Dune: The Machine Crusade (27 page)

“Jool Noret, you have had most unorthodox training,” said Master Shar. “Your father was a tremendous asset to the mercenaries of Ginaz. He too was trained by this warrior mek Chirox, while your fellows here were instructed by actual combat veterans. Do you feel this is a disadvantage?”

Guilt continued to simmer deep in Jool’s soul as he said, “No, Master Shar, I consider it an
advantage
. A machine has instructed me in how to kill machines. What teacher could know more about our sworn enemy?”

“Yet that mek killed Zon Noret,” rasped a gray-haired woman, a muscular veteran.

Jool focused on his resolve rather than the roaring sound in his ears. “To make up for the loss of my father, I must destroy twice as many of the enemy.”

A scarred old gnome with broken teeth leaned forward. “This mek was recovered from a robot battleship and reprogrammed. Are you not concerned that he might contain secret internal instructions to make you vulnerable?”

“My
sensei
mek has already trained four generations of mercenary fighters who were among the best of Ginaz, and I have vowed to surpass all of them. I have learned to kill machines, to seek out the vulnerabilities of all known designs of robots and cymek bodies.” The litany swelled within him, and his voice gathered a frightening strength. “I grew up learning about Serena Butler’s Jihad. I have seen reports of battles on the Synchronized Worlds, our triumphs and failures. My spirit is consumed with the need to destroy Omnius. There is no doubt in my mind that I was born to this.”

Master Shar smiled. “Then there is no doubt in ours, either.” He gestured toward the basin filled with coral disks. “If you possess the spirit of a warrior, now is the time for it to come forth. Choose. Let us see which of our fallen mercenaries has transferred his skills and ambitions into you.”

Jool Noret stared down at the numerous disks, most of them scribed with the name of a Ginaz mercenary who had been slain over the centuries of warfare; some of the chits were blank, denoting a new soul. The young man closed his eyes and plunged his hands into the pile, letting fate guide his selection. Somewhere in here lay a disk with his father’s name on it, but he knew he was not worthy of that one. He could not bear to draw it and hoped his hands did not happen to find it in the basin.

With a burst of courage he seized a disk, pulled it out, and held it up to the sunlight. Opening his eyes, he read the unfamiliar name:
Jav Barri
.

At last he knew who had been reborn within him. He could look through the Ginaz archives and learn the story of this Jav Barri. But it didn’t matter to him what the former mercenary had done. With his father’s memory, the
sensei
mek’s training, and the spirit of the fallen mercenary inside him, Jool Noret would make his own mark— or die in the attempt.

Master Shar said, “All of you are now commissioned to destroy thinking machines. This shall be your sacred, sworn duty, and you will be paid well for the sacrifices you make. Tomorrow you depart for Salusa Secundus, where you will be deployed with the Army of the Jihad.”

He paused, and his voice broke as he added, “Make us proud.”

F
rom a grassy promontory outside the League’s capital city, Iblis gave another rousing speech. One of the many shrines to Serena’s dead baby stood behind him, containing a “true fragment” from the clothing little Manion had worn on the day of his murder.

His icily beautiful wife Camie Boro attended, standing like a fixture at his side. The last of the imperial bloodline, Camie was now an important part of his power base and mother to his three children. She seemed to relish the attention the audience showered on her, as the mate of the Grand Patriarch.

But the main focus was on his speech. The crowd, as always, had turned to putty in his hands. Yorek Thurr and his Jipol officers had already, quietly and forcibly, removed a group of anti-Jihad protesters who had intended to cause a disturbance, and the rest of the audience would never know they had been there. Everything was perfect.

A fiery orator, Iblis paused, walked back a few feet to the steps of the shrine, and climbed them. For several moments he stood at the top, gazing across the throng that covered the neatly cropped lawn for as far as he could see. Dark clouds hung low in the Salusan sky, but people seemed to be trying to drive them away by waving banners and tossing bright orange flowers.

He wore unseen amplification devices. “Today is a great day, for we finally have cause to celebrate an exceptional victory! A mighty force of thinking machines came to the vital League World of Poritrin, but the massed warships of our Army of the Jihad stood firm and hurled them back in disgrace! The robot fleet fled— and
not a single human fighter died in the engagement
.”

The news was so unexpected, after decades of bloody massacres and appalling casualties, that the people hesitated for a moment in stunned silence, then cheers resounded, like deafening thunder from the distant storm. Iblis beamed with genuine pleasure, his mood buoyed as much as theirs.

“Because this triumph is so important, I will leave immediately for Poritrin to congratulate them in person. As the Grand Patriarch of the Holy Jihad, I must represent Priestess Serena Butler at a celebration of their continued freedom.”

While waiting for the noise to die down again, he gathered his strength, his mental emphasis, for the next thrust. “However, on the heels of this victory, we must press forward with renewed vigor. For every life spared there, another brave rebel has died fighting machines on other battlegrounds.

“In particular, we have seen the efforts of human slaves on Ix, a vital stronghold and manufacturing center for Omnius. For years, they have struggled to rise up and destroy the thinking machines, and we have aided them where we can. But it is not enough. We must pay the necessary price to win the struggle, and press our momentum of victory against an inhuman enemy. I announce to you that the Jihad Council has decided, with the blessing of Priestess Serena Butler, that we will liberate Ix once and for all, no matter what it takes!”

Starry-eyed from news of the bloodless victory at Poritrin, the people did not yet realize how difficult a conquest Ix would be. Iblis knew that humans would be massacred in the military operation, but the extensive and valuable manufacturing facilities there would make a fine plum for the League of Nobles. He had made his case and used his powers of persuasion to get the Council to go along with him. The industrial facilities on Ix made it worth the effort, unlike some of Omnius’s other planets. The wealth of technology would help all League Worlds.

“For a year, our clandestine commandos have infiltrated Ix, galvanizing the fifth column efforts there. Escaped human slaves hide in catacombs beneath the surface, battling hunting parties of cymeks and robots. Our jihadis have given the people weapons and even gelcircuitry scrambler devices to shut down the computer brains. But it is not enough. We must do more.”

He grinned with pride and determination. Beside him, Camie Boro exuded an aura of support for him, though she rarely spoke to Iblis when they were not in public. Theirs was a marriage of political convenience, offering practical advantages for both of them, with no physical passion.

“And there is a higher justification,” he continued. “The esteemed Cogitor Kwyna has said, ‘Those who live underground must not fear the open. They may feel safe and sheltered in the dark, but they will not be free until they claw their way upward into sunlight.’ Obviously, she is speaking of Ix!”

Even more applause and cheers ensued, but Iblis liked to dig beneath the surface, just to be certain of the peoples’ support. In nondescript clothes, his Jipol observers moved through the throng, reporting by a closed-circuit radio that they found no one who expressed anything but enthusiastic approval. Receiving constant summaries, the Grand Patriarch drew a deep, satisfied breath and suppressed a chuckle at the memory of how far he had come from his lowly beginnings as a work crew boss harassed by the Titan Ajax.

On Ix, for months his operatives and daredevil Ginaz mercenaries had been inciting the slaves to rise up and destroy the resident Omnius, just like the “great victory on Earth.” Unable to understand human mob mentality, the Ix-Omnius did not even employ counterpropaganda to fight the more ridiculous assertions made by the commandos. The intentional manipulation of information was not a comprehensible concept to the computer evermind. Iblis could use that to his advantage.

He cried out, “If we can retake just one Synchronized World, it means we can seize another. And another! We must not hesitate, no matter how many lives it costs!” He invoked the sacred names. “For Serena Butler and her martyred child Manion, we can do no less!”

Caught up in the frenzy of his words, the people waved banners depicting a stylized Serena Butler and her angelic little son, like the Madonna and child. “Serena! Serena! Manion the Innocent!”

Whenever he delivered speeches such as this, Iblis focused his thoughts inward, drawing upon his righteous anger and harnessing a visceral rage that could be used to tear the enemy into metal scrap and melt them into unrecognizable heaps. These people were his tools.

At the most basic level, the Grand Patriarch was a salesman, with an idea that he needed to sell to the masses. To be effective on such a scale, under intense scrutiny, he had to believe in the Jihad “product” himself, so that he could make it sound convincing to others. He made himself believe.

And he smiled. His Jipol had staged this rally perfectly, dispersing their own members into the crowd and stirring the people as needed. Soon, fresh recruits would be ready to launch themselves recklessly toward the target planet Ix, where the casualties would be immense.

He knew full well that these people represented cannon fodder in the Jihad, but only through their sacrifice could the conquest succeed, given enough zealots and adequate time. There would no longer be any such thing as a defeat— only victories and “moral victories.”

The Grand Patriarch noticed the statuesque, alabaster-skinned Sorceress at the front of the crowd, watching the proceedings intently, wordlessly. Tall and rigid, Zufa Cenva stood out from the vibrant multitude as if a spotlight were shining on her. As usual, her gaze fixed on him, but with a certain detached aloofness that he found disturbing. Iblis had noticed her at other Jihad rallies too. What did the chief Sorceress of Rossak want?

EMOTIONS MASKED, ZUFA Cenva stood with her sisters on the grassy hillside; she had asked them to observe closely, to confirm her suspicions. The pungent perfumes of orange flowers wafted through the crowds like a drug from the jungles of Rossak. But the Sorceress’s pale eyes were sharp, as alert as those of the furtive Jipol observers who were so obvious to her in the crowd.

As she studied Iblis, Zufa imagined hypnotic waves shimmering around him. They surged from the energy core of his body and extended like tentacles to touch the audience as he spoke. The Grand Patriarch’s words were always well chosen, but their cumulative effect seemed much greater than their actual content. Today he was in fine form, rousing the audience, guiding them this way and that, like a maestro. If the charismatic Iblis told them to march off a cliff, they would have done so, smiling all the way.

At precisely the right moment, he would raise his arms and gesture with his hands. He rarely prayed or used religious words, but the effect was similar. People believed in his sincerity. Zufa didn’t think it was training or practice, but something more.

“See, he doesn’t even know his own power,” she said to the other Sorceresses. “He believes his talents are instinctive, nothing more.”

Magnificent
.

As the leader of the Rossak delegation, Zufa had long been intrigued by Iblis Ginjo’s remarkable personal magnetism. But she and her sisters guessed something more about him, something they were keeping to themselves.

The extrapolated breeding chart on this male was fascinating, with roots that went back to her own jungle planet. Available evidence indicated that the Grand Patriarch had
innate
telepathic abilities, an exceedingly rare trait in a nonfemale.

Perhaps he carried the appropriate masculine bloodline she had been seeking for herself. She was not young, but given the sophisticated new Rossak fertility treatments developed by VenKee and tested by many Sorceresses, Zufa knew she could succeed in having one more child. To her, that meant trying to deliver a better daughter, one that would make her proud. Could this Grand Patriarch be the correct sperm donor?

Though his ancestry was obviously unknown to him, Iblis Ginjo must be the distant descendant of Rossak natives, taken captive by machines long ago and moved to other worlds. If only he had undergone the intensive mental training that she and her fellow Sorceresses took for granted. Zufa Cenva would not reveal the man’s true nature to him, unless she and her companions stood to gain something from it.

Perhaps she could exert influence on him and use his abilities to her own advantage.

Zufa was not immune to the Grand Patriarch’s charms, but had always been able to fend them off with her acute awareness. It pleased her that Iblis did not seem to recognize his hypnotic knack for what it was. Over the years, many of her highly trained sisters had sacrificed themselves in telepathic annihilation strikes against cymeks. But this man was in a different situation, possessed a different potential. She suspected that Iblis Ginjo was a dangerous, duplicitous man, but saw no one more qualified to take the Jihad where it needed to go.

For his own reasons, he did, after all, espouse the same cause as her Sorceresses: the utter annihilation of thinking machines. Iblis would, however, require the closest sort of scrutiny and would have to be handled with excruciating care.

I believe he is the most dangerous man I have ever met.