The Bator handed the explosives down to the hapless desert man, while Rabban gestured for them to hurry. “I hope you don’t become worm food, my friend,” he said with a laugh. Even before the doors could close on the ornithopter, the pilot lifted off the sands again, leaving Thekar alone.
Kynes and the other Harkonnen soldiers rushed to the starboard side of the transport, crowding the windowplaz to watch their guide’s desperate actions out on the open sands. The desert man had reverted to a different, feral human being as they watched.
“Excuse me. Just how much explosive does it take to kill a worm?” Kynes asked curiously.
“Thekar should have plenty, Planetologist,” the Bator answered. “We gave him enough to wipe out an entire city square.”
Kynes turned his attention back to the drama below. As the craft rose higher, Thekar worked in a flurry, grabbing the explosive components, piling them in a mound and linking them together with shigawire cables. Kynes could see tiny ready lights winking on. Then the whip-thin man stabbed his thumper into the sand next to the deadly cache, as if he were pounding a stake into the heart of the desert.
The troop ’thopter swerved and arrowed straight toward the bulwark of rock where the great hunter Rabban would wait in comfort and safety. Thekar triggered the thumper’s spring-wound mechanism and began to run.
Inside the ornithopter, some of the soldiers placed bets on the outcome.
Within moments the craft alighted on the ridge of blackened, pitted rock that looked like a reef in the soft desert. The pilot shut down his engines, and the ’thopter doors opened. Rabban shoved his troops aside to be the first to stand upon the shimmering rock. The others in the party piled out afterward; Kynes waited his turn and emerged from the rear.
The guards took up watch positions, directing the oil lenses of their binoculars at the small running figure. Rabban stood tall, holding a high-powered lasgun, though Kynes couldn’t imagine what he intended to do with the weapon at this point. Through a spotting-scope, the Baron’s nephew stared out into the heat-addled air, seeing the ripples and mirages. He centered on the clacking thumper and the dark landmark of piled explosives.
One of the high spotter ’thopters reported possible wormsign about two kilometers to the south.
Out on the desert, Thekar ran frantically, kicking up sand. He advanced toward the archipelago of safety, the rocky islands in the sea of sand— but he was still many minutes away.
Kynes watched the odd manner in which Thekar placed his footsteps. He seemed to jitter and hop erratically, running like a spastic insect. Kynes wondered if this was some sort of arrhythmic pattern to fool an oncoming sandworm. Was this technique something that desert travelers learned? If so, who could teach it to Kynes? He had to know everything about this place and its people, the worms and the spice and the dunes. Not only was it his Imperial directive: Pardot Kynes wanted to know for himself. Once he became involved in a project, he hated unanswered questions.
The group waited, and time passed slowly. The soldiers talked. The desert man continued his peculiar running, moving imperceptibly closer. Kynes could feel the stillsuit micro-sandwich layers sucking up his droplets of sweat.
He knelt and studied the umber rock at his feet. Basaltic lava, it contained eroded pockets that had been formed from leftover gaseous bubbles in the molten rock, or softer stone eaten away by the legendary Coriolis storms of Arrakis.
Kynes picked up a handful of sand and let it run through his fingers. Not unexpectedly, he saw that the grains of sand were quartz particles, shimmering in the sun with a few flecks of darker material that might have been magnetite.
At other places he had seen rusty colorations in the sand, striations of tan, orange, and coral, hinting at various oxides. Some of the coloring could also have been from weathered deposits of the spice melange, but Kynes had never seen unprocessed spice in the wild before. Not yet.
Finally, the spotter ’thopters overhead confirmed an approaching worm. A large one, moving fast.
The guards rose to their feet. Looking out onto the blurry landscape, Kynes saw a ripple on the sand, like an immense finger being drawn beneath the surface, disturbing the upper layers. The size of it astounded him.
“Worm’s coming in from the side!” the Bator called.
“It’s going straight for Thekar!” Rabban shouted, with cruel glee. “He’s between the worm and the thumper. Awww, bad luck.” His wide face now showed a different kind of anticipation.
Even from this distance, Kynes could see Thekar put on a burst of speed, forgetting his staggering walk as he saw the mound of the approaching worm tunneling toward him faster and faster. Kynes could well imagine the look of horror and hopeless despair on the desert man’s face.
Then with a grim resolve and a sudden desperation, Thekar came to a full stop and lay flat on the sand, motionless, staring up at the sky, perhaps praying fervently to Shai-Hulud.
With the tiny footstep vibrations stopped, the distant thumper seemed as loud as an Imperial band. Thump, thump, thump. The worm paused— then altered its path to head straight toward the cache of explosives.
Rabban gave a twitch of a shrug, nonchalant acceptance of an irrelevant defeat.
Kynes could hear the underground hiss of shifting sands, the approach of the behemoth. It came closer and closer, attracted like an iron filing to a deadly magnet. As it neared the thumper, the worm dived deeper underground, circled, and came up to engulf that which had attracted it, angered it— or whatever instinctive reaction these blind leviathans experienced.
When the worm rose from the sands, it revealed a mouth large enough to swallow a spacecraft, ascending higher and higher, its maw opening wider as its flexible jaws spread like the petals of a flower. In an instant it engulfed the insignificant black speck of the thumper and all the explosives. Its crystal teeth shone like tiny sharp thorns spiraling down its bottomless gullet.
From three hundred meters away, Kynes saw ridges of ancient skin, overlapping folds of armor that protected the creature in its passage beneath the ground. The worm gulped the booby-trapped bait and began to wallow into the sands again.
Rabban stood up with a demonic grin on his face and worked small transmitting controls. A hot breeze dusted his face, peppering his teeth with grains of sand. He pushed a button.
A distant thunderclap sent a tremor through the desert. The sands shifted in tiny avalanches from the fingernail dunes. The sequenced bomb ripped through the internal channels of the worm, blasting open its gut and splitting its armored segments.
As the dust cleared, Kynes saw the writhing, dying monstrosity that lay in a pool of disrupted sand, like a beached fur-whale.
“That thing’s more than two hundred meters long!” Rabban cried, taking in the extent of his kill.
The guards cheered. Rabban turned and pounded Kynes on the back with nearly enough strength to dislocate his shoulder.
“Now there’s a trophy, Planetologist. I’m going to take this back to Giedi Prime with me.”
Almost unnoticed, Thekar finally arrived, sweating and panting, hauling himself up to safety on the rocks. He looked behind him with mixed emotions at the faraway dead creature sprawled on the sands.
Rabban led the charge as the worm ceased its final writhing. The eager guards sprinted across the sands, shouting, cheering. Kynes, anxious now to see the amazing specimen up close, hurried along, stumbling as Harkonnen troops plowed a battered path ahead of him.
Many minutes later, panting and hot, Kynes stood awestruck in front of the towering mass of the ancient worm. Its skin was scaled, covered with gravel, thick with abrasion-proof calluses. Yet between the segments that sagged open from the explosions, he saw pink, tender skin. The gaping mouth of the worm itself was like a mine shaft lined with crystal daggers.
“It’s the most fearsome creature on this miserable planet!” Rabban crowed. “And I’ve killed it!”
The soldiers peered, none of them wanting to approach closer than sev
eral meters. Kynes wondered how the Baron’s nephew intended to haul this trophy back with him. With the Harkonnen penchant for extravagance, however, he assumed Rabban would find a way.
The Planetologist turned to see that the exhausted Thekar had plodded up beside them. His eyes held a silvery sheen, as if some inner fire blazed bright. Perhaps by coming so close to death and seeing the Fremen desert god laid low by Harkonnen explosives, his perspective on the world had changed.
“Shai-Hulud,” he whispered. Then he turned to Kynes, as if sensing a kindred spirit. “This is an ancient one. One of the oldest of the worms.”
Kynes stepped forward to look at the encrusted skin, at its segments, and wondered how he might go about dissecting and analyzing the specimen. Certainly Rabban couldn’t object to that? If necessary, Kynes would invoke his assignment from the Emperor to make the man understand.
But as he approached closer, intending to touch it, he saw that the skin of the old worm was shimmering, moving, shifting. The beast itself wasn’t still alive— its nerve functions had ceased even to twitch . . . and yet its outer layers trembled and shifted, as if melting.
While Kynes stared in amazement, a rain of translucent cellular flaps dripped off the hulk of the old worm, like scales shed to the churned sand, where they vanished.
“What’s going on?” Rabban cried, his face purpling. Before his eyes the worm seemed to be evaporating. The skin sloughed off into tiny flopping amoebalike patches that jiggled and then burrowed into the sand like molten solder. The ancient behemoth slumped into the desert.
In the end, only skeletal, cartilaginous ribs and milky teeth were left. Then even these remains sank slowly, dissolving into mounds of loose gelatin covered by sand.
The Harkonnen troops stepped back to a safer distance.
To Kynes, it seemed as if he had seen a thousand years of decay in only a few seconds. Accelerated entropy. The hungry desert seemed eager to swallow every shred of evidence, to conceal the fact that a human had defeated a sandworm.
As Kynes thought about it, more in confusion and growing amazement than in dismay at losing all chance of dissecting the specimen, he wondered just how strange the life cycle of these magnificent beasts must be.
He had so much to learn about Arrakis. . . .
Rabban stood, seething and furious. The muscles in his neck stretched taut like iron cables. “My trophy!” He whirled, clenched his fists, and struck Thekar full across the face, knocking him flat onto the sands. For a moment, Kynes thought the Baron’s nephew might actually kill the desert man, but Rabban turned his rage and fury on the still-dissolving, shuddering heap of the sandworm sinking into the exploded sands.
He screamed curses at it. Then as Kynes watched, a determined look came into Rabban’s cold, menacing eyes. His sunburned face flushed a deeper red. “When I return to Giedi Prime, I’ll hunt something a lot more satisfying.” Then, as if distracted from all thoughts of the sandworm, Rabban turned and stalked away.
One observes the survivors, and learns from them.
—Bene Gesserit Teaching
Of all the fabled million worlds in the Imperium, young Duncan Idaho had never been anywhere but Giedi Prime, an oil-soaked, industry-covered planet filled with artificial constructions, square angles, metal, and smoke. The Harkonnens liked to keep their home that way. Duncan had known nothing else in his eight years.
Even the dark and dirt-stained alleys of his lost home would have been a welcome sight now, though. After months of imprisonment with the rest of his family, Duncan wondered if he would ever again go outside the huge enslavement city of Barony. Or if he would live to see his ninth birthday, which shouldn’t be too far off now. He wiped a hand through his curly black hair, felt the sweat there.
And he kept running. The hunters were coming closer.
Duncan was beneath the prison city now, with his pursuers behind him. He hunched down and rushed through the cramped maintenance tunnels, feeling like the spiny-backed rodent his mother had let him keep as a pet when he was five. Ducking lower, he scuttled along in tiny crawl spaces, smelly air shafts, and power-conduit tubes. The big adults with their padded armor could never follow him here. He scraped his elbow on the metal walls, worming his way into places no human should have been able to navigate.
The boy vowed not to let the Harkonnens catch him— at least not today. He hated their games, refused to be anyone’s pet or prey. Negotiating his way through the darkness by smell and instinct, he felt a stale breeze on his face and noted the direction of the air circulation.
His ears recorded echoes as he moved: the sounds of other prisoner children running, also desperate. They were supposedly his teammates, but Duncan had learned through previous failures not to rely on people whose feral skills might not match his own.
He swore he would get away from the hunters this time but knew he would never be entirely free of them. In this controlled environment the stalking teams would catch him again and run him through the paces, over and over. They called it “training.” Training for what, he didn’t know.
Duncan’s right side still ached from the last episode. As if he were a prized animal, his tormentors had put his injured body through a skin-knit machine and acu-cellular repair. His ribs still didn’t quite feel right, but they had been getting better each day. Until now.
With the locator beacon implanted in the meat of his shoulder, Duncan could never really escape from this slaveholding metropolis. Barony was a megalithic construction of plasteel and armor-plaz, 950 stories tall and 45 kilometers long, with no ground-level openings whatsoever. He always found plenty of places to hide during the Harkonnen games, but never any freedom.
The Harkonnens had many prisoners, and they had sadistic methods of making them cooperate. If Duncan won in this training hunt, if he eluded the searchers long enough, the keepers had promised that he and his family could return to their former lives. All the children had been promised the same thing. Trainees needed a goal, a prize to fight for.
He ran by instinct through the secret passageways, trying to muffle his footfalls. Not far behind, he heard the blast and sizzle of a stun gun firing, a child’s high-pitched squeal of pain, and then teeth-chattering spasms as another one of the young boys was brought to ground.
If the searchers captured you, they hurt you— sometimes seriously and sometimes worse, depending upon the current supply of “trainees.” This was no child’s game of hide-and-seek. At least not for the victims.
Even at his age, Duncan already knew that life and death had a price. The Harkonnens didn’t care how many small candidates suffered during the course of their training. This was how the Harkonnens played. Duncan understood cruel amusements. He had seen others do such things before, especially the children with whom he shared confinement, as they pulled the wings off insects or set tiny rodent babies on fire. The Harkonnens and their troops were like adult children, only with greater resources, greater imaginations, greater malice.
Without making a sound, he found a narrow, rusted access ladder and scrambled up into the darkness, wasting no time on thought. Duncan had to do the unexpected, hide where they’d have trouble reaching him. The rungs, pitted and scarred with age, hurt his hands.
This section of ancient Barony still functioned; power conduits and suspensor tubes shot through the main structure like wormholes— straight, curved, hooking off at oblique angles. The place was one enormous obstacle course, where the Harkonnen troops could fire upon their prey without risking damage to more important structures.
Above him in a main corridor, he heard booted feet running, filtered voices through helmet communicators, then a shout. A nearby pinging sound signaled that the guards had homed in on his locator implant.
Hot white lasgun fire blasted the ceiling over his head, melting through metal plates. Duncan let go of the ladder and allowed himself to drop, freefall. One armed guard peeled up the hot-edged floor plate and pointed down at him. The others fired their lasguns again, sev
ering the struts so that the ladder fell in tandem with the small boy.
He landed on the floor of a lower shaft, and the heavy ladder clattered on top of him. But Duncan didn’t cry out in pain. That would only bring the pursuers closer . . . though he had no real hope of eluding them for long because of the pulsing beacon in his shoulder. How could anyone but Harkonnens win this game?
He pushed himself to his feet and ran with a new, frantic desire for freedom. To his dismay, the small tunnel ahead opened into a wider passage. Wider was bad. The bigger men could follow him there.
He heard shouts behind, more running feet, gunfire, and then a gurgling scream. The pursuers were supposed to be using stun guns, but Duncan knew that this late in the day’s hunt, most everyone else would have been captured— and the stakes were higher. The hunters didn’t like to lose.
Duncan had to survive. He had to be the best. If he died, he couldn’t go back to see his mother again. But if he lived and defeated these bastards, then perhaps his family would get their freedom . . . or as much freedom as Harkonnen civil service workers could ever have on Giedi Prime.
Duncan had seen other trainees who had defeated the pursuers before, and those children had disappeared afterward. If he could believe the announcements, the winners and their captive families had been set free from the hellhole of Barony. Duncan had no proof of this, though, and had plenty of reasons to question what the Harkonnens told him. But he wanted to believe them, could not give up hope.
He didn’t understand why his parents had been thrown into this prison. What had minor government office workers done to deserve such punishment? He remembered only that one day life had been normal and relatively happy . . . and the next, they were all here, enslaved. Now young Duncan was forced nearly every day to run and fight for his life, and for the future of his family. He was getting better at it.
He remembered that last normal afternoon out on a manicured lawn planted high up in one of the Harko City terraces, one of the rare balcony parks the Harkonnens allowed their subjects to have. The gardens and hedges were carefully fertilized and tended, because plants did not fare well in the residue-impregnated soil of a planet that had been too long abused.
Dune: House Atreides Page 6
