Dune: The Machine Crusade (49 page)

Holtzman nodded. “Norma has no aesthetic sense whatsoever. But that doesn’t stop her brain from working.”

Which worries me
.

The Dragoon guards and assistants climbed out of the shuttleboat and made their way to the lifts. Holtzman looked around, listening to distant industrial sounds. It reminded him of the clamor in the shipyards he had established on the river delta. His brow furrowed.

When the lift clattered its way to the top of the cliff, Holtzman’s party encountered a dozen well-armed, surly-looking guards who blocked their entry into the fenced compound. “This is a secure area and private property.” All the guards stared at the Dragoons in their gold-scale armor.

“Don’t you realize who this is?” one of his apprentices said boldly. “Make way for Savant Tio Holtzman!”

The Dragoons pushed their way forward, though the mercenary guards made no move to permit their passage. Instead, they leveled their weapons. “Looks to me like you’ve spent hours polishing that gold armor to a high gloss,” the lead guard said. “Wouldn’t want us to scorch it with a weapons blast, would you?”

The Dragoons recoiled in disbelief. “We come on the express authority of Lord Niko Bludd himself!”

“Doesn’t give him the right to ignore private property. He doesn’t own the whole planet.”

“Go call Keedair,” another guard said. “Let him deal with this.”

One of the mercenaries trotted back toward the buildings. Holtzman peered through the fence, saw a large hangar and outbuildings, along with a flow of slaves busily carrying components into a construction area inside a warehouse.

She’s fabricating something in there… something large.

Just then he noticed a child-sized woman approaching him, riding on a personal suspensor platform. She puttered away from the hangar toward the fence, where the Dragoons still faced off with the stony mercenary guards. “Why, Savant Holtzman! What are you doing here?”

“That is not the most interesting question, is it?” He rubbed the gray beard on his chin. “Rather, what are you
doing
here, Norma? What, precisely, is your work? I have come as your colleague to see if we can help each other against the thinking machines. Yet you act as if you’re engaged in illegal activities.”

In her youth, she had spent years working obsessively on modifications to his original equations. The concept of “folding space” sounded like one of Norma’s typically absurd ideas. Still, this odd, unassuming woman had proven her genius time and again….

“With all due respect, Savant Holtzman, my sponsor has made me promise not to reveal any details of my work.” The diminutive woman looked away.

“Have you forgotten who I am, Norma? I have the highest security clearance in the League of Nobles! How can you refuse to reveal details to me?” He looked at the Dragoon guards, as if he would instruct them to arrest her. “Now, tell me about… folding space.”

Startled, she hesitated, but her eyes glimmered with excitement. “Savant, it is merely an offshoot of your original field equations, a unique extension that allows the folding of spacetime to manipulate the variable of distance. Thus it will enable our Army of the Jihad to attack the thinking machines anyplace instantaneously, without the lengthy travel times we presently require.”

The inventor’s nostrils flared, and he fixed on only one part of her explanation. “It derives from
my
equations, and you did not think to tell me about it?”

Just then the Tlulaxa merchant bustled toward them, a small man not much taller than Norma Cenva. His narrow face wore a look of alarm; his thick braid seemed a bit frayed. “Norma, please let me handle this. You need to get back to your work.” He shot her a quick, sharp glare.”
Now
.” Cowed, Norma spun the suspensor car around and flitted back to the enclosed work area.

Holtzman put his hands on his hips and faced Tuk Keedair imperiously. “There’s no need for this to become a complicated issue. Your guards don’t seem to understand that we have a right to inspect and share any new developments that might benefit the Army of the Jihad—”

Not easily intimidated, Keedair responded, “This is a high-security facility, and the proprietary research here is funded solely by VenKee Enterprises. You have no more ‘right’ to be here than the thinking machines do.”

Holtzman’s apprentices gasped. The Tlulaxa nodded to his guards. “Do your jobs and see that they leave promptly.” He looked up at the Savant. “Whenever we have an announcement to make or a demonstration to hold, we will be sure to invite you and Lord Bludd… out of courtesy.”

The Dragoon guards did not know what to do, and looked over at the fuming Holtzman, as if he could concoct an instantaneous solution to the problem. But he saw that they had no choice but to retreat. For now.

“SHE IS HIDING something, just as I suspected all along,” Holtzman said, trying to make Lord Bludd see that he should be deeply concerned. “Why would VenKee insist upon such security, if she is as much a failure now as when she worked for me?”

The nobleman chuckled as he sipped from his bubbling fruit drink. Bludd leaned back in his chair on the balcony and gazed unconcerned from the bluffs to the river, where barges hauled cargo to the delta and the spaceport. “Isn’t it interesting that she suddenly makes a wealth of progress within two years of being freed from her servitude? Perhaps that smart little woman has played you for a fool, Tio! Hiding her discoveries all along so that she didn’t have to share credit with you.”

“Norma Cenva has never cared about fame or credit.” Holtzman declined the nobleman’s offer of refreshment and paced the floor of the balcony, not interested in the expansive view below. “And now that her ‘friend’ Venport got us to release her, we don’t have any claim on her new discoveries.”

Then a cold knife sliced into his chest. “That must be why VenKee was so willing to surrender a portion of glowglobe profits! Whatever Norma has concocted must be orders of magnitude more significant than that.” He clenched his fist. “And we’re cut out of it all.”

Bludd heaved himself to his feet, brushing his plush robes and arranging them neatly. “No, no, Tio. We relinquished only those concepts that were completely
new
. If she has developed them so quickly since the date of our signed agreement, any decent attorney— or even a brilliant scientist such as yourself— shouldn’t find it difficult to draw a direct correlation with Norma’s original work.”

Holtzman stopped as the idea sank in. “If her work involves what I think it does, then you are correct, Lord Bludd.”

The nobleman took a long draught from his goblet and nudged a second one closer to Holtzman. “Drink up, Tio. You need to relax.”

“But how are we going to get inside her complex? I need to see what Norma is doing. That facility is surrounded by dozens of mercenary guards, and that Tlulaxa foreigner watches over it like a hawk.”

“The visa of a Tlulaxa can easily be revoked,” Bludd pointed out, “and I shall do so immediately. In point of fact, even though Norma Cenva has lived here on Poritrin for much of her life, she is still a guest on our planet, not a citizen. We can put out the word, planting subtle doubts, cutting off supplies and access privileges.”

“Will that be enough?”

Bludd cracked his ring-studded knuckles, then called for his Dragoon captain. “Put together an overwhelming force and go upriver to Norma Cenva’s facility. Three hundred well-armed Dragoons should be sufficient. I suspect the mercenary guards will surrender as soon as they see you coming. Serve the Tlulaxa man with his revocation papers, and then you can investigate and learn what Norma’s been up to. That won’t be a problem, will it?”

Holtzman swallowed and looked away, suddenly finding the view of the river much more fascinating. “No, my Lord. But Norma will resist. She’ll send an urgent communiqué to Aurelius Venport. Tuk Keedair will file a brief in the League court. I’m sure of it.”

“Yes, Tio, but you will have months to investigate her labs and construction bays before anything can be resolved. If you find nothing worthwhile, then we can apologize and admit our mistake. But if you do learn of a scientific breakthrough, we will go into production with it ourselves before VenKee Enterprises can even file an appeal.”

Holtzman was already smiling. “You are quite the visionary, Lord Bludd.”

“Just as you are quite the scientist, Tio. Our adversaries are completely out of their depth.”

F
or well over a year Ishmael followed meaningless orders at Norma Cenva’s complex, though he felt as if his heart had died inside him. He toiled with a hundred and thirty other Buddislamic captives. The secret project was complex as they slowly built, refit, and tested the strange components of a large new ship.

None of it meant anything to him.

The woman scientist was not a difficult taskmaster. She was so intent in her focus that she blithely assumed every other person shared her obsessive dedication. Her Tlulaxa partner Tuk Keedair— Ishmael shuddered with loathing each time he saw the former slaver— enforced the long work shifts.

The assistants, administrators, engineers, and slaves spent their days and nights in a small settlement whose sole purpose was to build the experimental vessel. The Buddislamic slaves slept in plain, clean communal barracks erected atop the plateau where the nights were windy but full of stars. Ishmael had no opportunity to return to Starda, not even for a day.

Ishmael had received no word of his wife or daughters, had found no one of whom he could even ask questions about them. His family was lost to him. Each day he prayed they were still alive, but in his memory they had become ghosts inhabiting his dreams. His hopes dwindled to no more than thin threads.

Amid the loud hammering and shouts of the construction hangar, he watched his friend Aliid changing the cartridge of a sonic tool. When the slaves had first come upriver to work on this new, isolated project, Aliid had managed to get himself assigned to a daily work detail with Ishmael. Now the Poritrin slavers had taken both men from their wives and families.

After adjusting the sonic tool, the Zenshiite man spoke sharply. “You tried, Ishmael. You did what you thought was best— I cannot fault you for that, though I have always disagreed with your naïve faith in the fairness of our captors. What did you expect? The slavemasters rely on us being spineless, exactly as you demonstrated. When we are capable of nothing more than toothless threats, they feel no obligation to treat us like human beings. We must speak a language that our oppressors will heed. We must show fangs and claws!”

“Violence only brings down greater punishments upon us. You saw what happened to Bel Moulay—”

Aliid interrupted, grinning wolfishly. “Yes, I saw… but did
you,
Ishmael? In all the years since then, what have you learned? You fixate on the pain Bel Moulay suffered, but you forget everything he achieved. He brought us
together
. It was a clarion call, not just for the Poritrin nobles who overreacted and crushed every sign of resistance, but for all Buddislamics who continue to suffer. We slaves have a sleeping strength within us.”

Clinging to his nonviolent beliefs, Ishmael shook his head stubbornly. The two men had reached a familiar impasse, each of them unwilling to cross to the other side of the chasm separating them. Once, they had been good friends thrust together by common circumstances, but they had always been so different. Even their common miseries had not drawn them closer. Aliid, in his determination, kept trying to achieve the impossible— in so many ways. Ishmael had to admire him for his convictions, but Aliid showed only frustration.

When Ishmael had been a boy, his grandfather had taught him what to believe and how to live, but sometimes adults simplified matters for their children. Ishmael was thirty-seven years old now. Had he been wrong all these years? Did he need to find new strength within himself, yet still remain within the boundaries of Zensunni teachings? He knew deep in his bones that Aliid’s dreams of violence were wrong and dangerous, but his quiet confidence that it was all for a reason— that God would somehow rescue them and melt the hearts of their slavers— had accomplished nothing during his life. Or during the lives of generations of Buddislamic slaves.

He had to find another answer. A different solution.

Though Ishmael had failed utterly, wresting no comforts or concessions from Lord Bludd, the Zensunni faithful still came to him in the communal barracks at night, asking him to preach, to tell them stories, to reaffirm their patient acceptance of Buddallah’s will. More than a hundred men and women came to see him regularly— most of the workforce.

At first, Ishmael didn’t think he could do it. How could he recite the Koran Sutras and sing songs of God’s benevolence, when Ozza could not be beside him, when his beautiful girls did not sit across the story fire and listen to his familiar parables? But then Ishmael grew strong and realized that he could not lose everything. He had his own strength, even if Aliid could not see it.

As the months stretched past a year, though, Ishmael noticed a gradual but clear separation open up between his Zensunni brothers and the smaller group of Aliid’s Zenshiites. They still worked together inside the enclosed hangar where Norma Cenva and her team tinkered with the gutted prototype ship, but he sensed that Aliid was hiding secrets not only from the Poritrin slave masters, but also from Ishmael and his people….

A BRIGHT SPOT returned to Ishmael’s life with the suddenness of the dazzling fireworks that the Poritrin lords so often launched in their river celebrations. The news was all the more welcome for its very unexpectedness.

As the massive experimental ship entered the final phase of testing and demonstration, Tuk Keedair hired another group of slaves from Starda and brought them to operate the colossal machinery and assist in last-minute operations. Among the fifteen sullen new workers, Ishmael was astonished to find his elder daughter Chamal.