Road to Dune (21 page)

Sitting alone in the darkness, smelling the powdery decay around her, she closed her eyes and imagined the room as it had been when she first saw it, so verdant and moist, an oasis in the barren desert … an outrageous display of Hoskanner wealth and power.

But had she and Jesse been correct in killing this little piece of Eden? The plants did not belong here on Duneworld, but neither did she. No human did. The fungi, flowers, and fruit shrubs were a reminder of other places, of more pleasant environments. Was it really a reckless waste of water, as she and Jesse had insisted, or should they have seen it as a sign of hope? The thought of the greenery, moisture, and teeming life was so blissful that she laid her head on the table and drifted off to sleep … .

An abrupt shadow superimposed itself on Dorothy’s dream. She sat up in alarm, though she didn’t know why she felt such urgency. Looking around, she saw nothing out of place, but something was not right. Emerging from the sealed conservatory, she sensed immediately that the mansion was too silent.

The concubine hurried down the wide central staircase to the second level, where she found two of Tuek’s guards lying in the hall, arms and legs akimbo like insects sprayed with poison. She froze, listening for any movement, then glided forward to check them for pulses. Both men were alive, but unconscious. Gas? Something incredibly fast-acting, she decided. Sniffing the air, she caught a faint, unusual odor reminiscent of pine and burnt sugar.

As she ran down the corridor, she found more bodies. The night staff had fallen in their tracks. The mansion’s sealed ventilation system must have been compromised; a powerful soporific would have done its work in short order. The isolated conservatory, kept secret by Valdemar Hoskanner, used an independent system.

Heart pounding, she raced to Barri’s bedchamber. The door to the boy’s room was open, and she nearly tripped over Tuek’s motionless form sprawled on the floor, his hand gripping a stun gun. Apparently the security chief had suspected something amiss, but not in time to do anything about it.

“Barri!” Stumbling inside, she saw that her son’s bedding was in disarray, and expected to find him unconscious like all the others. But he was not there.

My son is gone!

Dashing to the window, Dorothy saw three dark forms running through the front rock garden where the Hoskanner statues had been discarded. She judged them to be large men, and they carried a bundle about the size of a young boy. Frantically, she overrode the seals, cracked the casing around the window, and broke it open to the dry night air. “Stop!”

The men looked up at her, but sped onward. They were much too far away for her to catch them. A mother’s anguished cry rose on a warm night breeze. Her throat was constricted by a rattling necklace of horror. The ungainly rhythm of her own heartbeats pounded in her ears.

As the dark figures kept running, Dorothy broke her paralysis and hurried back to Tuek’s unconscious form, where she wrenched the stunner out of his slack grip. As soon as she reached the open window, she depressed the firing stud without knowing how far the weapon could shoot. Though she sprayed the area, the stunner’s beam dissipated into the empty night, and the kidnappers disappeared with the boy. She tossed the useless weapon on the bed.

At once furious and terrified, Dorothy went back and tried to rouse the incapacitated veteran, shaking him as hard as she could. “Wake up, damn you! General Tuek, do your job!” He didn’t move. She slapped his face, but he was too deep in unconsciousness. White-hot anger infused her. This man should have protected her son!

“Damn you, damn you, damn you!” She hit him harder across the face, and the triangular diagem of Jesse’s pledge ring cut the skin on his rough cheek. Blood trickled down the side of his weathered face, but she didn’t care.

Someone with intimate knowledge of the household must have abducted Barri. Everything had been coordinated too perfectly, executed with precision. Inside her head, Dorothy heard the needle-stick noises that came with fear, skin-rasping fingernails followed by a bloom of sound in the murky shadows around her, cutting the stillness of the mansion.

Spinning, she saw Dr. Cullington Yueh sauntering toward her. He had escaped, too! He wore a gas filter over his kindly face and held the gilded ceremonial scalpel in his hand, its razor edge glinting in the low light.

Dorothy’s eyes widened with realization. She didn’t need to say anything, but looked around for something with which to defend herself. A small statue was out of her reach.

“I don’t know how you escaped the gas, Dorothy.” He pulled his mask aside and let it hang on his neck. “Oh, my job would have been easier if you’d gone to sleep like the others. Then I … I could have …”

Her skin grew hot, and she struggled to keep from flying at him with her fists. “
Why
, Cullington? What do you have to gain?” Her words tasted like acid. “Is Barri dead? What are they going to do to him? Tell me—
now!
”

The old surgeon bowed his head in shame and extended his prized ceremonial scalpel to her, handle first. His face was covered with perspiration. “Take my life, I beg you, for I must pay the price of betrayal.”

She snatched the weapon, but hesitated before using it. “What sort of trick is this?”

“I had no choice but to allow them in, and now I cannot go on. Kill me. That will put an end to it all. Oh, I’m sure my Wanna is dead anyway.”

“What happened to Barri? How can I get him back?
Why would you do this to us?
”

He reeked with dishonor, appeared barely able to stand. “The Hoskanners. They have imprisoned my wife Wanna on Gediprime. They torture her, yet keep her alive. Each time I refuse to perform Valdemar’s bidding, they send me new images of her agony.”

“You said she was dead!”

“Better if she were.” Yueh shook his head. “They forced me to act as their spy and saboteur. But my life—even hers—is not worth all this.” He gestured at the comatose forms around them, then crumpled to his knees, his face a mask of misery. Suddenly, he grabbed the scalpel and slashed at his forearm, succeeding only in cutting a long, shallow gash before Dorothy grabbed his weapon hand.

“Cullington! Stop this nonsense!” She fought with him for the scalpel, and finally wrenched it from his sweaty palm, as both of them tumbled to the floor.

Lying defeated beneath her, the old man looked at the bloody surgical blade in her hands, then at her face. “Use the knife, please! If I die, then I am no longer their puppet. Wanna would kill me herself if she knew what I was driven to do.”

Dorothy seethed. Tuek had suspected her, but all along Yueh was the real traitor, the clandestine source of information for the enemies of House Linkam. She realized that when the surgeon had tended Gurney Halleck’s injury, he had learned the secret of the new spice-harvesting operations.

Information he must have leaked to Jesse’s mortal enemies … .

“You will not die by my hand, Cullington. Not today. I need to save my son—and you’re going to help me do it.” She threw the scalpel down the corridor, and it skittered away. The old doctor began to stammer excuses, but she took him by the collar and pulled his sweating face close to hers. Blood from the cut on his arm dripped onto the floor, where thirsty stones absorbed the red wetness. “You’re going to do everything I tell you to do.
Everything,
even if it kills you.”

Broken, Yueh sobbed, and tears streamed down his sagging face. “Oh, with all my heart, I pledge myself to you. From this day forward, my life begins anew.”

28

There are many kinds of storms. Take care not to underestimate any of them.

—NOBLEMAN JESSE LINKAM

T
he seven spice harvesters were deployed simultaneously, every able-bodied man ready to operate the factory machinery. After months in exile, they could smell the sharp possibility of success, and it smelled like melange.

After opening the comm line, Jesse spoke to the men. They were already charged with anticipation, and he funneled their hopes, strengthening their collective will. “After today, if we bring in even half as much melange as I hope, you can return to Carthage. Go to your homes, your families, and your well-earned rest.” He smiled, hearing an echo of cheers over the speaker. “And, at last, many of you freedmen can leave Duneworld. There’s a ticket offplanet for any man who wants it—or a high-paying job for anyone who chooses to stay with me.”

He watched the crews in their joyous frenzy as carryalls picked up harvesters and lifted into the sky. He’d never seen the men so eager to hit the sands. “But first, let’s fill up those harvesters. This is Duneworld—and the spice is there for the taking!”

With military precision, the carryalls dropped the first industrial vehicles onto the rusty sands. In a matter of moments, the harvesters ratcheted into position and began to dig into the caked desert. Dust plumes churned into the darkening sky. Overhead, circling flyers monitored an oncoming weather front, and satellites mapped its course, unable to project how the storm might shift in its path.

The well-seasoned crews did not allow the weather to slow them. By now, the men had rehearsed the routine enough to be comfortable with working on a high wire over a chasm. Every day entailed hardships and dangers, while small fortunes of melange passed into their personal accounts. Most of the freedmen had already earned enough to buy tickets offworld, and the convict teams saw their passage monies placed in trust, so they could truly leave Duneworld as soon as their sentences ended.

With all the machinery landed in the midst of the reddish vein, the sandminers began loading container after container of fresh, redolent spice, which was processed and compacted, then airlifted away to be added to the dispersed stockpiles.

When the inevitable sandworm finally appeared, it charged in from the northern fringe of the storm, plowing straight at them. Like a fur-whale breaching the Catalan seas, the creature surged above the dunes, a ringed, sinuous body haloed with crackling static electricity.

Since coming to this planet, Jesse had become a competent ornijet flyer, one who was aware of the vagaries of desert weather, cold sinks, thermal updrafts, hot crosswinds, and abrasive sands. Now, as he received the worm spotter’s call, he cruised in and adjusted his trajectory to intercept the beast.

“On course,” he transmitted to Dr. Haynes on a private frequency. “I’ll deploy the canister within safety parameters.” Jesse’s voice sounded surprisingly calm to his own ears, belying the fear that he felt. His best men and equipment were out there on the spice sands, flirting with disaster.

In the months since they’d begun using Haynes’s depth-charge system, only one of the numerous shock canisters had misfired; even then, the highly trained crews had averted catastrophe by evacuating the men and equipment in time. And this was to be the last shock-charge deployed before House Linkam claimed unexpected victory in the great contest. If he defeated the Hoskanners, Jesse could begin to have a normal life again. Success today would guarantee a strong foundation for House Linkam and for his son.

According to plan, Jesse set the small ornijet down on an open expanse of dunes, then disengaged the shock canister and let it settle onto the soft sand. Leaving the engines humming and the wings vibrating, he sprang out and set the device.

Directly overhead, the sky had darkened to an ominous gray-brown soup, the leading edge of an approaching Coriolis storm. Wasplike crackles of static began to jump and pop around his boots, while pebbles bounced along the top of the dune, activated by the discharge that came as a precursor to the Coriolis winds.

Jesse’s hands tingled as he planted the static-shield generator next to the canister.
Bait
. When he activated its thrumming field, alarming blue-white flickers rippled through the air. He hurried. With his senses optimized to a frightening level, he saw and heard the worm coming toward him like a maglev train, lured by the tempting song of the generator.

Visible sparks leaped from the wings of his landed craft, dancing in the air. Incredible! After a quick double check of the canister, Jesse scrambled back into the ornijet and lifted into the sky, sending out a burst of exhaust.

He was safely away by the time the sandworm’s whirlpool maw gulped the shock canister. A knockout surge shot down the worm’s gullet, and the creature rose up, writhing and thrashing at the air. An amazing burst of lightning flashed out of its mouth. A web of tiny shocks curled up and down its outer rings. Balls of white light collected in plasma surges, then flew upward to pop like soap bubbles. St. Elmo’s Fire.

Sparks flew in all directions; globes of phosphorescent light erupted like fireworks. The eyeless monster lurched forward, leaped high, and then crashed down onto the uneven dunes, sending reverberations in all directions.

“Well, laddie,
that
was impressive!” Gurney’s transmitted voice was exuberant.

“Never seen anything like it,” Jesse said over the comm line. Feeling a little shaky, he circled over the downed worm to make sure it was subdued. “We should have a minimum of six hours. Get your crews back to work.”

By now, the sandminers knew with a fair degree of accuracy how long each shock canister rendered a worm immobile. Even while stunned, the beasts often twitched and stirred, causing jittery observers to overreact. Accustomed to that, Gurney’s excavation crews refused to sound every possible false alarm. Each minute of an early evacuation cut into profits.

The Coriolis storm’s thick, brownish nucleus was still a good distance away, but winds were increasing around the spice patch, and would likely force a shutdown before the sandworm recovered enough to be a threat.

Safe from the creature, the sandminers returned to their tasks with redoubled energy, scooping load after load of the spice. Excitement and energy flowed through the men. They knew this could be their last haul before a long and well-deserved respite.