Dune: The Machine Crusade (2 page)

He watched his forces shift, as he had commanded them to do. Xavier’s adopted brother, Vergyl Tantor, captained the vanguard ballista and moved it into position. Vergyl had served the Army of the Jihad for the past seventeen years, always watched closely by Xavier.

Nothing had changed here in over a week, and the fighters were growing impatient, passing the enemy repeatedly but unable to do anything more than puff up their chests and display combat plumage like exotic birds.

“You’d think the machines would learn by now,” Vergyl grumbled over the comline. “Do they keep hoping that we’ll slip up?”

“They’re just testing us, Vergyl.” Vor avoided the formality of ranks and the chain of command because it reminded him too much of machine rigidity.

Earlier in the day, when the paths of the two fleets briefly intersected, the robot warships had launched a volley of explosive projectiles that hammered at the impregnable Holtzman shields. Vor had not flinched as he watched the fruitless explosions. For a few moments, the opposing ships had mingled head-on in a crowded, chaotic flurry, then moved past each other.

“All right, give me a total,” he called.

“Twenty-eight shots, Primero,” reported one of the bridge officers.

Vor had nodded. Always between twenty and thirty incoming shells, but his own guess had been twenty-two. He and the officers of his other ships had transmitted congratulations and good-natured laments about missing by only one or two shots, and had made arrangements to collect on the bets they made. Duty hours would be shifted among the losers and winners, luxury rations transferred back and forth among the ships.

The same thing had happened almost thirty times already. But now as the two battle groups predictably approached one another, Vor had a surprise up his sleeve.

The Jihad fleet remained in perfect formation, as disciplined as machines.

“Here we go again.” Vor turned to his bridge crew. “Prepare for encounter. Increase shields to full power. You know what to do. We’ve had enough practice at this.”

A skin-tingling humming noise vibrated through the deck, layers of shimmering protective force powered by huge generators tied to the engines. The individual commanders would watch carefully for overheating in the shields, the system’s fatal flaw, which— so far, at least— the machines did not suspect.

He watched the vanguard ballista cruise ahead along the orbital path. “Vergyl, are you ready?”

“I have been for days, sir. Let’s get on with it!”

Vor checked with his demolitions and tactical specialists, led by one of the Ginaz mercenaries, Zon Noret. “Mr. Noret, I presume that you deployed all of our… mousetraps?”

The signal came back. “Every one in perfect position, Primero. I sent each of our ships the precise coordinates, so that we can avoid them ourselves. The question is, will the machines notice?”

“I’ll keep them busy, Vor!” Vergyl said.

The machine warships loomed closer, approaching the intercept point. Although the thinking machines had no sense of aesthetics, their calculations and efficient engineering designs still resulted in ships with precise curves and flawlessly smooth hulls.

Vor smiled. “Go!”

As the Omnius battlegroup advanced like a school of imperturbable, menacing fish, Vergyl’s ballista suddenly lunged ahead at high acceleration, launching missiles in a new “flicker-and-fire” system that switched the bow shields on and off on a millisecond time scale, precisely coordinated to allow outgoing kinetic projectiles to pass through.

High-intensity rockets bombarded the nearest machine ship, and then Vergyl was off again, changing course and ramming down through the clustered robot vessels like a stampeding Salusan bull.

Vor gave the scatter order, and the rest of his ships broke formation and spread out. To get out of the way.

The machines, attempting to respond to the unexpected situation, could do little more than open fire on the Holtzman-shielded Jihad ships.

Vergyl slammed his vanguard ballista through again. He had orders to empty his ship’s weapons batteries in a frenzied attack. Missile after missile detonated against the robot vessels, causing significant damage but not destruction. The comlines reverberated with human cheers.

But Vergyl’s gambit was just a diversion. The bulk of the Omnius forces continued on their standard path… directly into the space minefield that the mercenary Zon Noret and his team had laid down in orbit.

The giant proximity mines were coated with stealth films that made them nearly invisible to sensors. Diligent scouts and careful scans could have detected them, but Vergyl’s furious and unexpected aggression had turned the machines’ focus elsewhere.

The front two machine battleships exploded as they struck a row of powerful mines. Massive detonations ripped holes through bows, hull, and lower engine sheaths. Reeling off course, the devastated enemy vessels sputtered in flames; one blundered into another mine.

Still not realizing precisely what had happened, three more robot ships collided with unseen space mines. Then the machine battlegroup rallied. Ignoring Vergyl’s attack, the remaining warships spread out and deployed sensors to detect the rest of the scattered mines, which they removed with a flurry of precisely targeted shots.

“Vergyl— break off,” Vor transmitted. “All other ballistas, regroup. We’ve had our fun.” He leaned back in his command chair with a satisfied sigh. “Deploy four fast kindjal scouts to assess how much damage we inflicted.”

He opened a private comline, and the image of the Ginaz mercenary appeared on the screen. “Noret, you and your men will receive medals for this.” When not in combat camouflage for minelaying and other clandestine operations, the mercenaries wore gold-and-crimson uniforms of their own design, rather than green and crimson. Gold represented the substantial sums they received, and crimson, the blood they spilled.

Behind them, the damaged Omnius battlegroup continued on their orbital patrol, undeterred, like sharks looking for food. Already, swarms of robots had emerged from the ships and crawled like lice over the outer hulls, effecting massive repairs.

“It doesn’t look like we even ruffled their feathers!” Vergyl said as his ballista rejoined the Jihad group. He sounded disappointed, then added, “They’re still not getting IV Anbus from us.”

“Damned right they’re not. We’ve let them get away with enough in the past few years. Time for us to turn this war around.”

Vor wondered why the robot forces were waiting so long without escalating this particular conflict. It wasn’t part of their usual pattern. As the son of the Titan Agamemnon, he— more than any other human in the Jihad— understood the way computer minds worked. Now, as he thought about it, Vor grew highly suspicious.

Am I the one who’s grown too predictable? What if the robots only want me to believe they won’t change tactics?

Frowning, he opened the comline to the vanguard ballista. “Vergyl? I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Disperse scout ships to survey and map the land masses below. I think the machines are up to something.”

Vergyl didn’t question Vor’s intuition. “We’ll take a careful look down there, Primero. If they’ve flipped over so much as a rock, we’ll find it.”

“I suspect more than that. They’re trying to be tricky— in their own predictable way.” Vor glanced at the chronometer, knowing he had hours before he needed to worry about the next orbital encounter. He felt restless. “In the meantime, Vergyl, you’re in command of the battlegroup. I’ll shuttle down to see if your brother has managed to talk any sense into our Zenshiite friends.”

S
ince the exodus of all Buddislamic sects from the League of Nobles centuries earlier, IV Anbus had become the center of Zenshiite civilization. Its primary city of Darits was the religious heart of the independent and isolated sect, largely ignored by outsiders, who saw little value in the planet’s meager resources and troublesome religious fanatics.

The land masses of IV Anbus were mottled with large, shallow seas, some fresh, some potently salty. The tides caused by close-orbiting moons dragged the seas like a scouring rag across the landscape, washing topsoil through sharp canyons, eroding out grottos and amphitheaters from the softer sandstone. In the shelter of the deep overhangs, the Zenshiites had built cities.

From one shallow sea into another, rivers drained naturally, pulled by the tidal surges. The inhabitants had developed exceptional mathematics, astronomy, and engineering skills to predict the swelling and dwindling floods. Silt miners reaped mineral wealth by sifting the murky water that flowed through the canyons. The downstream lowlands offered fertile soil, as long as agricultural workers planted and harvested at appropriate times.

In Darits, the Zenshiites had built an immense dam across a narrow bottleneck in the red rock canyons… a defiant gesture to show that their faith and ingenuity were enough to hold back even the powerful flow of the river. Behind the dam, a huge reservoir had backed up, full of deep-blue water. Zenshiite fishermen floated delicate skiffs around the lake, using large nets to supplement the grains and vegetables grown on the floodplain.

No mere wall, the Darits dam was adorned with towering stone statues carved by talented and faithful artisans. Hundreds of meters high, the twin monoliths represented idealized forms of Buddha and Mohammed, their features blurred by time, legend, and notions of idealistic reverence.

The faithful had installed bulky hydroelectric turbines, turned by the force of the current. In tandem with numerous solar-power plates that covered the mesa tops, the Darits dam generated enough energy to power all the cities of IV Anbus, which were not large by the standards of other worlds. The entire planet held only seventy-nine million inhabitants. Still, communication lines and a power grid connected the settlements with enough technological infrastructure to make this the most sophisticated of all Buddislamic refugee worlds.

Which was exactly why the thinking machines wanted it. With minimal effort Omnius could convert IV Anbus into a beachhead and from there prepare to launch even larger-scale assaults against League Worlds.

Serena Butler’s Jihad had already been in full force for more than two decades. In the twenty-three years since the atomic destruction of Earth, the tides of battle had shifted many times between victory and loss, for each side.

But seven years ago, the thinking machines had begun to target Unallied Planets, which were easier conquests than the heavily defended, more densely populated League Worlds. On the vulnerable Unallied Planets, the scattered traders, miners, farmers, and Buddislamic refugees were rarely able to muster sufficient force to resist Omnius. In the first three years, five such planets had been overrun by thinking machines.

Back on Salusa Secundus, the Jihad Council had been unable to understand why Omnius would bother with such worthless places— until Vorian noticed the pattern: Driven by the calculations and projections of the computer evermind, the thinking machines were surrounding the League Worlds like a net, drawing closer and closer in preparation for a coup de grâce against the League capital.

Shortly after Vorian Atreides— with Xavier’s support— had demanded that the Jihad devote its military strength to defend the Unallied Planets, a massive and unexpected Jihad counterstrike succeeded in recapturing Tyndall from the machines. Any victory was a good one.

Xavier was glad the Army of the Jihad had arrived at IV Anbus in time, thanks to the warning of a Tlulaxa slaver named Rekur Van. The flesh merchant’s team had raided this world, kidnapping Zenshiites to be sold in the slave markets of Zanbar and Poritrin. After his raid, the slaver had encountered a robotic scout patrol mapping and analyzing the planet, something the machines always did in preparation for a conquest. Rekur Van then raced back to Salusa Secundus and delivered the dire news to the Jihad Council.

To counter the danger, Grand Patriarch Iblis Ginjo had put together this hasty but effective military operation. “We cannot afford to let another world fall to the demonic thinking machines,” Iblis had shouted at the send-off ceremony, to enthusiastically defiant cheers and thrown orange flowers. “We have already lost Ellram, Peridot Colony, Bellos, and more. But at IV Anbus, the Army of the Jihad draws a line in space!”

Though Xavier had underestimated the number of ships Omnius would dispatch to this remote world, thus far the Jihad forces had been able to thwart the attempted invasion, though they could not drive the robots away.

During a break in the talks with the Zenshiites, Xavier cursed under his breath. The very people he was trying to save had no interest in his help, and declined to fight against the thinking machines.

This city in the red rock canyons housed relics and the original handwritten canons of the Zenshia interpretation of Buddislam. Inside cave vaults, wise men preserved original scrawled manuscripts of the Sutra Koran and prayed five times daily when they heard the calls from minarets erected on the canyon rim. From Darits the elders dispensed their commentary, meant to guide the faithful through the forest of esoterica.

Xavier Harkonnen could barely contain his frustration. He was a military man, accustomed to leading battle engagements, ordering his troops and expecting his commands to be followed. He simply didn’t know what to do when these pacifistic Buddislamic inhabitants just… refused.

Back home among the League Worlds, there had been a growing anti-Jihad protest movement. The people were exhausted from more than two decades of bloodshed with no visible progress. Some had even carried placards near the shrines to the murdered child Manion the Innocent, begging for “Peace at Any Cost!”

Yes, Xavier could understand their weariness and despair, for they had seen many loved ones killed by the thinking machines. But these isolated Buddislamics had never even bothered to lift a hand in resistance, revealing the ultimate folly of extreme nonviolence.