Since coming to this planet, Jesse had become a competent ornijet flyer, one who was aware of the vagaries of desert weather, cold sinks, thermal updrafts, hot crosswinds, and abrasive sands. Now, as he received the worm spotter’s call, he cruised in and adjusted his trajectory to intercept the beast.
“On course,” he transmitted to Dr. Haynes on a private frequency. “I’ll deploy the canister within safety parameters.” Jesse’s voice sounded surprisingly calm to his own ears, belying the fear that he felt. His best men and equipment were out there on the spice sands, flirting with disaster.
In the months since they’d begun using Haynes’s depth-charge system, only one of the numerous shock canisters had misfired; even then, the highly trained crews had averted catastrophe by evacuating the men and equipment in time. And this was to be the last shock-charge deployed before House Linkam claimed unexpected victory in the great contest. If he defeated the Hoskanners, Jesse could begin to have a normal life again. Success today would guarantee a strong foundation for House Linkam and for his son.
According to plan, Jesse set the small ornijet down on an open expanse of dunes, then disengaged the shock canister and let it settle onto the soft sand. Leaving the engines humming and the wings vibrating, he sprang out and set the device.
Directly overhead, the sky had darkened to an ominous gray-brown soup, the leading edge of an approaching Coriolis storm. Wasplike crackles of static began to jump and pop around his boots, while pebbles bounced along the top of the dune, activated by the discharge that came as a precursor to the Coriolis winds.
Jesse’s hands tingled as he planted the static-shield generator next to the canister. Bait. When he activated its thrumming field, alarming blue-white flickers rippled through the air. He hurried. With his senses optimized to a frightening level, he saw and heard the worm coming toward him like a maglev train, lured by the tempting song of the generator.
Visible sparks leaped from the wings of his landed craft, dancing in the air. Incredible! After a quick double check of the canister, Jesse scrambled back into the ornijet and lifted into the sky, sending out a burst of exhaust.
He was safely away by the time the sandworm’s whirlpool maw gulped the shock canister. A knockout surge shot down the worm’s gullet, and the creature rose up, writhing and thrashing at the air. An amazing burst of lightning flashed out of its mouth. A web of tiny shocks curled up and down its outer rings. Balls of white light collected in plasma surges, then flew upward to pop like soap bubbles. St. Elmo’s Fire.
Sparks flew in all directions; globes of phosphorescent light erupted like fireworks. The eyeless monster lurched forward, leaped high, and then crashed down onto the uneven dunes, sending reverberations in all directions.
“Well, laddie, that was impressive!” Gurney’s transmitted voice was exuberant.
“Never seen anything like it,” Jesse said over the comm line. Feeling a little shaky, he circled over the downed worm to make sure it was subdued. “We should have a minimum of six hours. Get your crews back to work.”
By now, the sandminers knew with a fair degree of accuracy how long each shock canister rendered a worm immobile. Even while stunned, the beasts often twitched and stirred, causing jittery observers to overreact. Accustomed to that, Gurney’s excavation crews refused to sound every possible false alarm. Each minute of an early evacuation cut into profits.
The Coriolis storm’s thick, brownish nucleus was still a good distance away, but winds were increasing around the spice patch, and would likely force a shutdown before the sandworm recovered enough to be a threat.
Safe from the creature, the sandminers returned to their tasks with redoubled energy, scooping load after load of the spice. Excitement and energy flowed through the men. They knew this could be their last haul before a long and well-deserved respite.
Full of adrenaline-enhanced joy, Jesse landed next to the spice harvesters. He stepped into the mounting breeze to lend a hand, not afraid to get his own hands dirty, just as he’d done on Catalan. If this final excavation pushed them past the Hoskanners, he wanted to be part of it.
The brunt of the angry weather front approached slowly. Gurney monitored the dangerous system, and the sandminers worked with frantic abandon, their hair and clothing whipping in the warm wind. The new weather satellites transmitted detailed updates every fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, the sandminers’ attention was focused more on the Coriolis storm than on the motionless sandworm.
As heat-discharges stitched the sky with white-hot barbs, the monster recovered itself with astonishing speed. Rippling its sinuous body, the creature reared up and began to move toward the excavation sites, drawn by the pulsing clamor of seven noisy harvesters.
Alarm shouts went up. Worm spotters, caught off guard, sounded an immediate withdrawal. Gurney bellowed for the carryalls to sweep down and grab the huge harvesters and their cargoes. Darting ornijets dropped to the sand to snatch crewmembers who were too far from their vehicles.
Workers rushed in all directions while static sparks flew from the sand. Jesse swung into action. Had the unexpected storm discharge weakened the shock canister somehow? Perhaps the spectacular light show had bled away the bursts that would normally have knocked out each of the worm’s ring segments. That was a question for Dr. Haynes to investigate at some later time. Right now, Jesse and his men needed to fight for their survival.
“Run!” he shouted into the microphone on his collar. “Get aboard anything that flies. Leave the equipment behind—just get out of here !” Trying to get to higher ground where the extraction crews could see him, he plunged up a soft slope through sand that clung to his ankles.
The maddened worm thrashed through the dunes, then slammed into the first spice harvester before most of the crew could escape. Only partially attached to the huge machine, the carryall could not wrench the mobile factory free of the sand. As the worm devoured the big harvester, the airborne carryall could not disengage. The carryall crew screamed over the comm as they were dragged underground along with the doomed sandminers.
Wreckage from the harvester and the carryall strewed the sand, but the frenzied creature was not finished. It turned to the other machinery.
Two more carryalls clutched a pair of spice harvesters and successfully lifted them into the sky, flying away with their engines roaring. Over the noise, Jesse heard the keening of the approaching storm. Looking back, he saw the worm abruptly change direction and plunge toward the four remaining harvesters.
Only two carryalls were left. One dropped down, and the locks engaged, grabbing the heavy harvester. Stranded sandminers continued to race in from the dune fields and scramble aboard, but the pilot did not wait. The carryall lifted off, pulling the harvester out of the sand and leaving a dozen men on the ground. The doomed workers turned, mouths open in dismay as the rampaging worm came at them. It gulped the whole field in a single mouthful.
Jesse kept running. He reached the top of a dune and slid down the other side, hoping to put distance between himself and the worm. He smelled sulfur in the air and heard shouts, along with the winds and the crashing turmoil of the worm.
He shouted into the collar microphone again, “Save the men! Any ship that can make a second run, swing back!” He wasn’t sure if anyone heard him amid the babble of overlapping commands and screams.
Then, as Jesse scrambled forward, the ground unexpectedly dropped out from beneath his feet. He gasped, flailed with his hands, and saw the powder swirl, sucking him down.
A sand whirlpool!
The vortex had his legs now and yanked him into the sand up to his waist, his chest, his shoulders. He cried out one last time, then closed his eyes as the impossibly dry maelstrom swallowed him. He couldn’t fight, couldn’t escape. It all happened too fast. He felt as if he had dropped over a cliff and fallen into darkness.
No one on the surface had even seen him vanish.
29
I didn’t consider his rank when I confronted him. I though
t only of my own duties to House and family.
—DOROTHY MAPES,
A Concubine’s Life
After the gas wore off and Esmar Tuek crawled his way back to consciousness, he found that the nightmare had only just begun.
He lay on the floor outside the bedroom of young Master Barri. Memories eluded him, lost in a cacophony of questions. He recalled leaving the mansion’s security chamber, sensing shadows around him and whisper-quiet movements … something so wrong that it made the gray hairs on the back of his neck prickle. He had gone to check on the nobleman’s son, heeding his instinctive sense of danger.
Now, as he lay recovering, Tuek remembered his legs going heavy, each breath feeling like a gasp through clogged bellows, his vision and balance spinning. Shouts had sounded around him, oddly muffled through an unseen gauze filling his head. In a blur, the walls and floor had tilted around him as he saw guards sprawled comatose on the floor. Each footstep had felt like lifting a boulder up a steep hill. Staggering toward Barri’s bedchamber, Tuek had seen a blur of movement—
And now he awoke on the cool tiles, his cheek pressed against the stone. With strong arms the old veteran levered himself up and sat catching his breath, fighting nausea and a pounding headache. His face hurt, and when he touched his bruised cheek he found a hard crust there and a dab of thick blood from a small cut under his left eye. Someone had struck him.
Anger lit a fuse in his bloodstream. He wrenched himself to his feet and gathered his balance enough to lean against a stone-block wall. Tuek tried to cry out for assistance, but his voice faded like a dry rasp of blown sand against a windowpane. Outside, the light had changed, and it took him a moment to place the time—the edges of dawn! How many hours had he been out cold?
He staggered into the boy’s bedchamber, where he saw a plaz window with the seals broken, shockingly open to the dry outside air. The self-cooling sheets on the bed were rumpled, but empty. Master Barri was gone.
When he found a mirror above the boy’s vanity, Tuek stared at the small cut on his own face, a distinctive indentation. He considered taking an impression, using investigative tools to reconstruct the weapon that had struck him. Then he recognized the unusual shape of the wound. Dorothy Mapes wore a triangular diagem on her ring.
He drew a breath again and called out, but managed nothing more than a coarse whisper. “Guards! I need assistance!”
Making his way out of the bedchamber, he heard stirrings in the mansion. Groans, curses, and the plaintive calls of alarm wafted through the corridors as stunned household staff and Catalan men at arms struggled to awaken.
“Guards!” he called again, and was pleased to hear the satisfyingly loud voice he produced this time. Almost recovered now, Tuek strode down the corridor, his mind spinning through the immediate steps he would have to take. He would bring all of House Linkam’s resources to bear. The nobleman’s son was missing, and Dorothy Mapes had something to do with it!
He stopped in his tracks. Looking down, he saw a gilded ceremonial scalpel lying on the floor. Blood on the blade. He bent, but stopped himself from touching it, recognizing immediately that it had belonged to the old household surgeon Cullington Yueh. Why was his blade here? Whose blood was it? Tuek marked the weapon for preservation and analysis. His teams could learn much from the evidence … .
Later, after the Catalan Guards had made a complete sweep of the mansion and assessed the damages, one thing became obvious: someone with intimate knowledge of the floor plan had rigged the dispersal of a potent knockout gas through the building’s ventilation system.
In addition to the boy, both Dorothy Mapes and Dr. Yueh were missing. Had they been allies? The stunner found inside the boy’s bedchamber had been fired enough that the charge pack was nearly depleted. Quick scans verified that Dorothy’s fingerprints were on the sharp scalpel, and the blood matched Yueh’s. Tuek touched the distinctive wound on his cheek, obviously made by the diagem ring Jesse’s concubine always wore.
“If you search more thoroughly,” he grimly told his men, “you should find the body of Dr. Yueh.” He sank into a hard chair at his security console, but knew it would be days before he allowed himself a full night’s sleep. “We have been betrayed.”
DR. YUEH ESCORTED a bound Dorothy Mapes past security into the Imperial yacht’s plush parlor. Her sharp eyes noticed subtle differences in the ornate cut of this throne from what she had seen on the larger ship. Apparently, Grand Emperor Wuda had many such thrones; perhaps a different artisan had done the work here.
For good measure, she struggled against the bonds that she had instructed Yueh to tie around her arms; the knots were clever, but she could easily work her way free if she wished. It had seemed the only way to get on board the Emperor’s ship in time to reach Barri.
“You were not ordered to bring the concubine!” The plump Grand Emperor emerged from behind the throne, as if he had been hiding there. He wore a simple black robe with a high gold collar, which made his skin look even pastier than usual. Two guards emerged from behind columns, one on each side of the visitors. “I want only the son of Nobleman Linkam as hostage.”
Dr. Yueh seemed on the verge of collapse. He stammered, “D-don’t underestimate her value, S-Sire. The nobleman holds her in extremely high regard. She is the mother of his only son. I believe Nobleman Linkam has a powerful emotional connection with her.”
“You mean he loves this woman? A commoner? No wonder he is weak.” He tittered, and the guards followed suit. “Well, you promised me the boy, and you delivered him. Now, as we agreed, I will use my influence to see what I can do for your poor wife in the Hoskanner clutches.”
A flush of gratitude pinkened the old surgeon’s milk-pale cheeks. “Thank you, Sire.”
“However, I have no use for a mere concubine—especially one who is not of noble birth. She gains me nothing.” The Emperor looked at Dorothy with the pouting expression of an insect collector discarding a specimen. “She isn’t even that pretty.”
Yueh swallowed hard, and uttered the words he had been told to repeat. “Oh, don’t underestimate her value, Sire. She may be useful as an additional bargaining chip. The nobleman is very fond of her. It is one of his weaknesses.”
She lifted her chin, ignoring the turncoat doctor. “Taking political hostages is expressly forbidden by your own Imperial law, Sire.”
The Emperor frowned at her. “As you said, it is my own law. I can make new decrees if the old ones no longer serve me. It won’t be difficult to spread the story that the Hoskanners kidnapped your son. Who would disbelieve it?”
Dorothy did not reply. She wanted to think that General Tuek would be able to ferret out the truth, but he had little evidence … and plenty of preconceptions against her.
She waited as Emperor Wuda stepped onto the pedestal of his throne and settled his bulk into the seat. He took a long time to make himself comfortable atop a thick gold-and-black pillow.
“I want to see my son,” she demanded, using a level of vocal command that made the Grand Emperor flinch and glower.
“So? I want many things as well, and my wishes trump yours. We’ve learned of the large spice stockpile Nobleman Linkam has been hiding from me. In fact, I am amazed—his complaints and excuses had us convinced of his incompetence. And now! If the estimates I’m receiving are accurate, we could ship enough melange to end the spice riots on Renaissance, Jival, Alle, and every other planet.” His plump lips formed a humorless smile. “As soon as we find out where he’s hiding it.”
Dorothy frowned. Spice riots? What was going on out there in the Empire that had been kept hidden from Duneworld? “And you intend to hold my son hostage until Jesse cooperates?”
“And you, too, apparently. Rather simple, wouldn’t you say?”
Though she doubted her appeal would help, Dorothy said, “Grand Emperor, you and your comrades call yourselves noblemen. What is noble about kidnapping a nine-year-old boy?”
“A lowborn concubine wouldn’t underst
and the rules of civilized society,” he said with a condescending, mocking smile.
The pieces were falling together all around her, but not in expected ways. Why did so many people crave the spice? She redirected her line of inquiry. “Why would you discard centuries of tradition, break established law, and do everything in your power to bring down House Linkam when we are on the verge of winning a challenge that you yourself offered?”
“For melange, of course. The spice is everything.”
This still didn’t make sense to her. “Why are you so desperate ? An Emperor can have at his disposal any drug he chooses.”
The flabby leader gripped the armrests of his throne, and leaned forward. “Grand Emperor Inton Wuda is never desperate for anything.”
Dorothy caught herself, realizing that she had uncovered a weakness he had never meant to reveal. He was obsessed with the spice! What sort of hold did it have on him? She tried to retreat quickly. “Sire, please forgive my choice of words. I am agitated about the danger to Barri Linkam, my son, a young nobleman in his own right. He deserves every protection that your good offices can afford him.”
The Emperor made an annoyed, dismissive gesture. He shifted uneasily on the pillow. “Naturally, he will be protected. He’s no good to me dead.”
She held her silence, knowing that Jesse was a stubborn man, not given to compromises, even when faced with unfavorable odds. He would not be blackmailed, under any circumstances. She feared what he would do when he learned of the kidnapping.
“Throw the mother into the same room with the brat,” said a deep, firm voice that was disturbingly familiar to Dorothy. “If that keeps him quiet, it’ll be worth letting her live for now.”
At a sound on her left, Dorothy looked in that direction, past Dr. Yueh.
Striding through a doorway, Valdemar Hoskanner smiled smugly at her. Without a word, he took a seat in a chair beside the throne, as if he belonged there.
Road to Dune Page 17
