipped pole as a grapple. After she caught on, Ishanti reached her right arm behind her. “Take my hand!”

Amazed at what she was doing, Vor caught her hand, and she hauled him up onto the worm’s back, where she handed him a hook of his own. He didn’t think, only followed her lead. They ascended the line of ring segments, and the monster thrashed, not noticing the insignificant riders.

Ishanti jammed a pry bar into the cracks between the worm’s rings. With a heavy grunt, she pushed it, forcing open the ring to expose soft pink skin underneath. The sandworm flinched, and Ishanti jabbed the tender flesh. Finally, the worm turned to avoid the pain and began to rumble off into the desert.

“Tie yourself down.” She tossed Vor the other end of the coil of rope. “We have to hold on until we get far enough away.”

He did as he was told. Leaving a wake of churned sand behind it, the worm set off with amazing speed. With his hair whipping around his face, Vor turned to see Andros and Hyla standing defeated on the open sands.

Ishanti guided the worm forward, and they raced into the desolation of the deep desert.

A successful search depends on persistence and good fortune, but a successful
mission
depends on the character of the person to whom it is given.

—
XAVIER HARKONNEN
,
Memoirs of Serena Butler’s Jihad

Considering the amount of wealth and commerce flowing from Arrakis, Griffin Harkonnen was surprised to see that the main spaceport city was little more than a crowded slum. With the spice trade, he had expected a modern metropolis, but instead he saw people living in hovels made of fused brick and polymer. Every window, door, and crack was sealed to prevent dust from getting in. Arrakis had a reputation of sucking away wealth and hope faster than fortune-seekers could earn it back from the desert.

When he arrived and saw all the hopeless people who had no chance of getting offworld, Griffin’s heart fell, as he felt homesick for rustic Lankiveil, no matter the hardships of living there. But he refused to abandon his quest, his duty.

“Avenge our family honor, Griffin,” his sister had said. “I know I can count on you.”

He had always known that searching an entire planet for one man would be difficult—even for a flamboyant, attention-grabbing person like Vorian Atreides—but when he looked at the stark cliffs and the endless desert beyond, he couldn’t understand why anyone would choose to come
here.

If Griffin’s research was accurate, Vorian Atreides was quite wealthy, hiding his fortunes on various planets. On Kepler, Griffin had seen for himself that the man was well liked, even revered. If the Emperor had asked Atreides to leave Kepler, why wouldn’t he choose to build an estate somewhere and live in comfort?

The man had told his family where he intended to go after departing from Kepler. The secret had not been difficult to discover. Griffin didn’t think Atreides was on the run, or hiding, and had no reason to believe his prey would take extreme measures to change his name or disguise his identity. He had no idea Griffin was tracking him down, so why would he flee? Why would he hide? Even so, Griffin doubted he would be easy to find. This vast, desolate planet seemed like an easy world on which to disappear.

Valya had hated the Atreides scion for so long that she saw him only as a monster who needed to be punished for what he’d done to House Harkonnen. But Griffin wanted to understand the man he was going to kill, gathering as much information as he could on Vorian’s long life, including his early years in the machine empire before he’d changed sides and joined Serena Butler’s Jihad … as well as his friendship with Griffin’s ancestor Xavier Harkonnen, the great atomic purge that had obliterated all the Synchronized Worlds, and finally the momentous Battle of Corrin, after which Vorian Atreides had blackened the Harkonnen family name for all time.

But why would a man like that willingly come to a place like Arrakis? For even more riches, Griffin assumed, for the spice that was making some people wealthy.

He stood alone for a time, surrounded by the bustle of uncaring crowds, and then set off into the town. His skin was still soft and moist, and he was already sunburned.

From behind him, a zeppelin-size water tanker flew in, dispatched from some world where water could be scooped up from an alien ocean, then desalinated and flown here. Knowing the costs of commercial transport from working the whale-fur deal, Griffin thought how desperate this world must be for water if it was commercially viable to fly a ship from one planet to another and make a profit from it. He also understood why the melange mined here was so expensive. Simple economics.

Griffin was cautious with his own limited funds, secreting cash in various pockets and packs on his body. He had budgeted his every move, making certain he would have enough to buy his passage back to Lankiveil. He knew he would be forced to hire local investigators, and offer generous bribes in hopes of retrieving scraps of information.

He saw suspensor-borne pallets filled with canisters of concentrated spice, all of which bore the logo of Combined Mercantiles. Beggars approached him constantly, and he wanted to help them, but he simply had no funds to spare, if he was to accomplish his mission. Many of the destitute people were offworlders like himself, huddled in rags against buildings, wrapped in their misery and covered with dust.

Equally relentless, vendors kept pestering Griffin, trying to sell him water-retention masks, eye coverings, weather-predictive devices, magnetic compasses (which never seemed to point the same direction two times in a row), and even magic talismans guaranteed to “ward off Shai-Hulud.” He was obviously from another world, and thus a target for scams; Griffin turned down all offers.

Other people were obviously natives: He could tell that at a glance by their dark and leathery exposed skin, by the manner in which they moved and kept to the shadows, and how they covered their mouths and nostrils. They had a hard attitude about them and an undisguised disgust for naïve offworlders, but he thought they might be his best source of information. However, when he stopped an old desert man to ask questions, the man flashed a warding sign with two upraised fingers, said something in a language Griffin didn’t understand, and then scuttled away into an alley.

Discouraged, Griffin found lodgings and showed the proprietor an image of Vorian Atreides. The obese proprietor shook his head. “We try not to notice people around here. And even if that man did come into my establishment, he was most likely wrapped in a headdress with noseplugs and face mask. Nobody’s ever seen a person dressed like
that
around here.” He nodded toward the image.

Without revealing his own name, in case someone tipped off his prey, Griffin asked vendors on the streets, paying token amounts to anyone who showed interest. Those who gave him information exuberantly were clearly lying, in hopes of a larger bribe. Moving on, he contacted a local investigator, offering payment only if the man produced results; the investigator was not enthusiastic about the arrangement, but said he would look into the matter, as long as it didn’t take too much time.

Determined, Griffin realized he would have to do most of the work himself. He had come all this way, had promised his sister, and knew he had gotten physically closer to finding Vorian Atreides than ever before.

One night after sunset, he passed through a moisture-sealed door into a drinking establishment, where filthy, sullen men sat around consuming spice beer, spending all of their wages, because they had long since given up on buying passage off of Arrakis. Griffin found it disheartening to see people who had stopped trying to regain their self-worth. He vowed to never let that happen to him.…