The Butlerian Jihad

by Brian Herbert

  Almost there.

  Running at full tilt, she led the way toward the nexus of the thinking-machine citadel, triggering alarms all the way. Many robots had fallen inactive in rooms or halls, but others converged upon her. Armored doors slammed shut in the corridors, as if to seal off vital chambers, but Heoma could see they were not important. She saw exactly where to go.

  Soon the cymeks would arrive and surround her. Exactly according to plan.

  The tingle of mental electricity mounted in her brain like a power transformer. Her skull felt ready to burst, but she did not unleash her energy yet. She must retain all of her strength for one final moment.

  She heard their crablike warrior-forms skittering down the corridor, ominous sounds of sophisticated machine bodies guided by the brains of human traitors, different from the regimented lockstep of the robotic guards.

  “It is almost our time,” she announced to the fiery-eyed Rossak men, her voice filled with excitement and barely suppressed fear.

  Skidding to a halt, she arrived within the main chamber where the shielded core of the Omnius manifestation dwelled. Inside the armored room, numerous watcheyes glared at her through glowing optic threads.

  A voice boomed out from myriad sources. “Human—are you wearing a bomb, a pitifully weak explosive that you think can harm me? Did you bring one of your atomics, or is victory not worth such a price to you?”

  “I am not so naïve, Omnius.” Heoma tossed her sweaty white hair over her shoulder. “One person cannot possibly harm the great computer evermind. That requires a much more extensive military strike. I’m no more than one woman.”

  As the giant cymeks approached from adjoining corridors, Omnius simulated a laugh. “Humans rarely admit the folly of their own actions.”

  “I admitted no such thing.” Heoma’s skin was glowing red now, heated with unnatural energy. Static electricity made her pale hair wave like angry serpents. “You have merely misjudged my purpose.”

  The doors opened and three monstrous cymeks glided in with graceful metal footsteps, as if savoring the capture of these humans. Heoma’s bodyguards turned and opened fire, using the last of their ammunition to cripple one of the neo-cymeks in a single concerted attack.

  The second neo-cymek raised his integral weapons and vaporized the fearless Rossak men into clouds of bloody pulp. The damaged neo-cymek lay on the floor, its arms and legs twitching like a poisoned insect not yet ready to succumb to death. The larger Titan cymek strode forward.

  Now Heoma stood alone against the machines. Without moving, she focused her mental powers, building to the point where she could barely maintain even a shred of control.

  “I am Barbarossa,” said the cymek. “I have squashed so many hrethgir that it would take a computer to count them all.” He and his companion cymek came closer. “Rarely have I witnessed such arrogance.”

  “Arrogance? Or confidence?” Heoma smiled. “Removing a Titan from the equation is a worthy exchange for my life.”

  The Sorceress’s mental energy could do no damage to the hardened gelcircuits of Omnius itself. Human minds, however, were more vulnerable to her telepathic onslaught. She felt the flames of vengeful energy cresting within her mind—and released them in a white-hot firestorm.

  The shockwave of psychic annihilation boiled the brains of Barbarossa and his companion, as well as all other cymeks and hapless biologicals crowded inside the citadel complex. Omnius let out a wordless bellow of static and outrage. Heoma saw only white as her mental energy vaporized the organic brains of the cymek generals.

  Leaving the newly installed evermind vulnerable.

  Outside, League ground troops waited for the telepathic firestorm to fade, then surged forward to attack the now-defenseless stronghold of Omnius.

  The work of recapturing Giedi Prime had begun.

  Nothing is permanent.

  —Cogitor saying

  Within an hour of the transmitting facility’s activation, the cymeks and surface-confined robots had pin-pointed its location. While the battle raged in Giedi City, even after Barbarossa had been annihilated, a kill squadron of neo-cymeks and robots was dispatched to the northern sea. They surrounded the rocky, ice-covered island to penetrate the compound and destroy the parabolic transmitting towers.

  With few weapons, Brigit Paterson’s remaining engineers could not possibly defend against such an onslaught, but they had no intention of surrendering, either. Inside the main control center, she scanned the skies and sea. “The longer we hold out here, the more lives we’ll save.”

  Pasty-faced and drawn with terror, the desperate engineers armed themselves with grenades, pulse-projectile rifles, and a portable artillery launcher and went to guard the quays and aerial approaches to the island.

  The machine kill squadron did not issue ultimatums; they began their attack as soon as they were in range. Brigit’s engineers were ready and fired back immediately. They reloaded, making their dwindling ammunition count.

  The cymeks and robots were more intent on obliterating the towers than on killing the few defenders. Most of their attack was directed at the frosty structures that pumped a lifeblood of scrambler energy into the sky. When a cymek shot knocked one transmitter offline, the shields began to fade, but Brigit finessed the controls. Her cold fingers flew, rerouting to more stable sections of the tower, and soon she had a functional shield in place again. She didn’t know how long it would last.

  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 h
ave 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.

  There is always a way out, if you can recognize it.

  —VORIAN ATREIDES,

  debriefing files

  As 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 de
termine 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.”