Dune: The Machine Crusade (34 page)

Grinning, Vor brought his ship alongside the other craft, maneuvering expertly to dock the two vessels. Back in the isolated labin Zimia, he had worked for many months, tampering with the captive Omnius, adding subtle loops, errors, and virtual land mines to its programming. The original silvery gelsphere sat beside him in the Jihad ship’s cockpit, stolen from the cybernetic lab. Now he would use the gelsphere to plant his corruptions on the Synchronized Worlds.

Unwittingly, his old comrade Seurat would do it for him.

Vor donned a breathing mask and opened the hatch to step into the frigid air of the paralyzed update ship. The copper-skinned robot pilot, deactivated when Vor used a scrambler on him, should still be on board.

At the time of this betrayal, Vor had felt uncomfortable. Seurat had been his faithful companion, a quirky but genuine friend on many voyages. Though Vor still held a soft spot in his heart for him, his dedication to the Jihad was even stronger, infused with a powerful sense of determination and the rightness of humanity’s cause. Despite his attributes, Seurat was a thinking machine, making him the sworn enemy of the human race… and of Vorian Atreides.

Aboard the craft, Vor felt like an intruder. The brutally cold air seemed to resist him, and he moved forward silently, afraid to disturb the tiniest detail. He could not leave any mark of his presence, neither a fingerprint nor a scuff. The update ship’s every interior surface sparkled with frost, humidity that had crystallized out of the motionless air, but he left no footprints on the corrugated metal deck as he moved across it.

In the cockpit he discovered the familiar humanoid shape of the captain with whom he had served, a robotic pilot who had taken countless Omnius update spheres from one Synchronized World to another. Seurat remained motionless, his mirrored, coppery face reflecting a distorted image of Vor looking down at him through the breathing mask.

“So, I see you’ve waited for me,” Vor said, driving away the nostalgia that flickered around the edges of his mind. “I didn’t leave you in a very dignified position, I fear. Sorry, Old Metalmind.”

He opened the secret storage compartment from which he had originally stolen the Omnius update a quarter century earlier. Removing the silvery gelsphere from the pack at his side, he replaced it in the empty waiting cradle, precisely where he had found it. Though the League scientists had already performed decades of interrogation and analysis, Vor had meticulously deleted all those memories. Even the tainted update itself wouldn’t know what had happened.

With a sly smile, Vor resealed the storage compartment, careful not to leave any evidence of his intrusion. The information inside would look totally legitimate, though it was modified in ways that no thinking machine could readily detect.

Briefly, he worried what would happen to the independent robot pilot, once Omnius discovered the destruction Seurat unwittingly carried. He hoped the mechanical captain would not be destroyed out of spite. Perhaps his memory core would be completely wiped. A sad end for a decent companion… but at least Seurat would forget all those atrociously bad jokes he used to tell.

Maybe Omnius would just put Seurat back to work, provided the evermind survived the chaos Old Metalmind would bring. Vor wished he could be there to watch….

Finally, he took great pleasure in restarting the systems he had deactivated in Seurat’s body. Vor wished he could stay and talk with his old chum and teach him how to play Fleur de Lys, or tell him some of the twisted Omnius jokes that jihadi soldiers exchanged in their crew quarters— but Vor knew that wasn’t possible. In a few days the robot would awaken, assuming his gelcircuitry systems gradually repaired themselves.

By then, Vorian Atreides would be long gone.

His mission complete, he returned through the hatch to his own ship. Though it would not be apparent for some time yet, he was convinced that he had just struck a devastating blow against the Synchronized Worlds.

After years of the bloody Jihad, it was finally time to let Omnius defeat himself. Vor could almost taste the irony….

A
fter dutifully completing his public appearance on Poritrin, Iblis Ginjo was asked to consider going to Ix, where the fighting would be heaviest. Lord Bludd insisted that his presence would boost the morale of the jihadi soldiers who were sacrificing so much.

But Iblis dismissed the idea out of hand, without even raising the question with Yorek Thurr. Unstable conditions there were too dangerous for him. The human revolution on that Synchronized World, led by his own Jipol professional agitators, had been in full eruption long before the Jihad invasion fleet was due to arrive. Even if human forces won this offensive, tens of thousands would lie dead in the streets. And if Primero Harkonnen lost, the death toll would be even higher.

No, Iblis did not want to be there. It would be risking too much, both personally and politically.

Only after an Ixian victory was assured and the jihadis had cleaned up the remaining thinking machines would the Grand Patriarch make his triumphant arrival. At that time, he could saunter in and take most of the credit for victory. From then on, he could always use Ix as a rallying cry for even more major offensives, as he had done with Poritrin.

If Primero Harkonnen’s military operation was on schedule, he should arrive at Ix soon, though they had no means of instant communication at such distances. Within days the big battle should commence, though it would be some time before the Grand Patriarch learned the results….

Iblis remained on Poritrin for a month and arranged a series of private meetings with noblemen, some of whom had journeyed from Ecaz and other League Worlds for the belated festival. Despite the gravity of the machine threat, the patricians were in no mood to discuss serious matters. They wanted to savor their victory for a while, though it was only a small step toward the ultimate goal. Dealing with these fools, Iblis finally reached a peak of frustration, and announced that he would be leaving in order to oversee the important matters of the Jihad.

In a good-natured fashion, Lord Bludd had protested the Grand Patriarch’s early departure, but Iblis could see that he did not particularly care one way or another. So he left Poritrin accompanied by two Jipol officers, the grim and unshakeable Yorek Thurr and a young female sergeant newly recruited into Iblis’s private police force. While Thurr flew the ship competently, the new sergeant, Floriscia Xico, acted as copilot and attendant. Iblis retired to his own plush cabin to relax and plan during the long voyage.

In the luxurious chamber he sat on a deep-cushion chair, where he participated in a role-playing bioholo set on ancient Earth, ostensibly to learn about the founder of the original Islamic faith before the Second and Third Movements in the Old Empire. Iblis’s object was to learn about the first jihad, and to understand it completely.

Immersed in the bioholo, Iblis Ginjo saw himself as a fictional companion who walked alongside the great man, without ever actually speaking to him. The white-robed prophet stood on the crest of a dune, speaking to a throng of followers arrayed below him.

Abruptly the images around Iblis wavered, then flickered out of focus until the walls of his plush cabin stood out sharply around him again. Voices in the ancient reenactment clashed with real voices over the spaceship comsystem. Alarms sounded, and Iblis wrenched himself back to reality.

Someone was shaking him and shouting into his ear. He looked into the flushed face of curly-haired Floriscia Xico. “Grand Patriarch, you must come to the flight deck immediately!”

Struggling to reorient himself, he lurched after her. Through the front viewport, he saw an immense asteroid filling space, spinning wildly as it headed toward them.

“It’s not moving in a natural orbit, sir,” Thurr said, not taking his eyes from the controls or their trajectory map. “It keeps adjusting course whenever I take evasive action, and its acceleration is obviously artificial.”

Iblis calmed himself and stood tall, the commander that his Jipol expected to see. Both the swarthy little Thurr and the younger, less seasoned Xico seemed uncharacteristically uneasy. “Our craft has augmented engines,” Iblis said. “We can outrun any asteroid.”

“Theoretically,” Thurr said as he wrestled with the controls, “but it keeps accelerating, sir. Heading straight toward us.”

“Fifty seconds to collision,” Xico reported, from the copilot seat.

“That’s ridiculous. It’s just an asteroid—”

One of the big rock’s largest craters glowed, and the ship lurched, as if suddenly caught in a fisherman’s net. Lights dimmed, and the flight deck shuddered. Thurr said, “Tractor beam has us.”

A shower of sparks sprayed out of the control console like a Poritrin fireflower display. Iblis heard an explosion belowdecks, deep in the engine compartment. In front of Thurr and Xico, the control panels went dark.

The asteroid loomed closer and closer, moving under its own inexorable power. Xico slumped in her seat as if she had given up. In disgust, Thurr slapped the controls. “Our engines are disabled! We’re dead in space.” Sweat glistened on his bald head.

The asteroid drew them closer, pulling them into a yawning crater. The cosmic body was obviously a huge, disguised ship. But who did it belong to? Angry and fearful, Iblis swallowed hard.

Abruptly, all power went out, even the backup systems. A chill wind seemed to accompany the darkness that engulfed the ship as they were swallowed by the gigantic asteroid.

F
ar above Earth’s solar system the small update vessel drifted without engine power, ranging to the edge of a diffuse cometary cloud. Seurat returned to a dim but increasing awareness, not knowing where he was or how much time had elapsed.

Normal systems reactivated on the frozen ship, and frost melted from the bulkheads, dripping down onto the motionless robot captain. Somewhere deep in his mechanical consciousness, Seurat heard and felt the droplets hitting him, wisps of moisture condensing out of the air. Dissonant thought patterns made him recall an ancient Earth torture method, but most of his memory circuits were inaccessible to him, for the moment.

He could not judge the passage of time or where he was now. He had been in the update ship when his last conscious thoughts ended abruptly. A probability program told him:
That is where I must be now
. And he recalled his last mission.

Without moving, he absorbed what little information was available. Another tiny drop of water fell on his metal body, like dew.

The cabin is thawing. Therefore, it must have been frozen. Therefore, sufficient time must have passed for standard systems to shut down and the internal temperature to drop.

Since his internal circuitry was not functioning completely, Seurat wondered if his gelcircuitry mind had suffered damage. How much time had passed? He probed, but could not tell. However, as he tested his mental paths, he found that he could access more with each passing moment.

I was deactivated.

The process of coming back to life seemed slow to the independent robot. Consciously, he activated a secondary damage assessment-and-mitigation program. His scattered memory remained a chaotic jumble and mostly inaccessible, but he could tell that it was reassembling itself bit by bit.

Is this a dream? The result of a gelcircuitry malfunction? Can machines dream?

The probability program broadened its functions and told him, like a voice from within:
This is real.

He heard crisp popping and snapping sounds, and high-range spinning noises. Then his core program jolted into full awareness, quickly sorting out disjointed recollections. Finally he obtained an internal report on the last few moments: Seurat’s escape from Earth while it was under atomic attack by the League Armada… the pursuit… Vorian Atreides. The human trustee had damaged the update ship, boarded the vessel, and forcibly deactivated him.

While most of the robot’s external sensors were not yet operational, he did not detect the presence of any other sentient beings inside the cabin— human or machine. The human aggressor was gone.

The robot realized that his lengthy interaction with the son of Agamemnon had left him vulnerable to the pandemonium and unpredictability of human actions. Recalling his copilot, Seurat had difficulty thinking of the former trustee as his enemy, even though Vor had clearly stunned him—
twice
!

Why did my friend do that to me?

Understanding the motivations of human beings was not Seurat’s strong suit, or even part of his programming. The robot captain performed his duties with the tools that Omnius had provided for him. Of greater importance, he needed to discover if the damage was permanent. Would he be able to restore all of his former functions?

As if answering him, his systems continued to awaken, faster now. More than eighty percent.

Despite the unsettling lack of predictability, Seurat still preferred the missions he had shared with Vorian Atreides to those he had flown alone.
He is not like other, exceedingly dull humans I have observed
.

Abruptly, his programs came fully alive and began to assault him full-force, informing Seurat of slowly compounded errors that distracted him with considerations of such troubling matters. His optic threads glimmered, suddenly flooding him with detailed images from around the cold, dead cabin of the update ship.

His mental functions accelerated and smoothed into an internal hum of systems checking and rechecking information, scooping up bits of errant data and discarding them. Around the walls, deck, and control panels, he detected subtle indications of corrosion, age, and disuse. He probed again, to determine how much time had passed. Still uncertain.