Road to Dune (8 page)

Tuek saw a mound of sand coming toward the shut-down harvester. The old veteran set the conveyor to ascend as rapidly as possible. More and more men made it to safety.

Gurney said, “That machine’s already scrap metal for the worms.”

Desperate crewmen streamed out of the stranded harvester and ran across the sand toward the rescue chute. Dust-encrusted workers began to spill into the transport ship, spreading through the passenger compartment. English and Tuek guided them to the back, shouting for the men to cram together. “Faster! Worm’s coming! Faster, damn you!”

Moments later, Jesse tumbled into the passenger compartment himself, staggering with an injured sandminer over his shoulder; the man’s sleeve was torn and bloody, his arm bent at an unnatural angle. Tuek grabbed him, taking the weight from Jesse. “Here, My Lord. Let me help.”

“Take him, Esmar! There’s still more down there! More men!”

Wrestling the nobleman clear, Tuek looked back down the chute, where six frantic sandminers scrambled onto the rescue conveyor. Relieved of the injured man, Jesse turned, ready to climb back down and lend more assistance on the ground.

Then a giant mouth ringed with glittering crystal teeth broke through the sand and shot up toward the bottom of the chute. Tuek smelled a nauseatingly strong belch of cinnamon, and felt the heat of the monster’s exhalations. Four men screamed as they tumbled into the maw.

The straining transport lurched into the air, and then the worm seized the end of the conveyor. English shouted from the cockpit, and Gurney lifted the ship higher, until the chute finally tore free. Suddenly loose, the aircraft recoiled up into the hot desert sky. Two remaining workers dangled from the torn end, trying desperately to hold on.

The blind worm sensed the clinging sandminers, and with a more vigorous lunge the beast bit off the rest of the chute, taking them with it.

Inside the passenger compartment, the terrified crewmen screamed. The transport craft spun and wavered unsteadily in the air, struggling to pull away.

“Higher!” English shouted.

Gurney responded, optimizing the kinetic controls. Staring down through the whistling gap, Tuek watched the worm turn its wrath on the abandoned spice harvester.

The rescued crew chief hunched on the deck, shaking dust out of his hair and bemoaning the disaster. “Must be twenty sandminers lost! Eight of them freedmen we rehired. All good men.”

Jesse sat numb and exhausted, staring through the aft porthole. “I don’t want to send more crews out until we can protect them. Let the Hoskanners burn in hell. I won’t commit murder!” He shook his head. “I hope some of the new equipment arrives soon. We don’t seem to have benefited much from paying extra for the rush delivery.”

Tuek wanted to chide the nobleman for risking himself, but he would not do that in front of the men. Interestingly, because of Jesse’s actions, the rescued crews looked at him with a strange, newfound respect.

Tuek also viewed the nobleman through fresh eyes. Perhaps Jesse
was
the sort of leader who could inspire men to overcome their fears, despite bad equipment and dangerous working conditions. The sandminer crews needed that as much as they needed new machines.

Perhaps, despite the tremendous odds they faced, House Linkam would survive after all.

7

Some people keep their secrets. Others build them from scratch.

—DOROTHY MAPES,
reflections

B
efore allowing the Linkam family to set foot inside the Hoskanner mansion, General Tuek’s men had scanned it for weapons, traps, electronic eavesdropping devices, and any number of hidden pitfalls. The veteran did find numerous traps, hidden explosives, tiny assassination devices disguised as “security systems,” and poisoned food supplies. He even found two meek-looking household servants who, when stripsearched, displayed small horned-cobra tattoos on their backs signifying their ties to House Hoskanner. The security chief evicted them immediately and sent them to live with the convict laborers in Carthage.

Despite his indignation, Tuek seemed to think these hazards were not serious attempts by the Hoskanner nobleman—more a game to show his contempt for the Linkams. The security chief continued his search, trying to find something more subtle and insidious.

Though Tuek had combed the rooms and corridors to the best of his ability, Dorothy still sensed the old veteran had missed something.

With sharp eyes and attentive skills that, she believed, surpassed Tuek’s, the petite woman studied the various chambers, the architectural layout, even the choices of furnishings, to better understand Jesse’s nemesis. Valdemar Hoskanner had designed this building to flaunt his wealth, to demonstrate his power on Duneworld. He had left signs of his aggressive personality, and perhaps his weaknesses, everywhere.

Hoskanner supervisors and functionaries had shared communal residences with few amenities; their lives centered on work. No doubt they counted the days until they could be rotated home to Gediprime. Those buildings were now inhabited by the loyal staff members from Catalan.

Deeper in the town, the hardened freedmen had dwellings of their own, most of them squalid but private, while the newest convict laborers were assigned to prefab barracks. Duneworld’s environment provided all the security necessary to keep the prisoners from escaping; neither convicts nor freedmen could go anywhere.

Every scrap of moisture was recycled and hoarded. But Valdemar himself, in open defiance of the desert, had built this huge headquarters mansion with cavernous rooms that needed to be sealed and cooled. To Dorothy, with her hard business mindset, the grandiosity seemed unnecessary and profligate. She would have to shut some of the wings and floors down in order to conserve.

As she looked around, Dorothy tried to get into the mindset of their nemesis. This imposing mansion suggested to her the sheer scale of spice exports, the incredible profits. Once she began to realize how high the stakes truly were, Dorothy knew that Valdemar Hoskanner would do anything to win. This had never been a fair contest, and the Hoskanners had never intended to offer an actual compromise. They wanted only to eliminate the annoyance of House Linkam through deception, and dispense with the objections of the Nobles’ Council.

Dorothy intended to find some of the traps Valdemar had left behind herself, using her own sharp wits instead of Tuek’s technology.

In the south wing, she noted with interest that a fourth-floor corridor seemed to go nowhere. A piece of the architecture did not fit. Having compared an aerial image of the headquarters mansion with on-site plans that Tuek’s inspection team had drawn up, she realized now that the stone building’s physical outline did not precisely match its interior layout. A small part of this wing was wrong.

To her sharp eye, the hall floor showed faint signs of regular passage. Why would that be so, if the corridor didn’t lead anywhere ? With nimble fingers, she touched the irregular contours of the wall, searching for anything unusual. Not surprised to discover that one of the stones felt hollow and seemed to be made of a material that did not match the other blocks, she figured out its movement and unlocked the clever mechanism.

With a gentle hiss, the hidden door unsealed and slid aside. Startlingly moist and mulchy air wafted toward her, so full of the smells of plants, leaves, roots, and compost that it struck her like a slap in the face. Alert for booby traps, Dorothy stepped inside.

Cleverly concealed mist nozzles sprayed moisture in the air, while automatic irrigation piping fed flower beds, hedges, potted fruit shrubs. Dorothy had no doubt that these were flora brought from Gediprime. She saw an explosion of colorful flowers—purple, yellow, orange—amid verdant ferns. One set of huge scarlet blooms turned toward her as she moved, as if sensing a human presence. A raft of capped mushrooms spread out, speckled with golden-brown spots and silvery flecks.

The smell of moisture in the air and the sight of misty droplets sent a wistful pang through her. Though she had only been on Duneworld for a few weeks, it seemed like years since she’d experienced an afternoon rain shower on Catalan. With delight, she realized she could bring Barri here whenever he grew lonely for his former home. It would be their special, private place.

But Dorothy understood that would make her as wasteful and excessive as Nobleman Hoskanner. Her practical mind ran through swift calculations, and she was appalled to estimate the expense this conservatory required.

When she thought of the people living in squalor in Carthage, she grew angry that Valdemar Hoskanner would have indulged himself so. These plants did not belong here. It was an insult to the freedmen who had worked themselves almost to death to complete their sentences, and who were now unable to afford passage offplanet.

Already mired in debt, with unexpected expenses and regularly occurring disasters, House Linkam had to pare their operating costs to the absolute minimum. They must adapt to this desert land, not expect Duneworld to change to suit their own needs.

She would have to speak to Jesse in private about this. Better not to let anyone know the precious garden even existed. The conservatory would have to be shut down immediately, to stop the hemorrhage of water.

INSIDE THE MAIN spaceport terminal, parsecs from his home on Catalan, Jesse leaned against the parapet of the landing-control tower and thought about loneliness. The night’s first moon rose above the mountain-jagged horizon. He watched it through the blast shutters, looking into the haze of dust that had drifted in from the desert wilderness to the south. The moon shone brightly, and the rolling dunes beyond the cliffs gleamed like parched icing.

Already Gurney and his crews had gone out to the old Imperial stations to strip away valuable live-rubber shielding. William English had teams installing the shielding in the old harvesters, restoring them to greater efficiency. Jesse still needed a lot more equipment, but at least the machines he had should function better after this.

And word had spread about his offer to pay for passage off-planet to any freedmen, provided House Linkam won the challenge. Many of the sandminers were giddy at the prospect, even the convict laborers who saw this as a sign of hope. Some skeptical men—secret Hoskanner sympathizers?—grumbled that it was a trick, that the devious nobleman would tell any lie to win his bet, but the majority believed him. They
wanted
to believe … .

Though he had hoped for solitude, he heard soft footsteps, a gentle movement like wind through a stand of trees … but there were no trees on Duneworld. He turned to find Dorothy looking at him with an expression of concern on her oval face. He had told no one he would be out at the main spaceport, but she always seemed to know where to find him.

“It’s late, Jesse. Why don’t you come to bed?” Her voice carried a quiet invitation, as it always did, but she would let him decide whether or not they would make love. Often, troubled by the uncertain pressures of this dangerous new venture, he would spend an hour simply holding her before drifting off to sleep.

“My work is not yet finished for the day.” He stared through the slats of the blast door. The bright moon seemed to beckon him.

She moved silently, touched his arm. “The day’s work will never be done, Jesse. Nor tomorrow’s. Don’t think of it as an individual task to complete. Each day here is a continuing struggle, a marathon race that we must win.”

“But if we succeed, Dor, it won’t stop even then.”

The possibility of winning seemed like a twisted hallucination brought on by the consumption of too much melange. The Hoskanners had been eighteen years establishing their facilities and operations, with no time limit or contest to drive them. Jesse’s choices were death, bankruptcy … or victory. He was in over his head, much like that hapless sandminer Tuek and Gurney had seen sucked into a sand whirlpool.

Dorothy slipped her arm around his waist. She had always been more than just his lover; she was a sounding board, a trusted advisor whose words and objectivity he could always rely upon. “Would you rather stay here and talk?”

Jesse could not put words to his thoughts; articulating them would only make his troubles more raw. Instead he changed the subject. “There’s so much we need to know about this world. I’m going to mount an expedition to the forward research base in the deep desert, where the Imperial planetary ecologist has been working for years. Maybe I can learn something I need to know.”

“How far away is it?”

His face remained shadowed in the observation tower. “Almost sixteen hundred kilometers south, close to the equator. It’s a research station and test oasis. That’s where most of the deep-desert crews work.”

“So far away. It’ll be dangerous.”

Jesse sighed. “Since accepting the Emperor’s challenge, everything I do carries an element of danger. All I can do is forge toward our goal.”

“Spoken like a true nobleman,” Dorothy said with a wistful smile.

“And … I’m taking Barri with me. I want him to see the operations. He needs to learn our family business, and it’s never too early to start. We’ll be gone for at least a week.”

Now she stiffened and drew away. “Not the first time you go out there, Jesse! He’s only eight.”

“One day he’ll rule House Linkam. I’m not going to pamper him. You do that too much already.”

“Most noble sons his age aren’t half as advanced as Barri is.”

“You know how I feel about most of those noble sons.” He snorted. “Because of the position we’re in, Barri has to be ready at all times, for any situation. My father was poisoned, my brother died in a foolish bullfight, and I’ve roused the ire of the Hoskanners. What are the odds I’ll make it to my next birthday?”

“All the more reason you shouldn’t risk Barri! I’ve seen the mortality statistics of the workers. Those men would be safer in a penal colony. How can you take our boy into the middle of that?”

Jesse took a deep breath. When Dorothy set her mind on something, it was like trying to pry open the jaws of a gazehound from its quarry. “I do it because I am the head of House Linkam, and he is my son. He goes where I say he goes.” The iron tone of his voice cut off further protests, though he could tell she still had a lot more to say.