Dune: The Machine Crusade (58 page)

She shifted on the hard bench, but could not get comfortable. She had little to occupy her time, no amusements or diversions whatsoever. This wasn’t a luxury cruise through the cosmos.

A creative excursion through her own mind usually enabled her to forget about physical hardships. With her work stolen and her life disrupted, however, Norma found herself focusing too much on her surroundings and the inadequacies of her stunted body.

To comfort herself, she toyed with the lovely soostone Aurelius had given her. Though it had never had any telepathic effect on her, she enjoyed the memories triggered by the smooth stone. Norma closed her eyes and let calculations run across the window of her mind, long rows and columns of numbers and mathematical symbols, as if they were arrayed in space… right outside the portholes of this slave ship.

Though he had tried, Savant Holtzman could not take away the core of her accomplishments. She kept all of that locked within the intricate passageways of her mind, every detail available to her recollection, everything she needed to know about her foldspace work. Exploring her own mental archives entertained her, and she changed the numbers and symbols, watching them appear and disappear at will. It was her secret universe, where no other person could look… though someday she would like to share it with Aurelius.

At least I am still alive. At least I am still free.

From a distance, she heard a loud, abrasive voice. For some reason it made her think of her mother scolding her for yet another weakness. As if in the absurdity of a dream, Zufa Cenva was flying through deep space alongside the ship, peering in at her through a porthole with fiery eyes, like two tiny red suns.

Abruptly, Norma came out of her trance and recognized the chaos around her. The Dragoon guards were on their feet, shouting in Galach, and the chartered slave ship was veering off course. The old engines made heated, straining sounds as the pilot changed his route abruptly.

Losing her balance, she stumbled against the wall porthole and looked out in surprise to see red eyes peering in at her, but they did not belong to her mother. This evil gaze came from a mechanical monster constructed to look like an immense orange-and-green prehistoric bird— and her mother was nowhere around to help with her Sorceress powers.

The slave ship shuddered in evasive maneuvers, and the raptorlike craft swooped away, showing its hot exhaust ports and then circling around. For several moments Norma lost sight of the beast. The guards shouted again, and cargo crates toppled over, smashing on the floor and spilling padded bottles of exported Poritrin rum.

She ran across the top of the bench toward the opposite porthole. The spaceship jolted as it was struck by a blast that reverberated through the decks with a sound like a hammer against an anvil. Norma tumbled to the corrugated metal deck.

When she finally reached the porthole, she saw the monstrous craft again, swooping toward the old slave ship like a hawk hunting a helpless pigeon.

The huge flying machine opened its jagged mouth as if to roar, revealing banks of sharp artificial teeth, each one as big as a doorway. Norma had a difficult time maintaining her grip on reality.

Is this really happening?
she asked herself. It seemed impossible. Somehow, her focused thoughts had expanded, dilated to encompass far too much. She clutched the gem like a talisman.
I must regain control of my mind.

She struggled to reason the situation out, summoning logical possibilities. Could the monstrously gaudy vessel be a…
cymek
flyer? But why would an enemy ship be out here, and why would it be after her?

The raptor vessel grasped the sluggish slave ship with huge grappler talons. Norma saw the ribbed green belly of the huge bird-machine, large enough to swallow their whole ship. Its underside was marred with scrapes and long black scorch marks, perhaps from battle.

The machine ship opened a compartment in its belly and drew the smaller captured vessel toward it. Acid-green lights blazed inside the confinement chamber, hurting Norma’s eyes.

Once the slave ship had been swallowed up like a morsel of raw meat, the doors of the giant ship closed.

INSIDE THE MECHANICAL behemoth, a preservation canister dangled from the ceiling like a spider’s egg sac, high over the captured vessel. Red and blue lights blinked around the container, surging as the disembodied brain increased its mental activity. Abruptly, thoughtrode sensors extruded like electronic talons, to better study the prey.

Finally, I can earn my forgiveness from General Agamemnon,
Xerxes thought, as he began recording data.

W
ithout a sound in the isolation of space, the emptiness tore asunder and a large ship lurched through the opening… from nowhere.

The Zensunni passengers packed into the space-folding vessel let out gasps of surprise and panic as they were thrust through a knot in spacetime and emerged on the other side.

Ishmael felt as if his thoughts had stuttered. When he looked outside, he saw stars that bent, twisted, then snapped into sharp definition again… but in different positions, as if the map of the Galaxy had been rearranged. The planet Poritrin was nowhere in sight, but the viewport of the unstable ship filled with the brassy globe of a desert world, a cracked and parched wasteland.

Their ship plummeted toward it. Without accurate coordinates attuned to Norma Cenva’s prototype engines, the spacecraft careened into the atmosphere of Arrakis. The unprepared pilot Tuk Keedair wrestled with the controls to restore flight stability, and it was obvious to Ishmael that he didn’t know exactly what he was doing with this strange prototype.

Ishmael prayed for their safety.

They hurtled around to the dayside of the world, where harsh sunlight poured over it. Chamal hurried forward into the pilot deck. “It looks as if it’s made of gold, Father!”

A grin covered Rafel’s face. “We’ve escaped from slavery.”

Ishmael looked at the two, knowing that the Zensunni refugees were alarmed and confused by their passage through foldspace; in moments they would realize the danger was not yet over. The prototype ship continued ever downward with deceptive slowness toward the big planet.

“Can you regain control?” Ishmael asked Keedair in a low voice.

The Tlulaxa slaver looked at him with wild, dark eyes. Sweat streamed down the sides of his narrow face. “I told you from the start that I wasn’t certain I could fly this thing. I hope you’re satisfied.”

Ishmael glanced at his daughter, who still stared through the starship’s front window, then turned back to the slaver. “Just do your best. That’s all I ask.”

Keedair scowled. “We may not make it.”

As the reluctant Tlulaxa pilot fought with the guidance systems, the vessel skipped like a thrown stone across the edge of the atmosphere, then dove deeper, burning hot like a meteor through the desert skies.

The plunge continued, rough and destructive; bits of the stolen ship’s hull peeled off like scales from the wings of a moth flying dangerously close to a flame. The Zensunnis faced their fate, some wishing they had remained behind on Poritrin, while others accepted imminent death. A
free
death, at least, Ishmael thought.

Chamal looked at her father, unshakeable in her confidence that he would somehow bring them through this crisis.

Ishmael wondered what Aliid was doing now. Was his fiery friend still alive, and had the Starda revolt caused as much destruction as the Zenshiites had planned? And what about Ozza, whom he had left behind? And sweet Falina, only fourteen years old.

At least Ishmael had led his people, including one of his daughters, far enough away that they would never again need to fear slavers or thinking machines. They would be safe here… if they survived the landing.

According to rumor, Arrakis had no oceans, only incomprehensibly vast expanses of open sand laced with a scarwork of mountain ranges and lava reefs. The planet supposedly boasted a sheltered spaceport settlement that barely counted as a city….

On the pilot deck, Keedair could hardly guide the ship at all, and simply struggled for survival as they streaked toward the dunes and rocks. The ship traced a line of smoking fire through the atmosphere as it came down low across a line of gnarled, blackened rocks, lava extrusions that had oozed through volcanically active fissures and then hardened.

Keedair fought to lift the ship enough to float them over the long craggy peninsula, but the engines stuttered. No one had ever expected this old hulk to fly on regular missions; Norma Cenva had simply intended to demonstrate that her space-folding interpretation of the Holtzman Effect was valid and usable.

Keedair tried to squeeze enough velocity out of their lumbering craft to make it to the open sands and the cushioning dunes. Unfortunately, the hull bottom scraped a large Rock and one of the ship’s fins caught on a jagged outcropping. Sparks flew. The vessel spun, ripping open its belly on a lava reef, then miraculously came to rest in a pocket of stone created by an elbow of upthrust lava.

All power shorted out on the pilot deck, and the lower containment chambers went dark, plunging the refugees into absolute blackness accompanied only by the sounds of crackling fires, groaning hot metal, and frightened whispers.

Ishmael had been thrown to the deck and rolled in a bruising tumble against the pilot’s chair. Now he lurched to his feet, hoping the other hundred passengers had secured themselves adequately for such a rough landing. Rafel picked himself up from the deck and made sure his wife Chamal was unharmed.

“Open the hatches,” Ishmael shouted. “We need to get all the people out in case the ship explodes.”

“That would be the perfect end to this adventure,” Keedair said. His braid had become tangled and frayed, and in a gesture of annoyance he tossed it over his shoulder.

Rafel glared at him. “We should kill you now, slaver.”

The Tlulaxa looked as if he was weary of being afraid. “Can you worthless people do nothing but complain and threaten? You abducted me, forced me to fly you to another world, and commanded me to land this ship and keep you alive. I’ve done so. From here on, you’re dealing with problems you made for yourselves.”

Ishmael looked at him, trying to see if the flesh merchant actually expected gratitude. Finally with a shudder of metal, the controls went dead. Going to an escape hatch, Keedair jerked the handle and managed to breach one of the hard seals so that the hatch opened.

Zensunni refugees crowded the gap and with makeshift tools pried open the doorway. The blistering sunlight and parched air of the new world rushed into the groaning ship.

Because he had led these people, orchestrating their escape from years of captivity and taking them to a new life beyond the clutches of League slave masters, Ishmael should have been the first to set foot on Arrakis. The former slaves looked back at him expectantly, waiting.

But Ishmael waved them on, and remained inside the crashed vessel, an attempt to impose order. “Do not let frenzy and eagerness overrule your common sense,” he shouted.

Escapees began to pour out of the opening, dropping from the wreckage onto the hard, broken ground. Some milled around, calling for friends and loved ones; others raced away to imagined safety on this strange and bleak new world. Leaving her husband on the piloting deck, Chamal climbed down and helped the others to move to shelter and safety in rocks away from the ship.

Rafel was brave and blustery now, red-faced with anger. He grabbed Keedair by the knotted braid and hauled him out of the pilot’s chair. “Come outside and see where you have landed us. How close are we to civilization?”

The slaver laughed at him. “Civilization? This is
Arrakis
. Within weeks you’ll be crying for Poritrin and your comfortable slave barracks.”

“Never,” Rafel vowed.

But the former flesh merchant smiled in a way that was both confident and resigned. Rafel nudged him through the open hatch to the ground, and Ishmael followed. Rafel stood next to his prisoner on the stump of a black outcropping that had been shattered by the ricochet of the prototype vessel. As he gazed around the yawning, empty landscape, the young man’s face filled with surprise, disbelief, and then despair. Chamal took her place beside him. In their worst nightmares they had never expected such a bleak, inhospitable vista.

Ishmael stood proudly and looked at the searing black-and-brown peninsula that extended in a curve all the way to the horizon. Undulating dunes, like waves on a petrified yellow sea, extended in the opposite direction. He took a deep breath of the arid air of Arrakis, which smelled of dust and flint. In the brief time he had been out here, his nostrils and mouth had already become parched. He saw no trees or birds and not a speck of green, not even a blade of grass or a flower.

It seemed to be the worst pit of Heol in the universe.

Rafel grabbed the Tlulaxa flesh merchant by the collar. “Bastard, betrayer! Take us somewhere else. We cannot live here.”

Keedair gave a bitter laugh. “Somewhere else? Weren’t you listening? Look at the ship. It is going nowhere, and neither are any of you Buddislamic malcontents. Live here… or die here. I do not care which.”

Some Zensunnis looked as if they wanted to scream or weep, but Ishmael gazed across the landscape and raised his chin in defiance. His mouth formed a firm line of determination, and he placed a hand on his daughter’s shoulder. “Buddallah has chosen our course, Chamal. And this is where we will make our new home. Forget your dreams of paradise. Freedom is far sweeter.”

O
ne of Norma’s urgent messages finally reached him during a brief stop on Salusa Secundus, on his way back from Arrakis. Arriving at the company offices, he also found a harried communiqué from Tuk Keedair, adding more details of the disaster that had befallen the space-folding operations. He and Norma had been exiled from the planet. Muttering curses against Lord Bludd and Tio Holtzman, Venport commandeered the first available VenKee ship and raced directly to Poritrin.