As commanding officer, Xavier observed him closely. In combat demonstrations Noret fought with utter conviction, though he seemed to prefer his own company when he was off duty.
Now, inside the crowded common room, Noret sat in the middle of his fellows and seemed to shut out all distractions. In full view of the rest of the crew, he contorted his body into supple okuma positions, then held himself rigid, facing a bulkhead while he journeyed inward to a realm of contemplation.
Suddenly, with blinding speed, he leaped to his feet, whirling and diving, striking out with his bare hands, as well as more traditional weapons— a small club and a heavy stun-ball connected like a bolo to a thin chain on his wrist. It seemed to be a test, or a game, but the Ginaz mercenaries treated it with absolute seriousness. A quartet rushed at him, but Noret dispatched them all with startling efficiency.
For a finale, he tossed his assorted weapons into the air, defeated two more men with martial arts blows, snatched the weapons back out of the air, then slipped them into concealed pockets in his black clothing. Though soundly beaten, none of his companions were seriously hurt. No doubt they would challenge Noret again… and just as certainly, the young man would win.
* * *
TWO DAYS LATER, Xavier made a point of approaching Noret, wanting to learn more about him. Even during the tedious voyages between battlefields, the Primero had never felt comfortable fraternizing with his troops, as Vor always did. His friend would eat in the common mess hall with the soldiers, spinning tall tales for them about his adventures, playing round after round of Fleur de Lys, which he won without smugness and lost without rancor.
But Xavier had never been able to do that. He was their commanding officer— a leader among men, but rarely a friend. Instead of calling out a good-natured greeting as he walked along the crew decks, the soldiers all snapped to attention and gave him crisp salutes. Complete respect seemed to be a barrier between them and him. Privately, the men called him “Old Fuss and Formality.”
Now he did not seek out Jool Noret as a friend. In the ballista’s crew compartments, the young mercenary was tidying his lower bunk, carefully stowing articles of clothing and exotic weapons in an adjacent locker. Even for such a mundane task, Noret’s every movement was fluid and quick.
The room was nearly empty with the current duty shift. The Primero came toward him from behind, making no noise loud enough to be heard over the background hum of the spaceship engines and conversations in the outer corridors. Even so, he noticed that the young mercenary stiffened without actually seeing him. He seemed to be watching with his ears.
Xavier moved into his line of sight and stood with his arms folded across his chest. “I have observed your combat exhibitions, Jool Noret. Your technique is very interesting.”
“And I have observed you observing, Primero.”
Xavier had already considered his purpose in this encounter. Another week remained until they arrived in the Ixian system and began their campaign. “I believe you have skills you could teach to my men, techniques that will increase their chances of survival when they fight the thinking machines.”
The young mercenary looked away, as if stung. “I am not a teacher. I still have too much to learn myself.”
“But the men respect you and want to learn from you. If you instruct them in your methods, you could save lives.”
Donning a haunted expression, the young man seemed to withdraw into himself. “That is not the reason I agreed to fight for the Jihad. I want to destroy thinking machines. I want to die bravely in battle.”
Xavier did not understand what demons troubled this man. “I would rather you fought bravely and survived, to destroy even more of the enemy. And if you help my jihadis to improve, we will be more easily assured of victory.”
Noret remained silent for so long that Xavier didn’t think he intended to respond at all. “I won’t be a teacher,” he said, at last. “That is too much of a burden on top of the others I carry. I will not have their blood on my hands if they fail to perform with adequate skill.” He looked up at the aging officer, his expression sad. “However, they are welcome to… observe, if they wish.”
Xavier nodded, for the moment unwilling to push harder and discover what disturbed Noret so deeply. “Good enough. Perhaps they can learn something by watching you. If it works out, I’ll consider requesting additional compensation for you when we return home.”
“I don’t want any of that,” Noret said, his expression intense and strangely frightening. “Just give me free rein to kill machines.”
Beware of well-meaning friends. They can be as dangerous as enemies.
— GENERAL AGAMEMNON, Memoirs
After Xavier and his battle group departed for Ix, Vor’s mind burned with alternatives. Brute force was a stale and old-fashioned tactic, but not at all the most effective way to defeat the thinking machines. His eyes twinkled impishly as his mind gave birth to possibilities, devising schemes that could prove more effective than all the warships in the Army of the Jihad.
This was more than a friendly competition with his fellow primero. Clever tricks could save countless lives. Human lives.
Without fanfare or much attention whatsoever, Vor commandeered a single-man scout ship. As usual, the jihadi officers were concerned. They warned him of the risks involved and insisted that he take along an escort of armed gunships. But Vor just laughed and brushed them off. They still did not know what he had done to the captive Omnius sphere, now hidden in his cockpit. No one knew. Yet.
Out in open space, Vor set course for a world he had never again expected to visit, and certainly not by choice: Earth. The birthplace of humanity. Now nothing more than a radioactive, charred ball.
Vor knew what he would find there… and still he went.
Though he had no reason to venture down to the surface, he took extra time to cruise above the stormy atmosphere, scanning the lifeless land masses below. The night-side continents were black, showing no signs of civilization, and as he circled around to the daylight side he noted swirling white clouds, murky oceans, and brown land masses with almost no smear of green.
He remembered the many times he had flown here in the Dream Voyager. Thumbing back through the internal ledger of his thoughts, he envisioned himself and the independent robot Seurat approaching the homeworld of humanity, the central planet of Omnius. The network of city lights, the grid of bright industry and civilization had always called out to Vor. But the beautiful glitter was now absent. It had been decades since the nuclear annihilation, and still the planet looked mostly dead. Perhaps one day Earth would again be habitable, but for now it was only a scar marking a wound that humans had dealt the thinking machines… and themselves.
Vor had spent his formative years here, studying his father’s memoirs, absorbing the cymek general’s distorted version of history. Then Serena Butler had shown him that his life was filled with distortions and outright lies. He had escaped. He had been reborn.
In his new life as a free human in the League of Nobles, Vor found himself fascinated with history. He read the records of ancient humanity and memorized details of the original Agamemnon, the ancient general who had fought in the Trojan War, as recorded in Homer’s Iliad.
In his studies Vor sought to differentiate between history and myth, between accurate information and legends. But sometimes even tales of questionable accuracy could provide interesting ideas. When studying the exploits of the first Agamemnon, he had become particularly intrigued by the account of the Trojan horse…
The League scientists would not have understood— or perhaps they would have run endless tests. But that was not a luxury they could afford during wartime.
Filled with nostalgia and renewed determination, Vor left Earth behind and headed for his real destination. Following a trajectory he had flown long ago during the Armada’s battle for Earth, he reached the fringes of the solar system. Back then, still a recent turncoat and not fully trusted, Vor had broken ranks to purs
ue an Omnius update ship that was attempting to escape. After deactivating its robot captain, he had left the craft adrift… for twenty-five years.
Now Vor searched for any trace of the long-inert vessel, scanning the regions into which it might have drifted among the frozen cometary debris far from the light of the Sun. “Don’t hide from me, Old Metalmind,” he said to himself. “Come out and play.”
Vor wished he’d had the foresight years ago to place a tiny locater beacon on the update ship, but now he used his skill with calculations and computers to determine possible orbits. Taking his time, he combed the sparse desert of deep space. Finally, not far from one of his orbital estimates, he detected the metal signature of the robotic vessel. “Ah, there you are.”
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….
There is a time to attack and a time to wait.
— From a Corrin-Omnius update
After 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.
Dune: The Machine Crusade Page 26
