Dune: The Butlerian Jihad (30 page)

Outside, she heard explosions and screams, making her wonder how many of her engineers remained alive. Her screens flickered as the sensors were damaged in the firestorm, and she saw more ships approaching, probably machine reinforcements. A whole squadron.

Then louder detonations rang out in the water, and the cymeks began to scramble. Robot vessels exploded, targeted by oncoming kindjals flown by human pilots. She heard a ragged cheer from a woefully small number of voices. The League Armada had sent rescuers to defend the shield facility.

Weak with relief, Brigit slumped into her chair, glad that this risky scheme had worked. When she got home, she promised she would buy Serena Butler the finest, most expensive bottle of wine available in the whole League of Nobles.

AFTER HEOMA’S MIND-STRIKE obliterated the cymek enforcers, Holtzman’s second portable scrambler knocked out the robots in another section of the city. The Omnius core was damaged and vulnerable.

Surviving robotic defenders mounted a strong resistance, willing to sacrifice anything to keep humans from reclaiming the planet and destroying the evermind. While Xavier Harkonnen fought against thinking-machine spaceships in his giant ballistas, he dispatched four javelin destroyers to help secure the surface. Squadron after squadron of kindjals soared over targets, wrecking the embryonic machine infrastructure, crippling any robots that had been beyond the range of the field-portable scramblers.

Armada troop transports dumped soldiers onto the battleground to seek out and sabotage thinking-machine strongholds. Scanner ships sent messages to rally any knots of human resistance, calling for others to rise up and join the fighting.

In response, distraught men, women, and children surged out of buildings, breaking away from slave gangs. They ran through the streets with any weapons they could find, some recovered from fallen robots.

As the tide of battle began to turn, Xavier issued a set of general orders, delegating responsibilities and mop-up zones to the Armada subcommanders. Then he set out with elite search teams to find Serena Butler.

He flew directly to the island in the northern sea where commando engineers had restored the shield-generating facility. He expected to find Serena there, since this had been her scheme all along. Xavier looked around, studying the bodies with dread, but saw no sign of Serena or the old veteran Ort Wibsen. Nor did he see her blockade runner.

When he encountered Brigit Paterson standing outside in the cold breeze without seeming to feel the chill, she was exuberant with their victory. In a booming voice, she said, “We did it, Tercero! I would never have bet a single credit on our odds of success, but Serena knew what she was doing. I can’t believe she pulled us through.”

Xavier felt ready to melt with relief. “Where is she?”

“She’s not with the Armada?” Brigit frowned. “She left here days ago to intercept your ships and inform you of what we had accomplished.” She blinked, suddenly disturbed. “We thought she’d given you all the information.”

“No, we came because of the message she left me on Salusa.” Xavier’s heart leaped with sudden fear, and his voice dropped to a frigid whisper. “Something must have happened. God, I hope not.”

XAVIER TOOK A small contingent of kindjals with his best pilots. Serena was lost somewhere on Giedi Prime. An entire planet provided an overwhelming number of hiding places, but he vowed to find her.

After leaving the engineering crew on the windswept island, had she crashed? Had she been captured? Wibsen’s service record showed him to be an excellent pilot, and the converted blockade runner should have performed well. But Serena and her remaining commandos had not responded to any Armada transmissions. So many things could have happened.

Bad things.

The Armada had orders for the final phase of the operation on Giedi Prime. Convoys were airlifting survivors away from the damaged government complex in Giedi City. He hoped Serena was not in there.

Ten kilometers above the surface, centered over the citadel that had once been the home of Magnus Sumi, the squadron leveled out, and Xavier knew it was time. Only a few months earlier, in those buildings below, he and his inspection team had been hosted by the Magnus at a banquet.

Now Omnius must be excised like a cancer, obliterated from Giedi Prime.

Circling over the wounded metropolis, Xavier hesitated. His stomach knotted, and he finally gave the order to his crew. The kindjals disgorged their deadly loads.

Xavier closed his eyes, then forced himself to watch the terrible solution. This was the only way to be certain. Even if shreds of the evermind had been distributed in substations around Giedi Prime, the vigorous occupation force would root out any remnants. For now, the humans must annihilate the computer core that cowered like an evil insect queen in the citadel complex, cut off from all its infrastructure, stripped of its machine protectors.

Through the tattered smoke and cloud cover, Xavier watched a dozen high-thermal bombs go off, blazing flashes and thunderclaps over the center of Giedi City, vaporizing the government buildings. For blocks around, even stone melted. Steel turned to ash. Glass vaporized. Nothing could survive.

A bittersweet victory . . . but victory nonetheless.

DURING AN INSPECTION tour two days later, Tercero Harkonnen and his line officers documented the decimation of Giedi City. They already knew what they would find, but the harsh evidence sickened them.

Xavier took a deep, shuddering breath and tried to salve his conscience by reminding himself that Omnius had been defeated. The humans had taken the planet back.

But there was no sign of Serena.

A
s the
Dream Voyager
finally entered the Ophiuchi B solar system as part of the long update run, Seurat attempted to contact the recently installed Omnius network on Giedi Prime. If General Agamemnon had conquered the
hrethgir
world, as promised, Vor knew they would find the standard machine-run citadel at the world’s business hub. It would be another great chapter for his father to include in his memoirs.

Vorian stood behind the robot captain, studying the instrument console as they approached. “I’ll bet there’s still a lot of organizing and restructuring to do down there.” He was excited at the opportunity to visit a world in the process of shifting from human unruliness to efficient machine rule. Omnius would need to install the best trustees, those most loyal to the thinking machines. Neo-cymeks would probably take care of the brunt of the subjugation work, and trustees would come in later, once the people were sufficiently tamed and accepting of their new situation.

But Vor also felt a little peculiar. The conquered
hrethgir
on Giedi Prime would look like him, though he would feel no kinship with them.
Seurat, and others like him, are more like brothers to me.

At the command console, the robot attempted to lock an onboard signal onto a homing beacon from the citadel. “No contact yet. Perhaps all the systems are not yet installed on the surface, or Agamemnon caused too much damage during his conquest.”

Vor tended to the monitoring systems. “Damage can always be repaired, once conquest is assured.” Ahead, Giedi Prime was illuminated on its dayside by a pale yellow sun. As he stared, his brow furrowed with worry. “Something doesn’t seem quite right, Seurat.”

“Define your reservations, Vorian Atreides. I can take no action based upon a vague uneasy feeling.”

“Never mind. Just . . . be careful.”

The
Dream Voyager
skimmed the upper atmosphere, slicing through clouds and scattered particulates that the ship’s scoop system analyzed as copious smoke. Could the
hrethgir
have been so vicious and desperate that they had burned their own cities? What loathsome creatures!

His stomach lurched as onboard warning systems whined. Seurat promptly altered course, halting their descent and gaining altitude again. “It appears the scrambler field remains intact on Giedi Prime.”

“We almost flew into it!” Vor cried. “Does that mean—”

“Perhaps General Agamemnon did not succeed in his conquest. Giedi Prime is not as secure as we were led to expect.”

Irrationally confident that his father would not have failed, Vor ran a sequence of scans. “Instruments picking up League military equipment on the surface, evidence of recent massive explosions in Giedi City.” The words caught in his throat. “The central hub and the local Omnius have been obliterated! All robots and cymeks appear to be destroyed as well.”

“I am scanning their broadband reports . . . collating a summary.” Without alarm, the robot recounted his understanding of the portable scramblers, the powerful Sorceress of Rossak who had used mental powers to obliterate the cymeks, then the overwhelming force of the League Armada.

Then Seurat said in a maddeningly calm voice, “Vorian, a fleet of
hrethgir
ships is coming around from behind the planet. They appear to have been waiting for us in ambush.”

Outside, streaks of orange and blue tracer fire came close to hitting the update craft, and the
Dream Voyager
‘s automatic systems jolted into evasive maneuvers. League kindjals streaked in like wolves. “They’re barbarians,” Vor said. “Eager to destroy anything they don’t like.”

Seurat said, “We are under attack. And the
Dream Voyager
is not a combat-programmed vessel.” He continued to sound artificially jovial, facetiously this time. “Someday I will think of a joke about why it takes so many humans to short-circuit an Omnius.”

ALERTED TO THE approach of a single thinking-machine vessel, Tercero Xavier Harkonnen had moved his orbital battle group to the far side of the planet. Some wreckage of robot warships still tumbled in a dispersing swath; Omnius’s forces had been completely destroyed.

Xavier flew out in a personal kindjal, accompanied by a well-armed squadron. He saw the update ship roar on a steep trajectory toward the damaged main city, then swerve desperately upward as soon as the robot captain detected the scrambler fields. “Follow me! We can’t let it get away.”

Hungry for vengeance, his squadron hurled itself into the pursuit. At the same time, he signaled the ground-based military forces that he had an enemy craft in sight. Ahead, wavering in the crosshairs, the
Dream Voyager
surged forward, trying to evade Armada weapons fire and to escape back into space.

Abruptly, Xavier was startled to hear a human voice— or one that
sounded
human— coming over the comline. “Hey, break off your attack! This is a League ship. My name is Vorian Atreides. We have boarded a machine craft and taken control. Stop trying to shoot us down!”

Xavier tried to determine from the tenor if it really was a human voice, or only a clever machine copy. Thinking machines were not devious . . . unless there was a preserved cymek brain aboard. Some of the kindjals dropped back, uncertain.

“Stay on your guard,” Xavier said to his squadron, “but cease fire until we figure this out—”

Before he could finish his order, the suspicious ship looped and began firing its own weapons, minimal defensive volleys that nevertheless took the Armada fighters by surprise. One kindjal veered away, its engines damaged.

Xavier’s console screen showed the image of a human face with dark hair and shining fanatical eyes. A sleek, mirror-faced robot stood next to him, his flexible copperfilm body rippling as he operated the controls of the ship.

A human and a robot, working side by side?
Xavier couldn’t believe it.

“Open fire!” he shouted. “Destroy that ship.”

“IT IS NOT wise to provoke them too much, Vorian,” Seurat said, maddeningly calm. “I would rather leave here posthaste.”

“I just gained us a few precious seconds, didn’t I? You wouldn’t have thought of using a bluff.” Vor couldn’t stop grinning. He had read similar words in the memoirs of Agamemnon and was glad to echo them.

As the Armada commander took evasive maneuvers and rallied his kindjal pilots, he hurled insults back at Vor on the comline. “You are a disgrace to humanity, a traitor!”

Vor laughed, proud of his place here. He quoted what he’d been taught all his life. “I am the pinnacle of humanity— a trustee of Omnius, the son of General Agamemnon.”

“I apologize for interrupting your grand speech, Vorian, but I am detecting more
hrethgir
ships,” the robot said. “More than we can evade. Therefore, I am breaking off engagement. Our responsibility is to protect the updates aboard. We have to make our report.”

Vor said grimly, “If the Giedi Prime– Omnius is already destroyed, we will never have an update of what it did during its months of operation here. We’ll never know what he accomplished.”

“A grievous loss,” Seurat said.

The robot guided the
Dream Voyager
toward orbit, farther from the deadly scrambler fields. The acceleration pressed Vorian back into his padded seat until he nearly lost consciousness. A squadron of human-operated ships closed in on their tail, and the update ship shuddered as an energy pulse hit the aft section.

Seurat dodged, and another volley of blows pounded the hull, damaging the armor plates. This vessel was not made to endure such punishment. Vor heard onboard systems hissing, automated routines making temporary repairs to the damaged parts. Another blast hit, even worse than the others.

“We are operating on reserves,” Seurat announced. Vor scanned the ship’s diagnostics himself, assessing the damage. The air in the cabin began to smell acrid and smoky.

The
Dream Voyager
lurched. More kindjals surrounded them, targeting their engines. An explosion jarred Vor to his bones.

“We cannot tolerate much more of this,” Seurat said. “Our engines are functioning at only a third of normal capacity, and I am flying as fast as I can.”