“A true mercenary never stops fighting.” His eyes narrowed. “I see you’re an officer yourself.”
Vergyl let out a frustrated sigh. “In the Construction Brigade. It’s not what I wanted. I’d rather be fighting, but … it’s a long story.”
Noret wiped sweat from his brow. “Your name?”
“Second Decero Tantor.”
With no flicker of recognition at the name, Noret looked at the combat mek and then at the young officer. “Perhaps we can arrange a little taste of battle for you anyway.”
“You would let me … ?” Vergyl felt his pulse quicken.
Zon Noret nodded. “If a man wants to fight, he should be allowed to do so.”
Vergyl lifted his chin. “I couldn’t agree more.”
“I warn you, this may be a training mek, but it is lethal. I often disconnect its safety protocol during my rigorous practices. That is why Ginaz mercenaries are so good.”
“Still, there must be fail-safes, or it wouldn’t be much good as an instructor.”
“Training that entails no risk is not realistic. It makes the student soft, knowing he is in no danger. Chirox is not like that, by design. He could kill you.”
Vergyl felt a rush of bravado, hoped he wasn’t being foolish. “I can handle myself. I’ve gone through Jihad training of my own.” But he wanted a chance to prove himself, and this combat robot might be as close to the fight as he ever got. Vergyl focused his hatred on Chirox, for all the horrors the fighting machines had inflicted upon humanity, and wanted to smash the mek into scrap metal. “Let me fight it, just as you were doing.”
The mercenary raised his eyebrows, as if amused and interested. “Your choice of weapons, young warrior?”
Vergyl fumbled, looked at the clumsy training staff he had grabbed. “I didn’t bring anything but this.”
Noret held his pulse sword up for the younger man to examine. “Do you know how to operate one of these?”
“That looks like one we used in basic training, but a newer model.”
“Correct.” Noret activated the weapon and handed it to the young man.
Vergyl hefted the sword to check its balance. Shimmering arcs of disruptive energy ran along the surface of its blade.
He took a deep breath and studied the combat mek, who stared back at him dispassionately, its eyelike optic threads glowing orange … waiting. The sensors shifted direction, watched Noret approach, and prepared for another opponent.
When the mercenary activated the mek, only two of the six mechanical arms emerged from the torso. One metal hand clasped a dagger, while the other was empty.
“It’s going to fight me at a low difficulty setting,” Vergyl complained.
“Perhaps Chirox just wants to test you. In actual combat, your adversary will never provide a resumé of his skills beforehand.”
Vergyl moved carefully toward the mek, then shifted to his left and circled, holding the pulse sword. He felt moisture on his palm, loosened his grip a bit. The mek kept turning to face him. Its dagger hand twitched, and Vergyl jabbed at the robot’s weapon with the electronic sword, hitting it with a purple pulse that caused the robot to shudder.
“Looks like a dumb machine to me.” He had imagined combat like this. Vergyl darted toward his opponent and struck the torso with the pulse sword, leaving a purple discoloration on the metal body. He tapped a blue button on the weapon’s handle until it reached the highest pulse setting.
“Go for the head,” Noret counseled. “Scramble the robot’s circuits to slow him. If you strike Chirox just right, he will need a minute or two to reconfigure.”
Again Vergyl struck, but missed the head, sliding down to the armored shoulder. Multicolored sparks covered the mek’s outer surface, and the dagger dropped from its mechanical grip to clatter on the floor of the training chamber. A wisp of smoke rose from the robot’s hand.
Excited, Vergyl moved in for the kill. He didn’t care if anyone needed this fighting unit for training. He wanted to destroy it, to burn it into molten remains. He thought of Serena, of little Manion, of all the slaughtered humans … and of his own inability to fight for the Jihad. This scapegoat mek would have to do for now.
But as he stepped forward, suddenly the flowmetal of the robot’s free hand shifted, reshaping itself and extruding a short sword with barbs on the blade. The other hand stopped sparking, and a matching weapon also formed there.
“Careful, young warrior. We wouldn’t want the Army to lose your construction skills.”
Feeling a surge of anger at the remark, Vergyl snapped, “I’m not afraid of this machine.”
“Fear is not always unwise.”
“Even against a stupid opponent? Chirox doesn’t even know I’m ridiculing him, does he?”
“I am just a machine,” the mek recited, its synthesized voice coming from a speaker patch. Vergyl was taken aback, thinking he had caught just a hint of sarcasm in the robot’s voice. Like a theatrical mask, its face did not change its expression.
“Chirox doesn’t usually say much,” Noret said, smiling. “Go ahead, pound him some more. But even I don’t know all the surprises he might have in store.”
Vergyl moved back to reassess his opponent. He studied the robot’s bright optic threads as they focused on the pulse weapon.
Abruptly, Chirox lunged with the barbed short sword, exhibiting unexpected speed and agility. Vergyl tried to dodge the blow, but did not move quickly enough, and a shallow gash opened on one of his arms. He went into a floor roll to escape, then glanced at the wound as he leaped back to his feet.
“Not a bad move,” Noret said, his tone casual, as if he didn’t care whether the robot killed Vergyl. Killing was both sport and profession to him. Maybe it took a harsh mindset to be a mercenary for Ginaz, but Vergyl—endowed with no such harshness—worried that he had gotten into this situation on impulse and might be facing a challenge more difficult than he was ready for. The combat mek kept advancing with jerking, unpredictable speeds, sometimes lunging with an astonishing fluidity of motion.
Vergyl darted from side to side, striking repeated blows with the pulse sword. He executed proficient rolls and considered attempting a showy backflip, but didn’t know if he could pull it off. Failure to properly execute a move could prove fatal.
One of his pulse blows struck the panel box on Chirox’s side, making it glow red. The robot paused. A thin, agile arm emerged from the robot’s torso and adjusted something inside.
“It can repair itself?”
“Most combat meks can. You wanted a fair shot at a real machine opponent, didn’t you? I warned you about this robot.”
Suddenly Chirox came at Vergyl harder and faster than before. Two more arms extruded from the body core. One held a long dagger with a jagged tip for snagging and ripping flesh. The other held a shimmering branding iron.
Zon Noret said something in an anxious tone, but the words blurred. The entire universe that Vergyl had known up to this point faded, along with all unnecessary sensory perception. He focused only on survival.
“I am a jihadi,” Vergyl whispered. He resigned himself to fate and at the same time decided to inflict as much damage as he could. He recalled a pledge that even the Construction Brigade had to memorize: “If I die in battle against the machines, I will join those who have gone to Paradise before me, and those who follow.” He felt a near-trancelike state consume him and remove all fear of death.
He plunged into battle, flailing away, striking the pulse sword against the mek, discharging the weapon repeatedly. In the background, someone shouted words he couldn’t make out. Then Vergyl heard a loud click, saw a flash of color, and bright yellow light immersed him. It felt like a blast from a polar wind and froze him in place.
Immobilized, helpless, Vergyl shuddered, then toppled. He fell for what seemed like a great distance. His teeth chattered, and he shivered. He didn’t seem to land anywhere.
Finally he found himself looking up into the robot’s gleaming optic sen
sors. Totally vulnerable.
“I can kill you now.” The machine pressed the jagged tip of the long dagger against Vergyl’s neck.
The combat mek could thrust the blade through his throat in a microsecond. Vergyl heard shouts, but could not squirm away. He stared up into the implacable optical sensors of the robot, the face of the hated machine enemy. The thinking machine was going to kill him—and this wasn’t even a real battle. What a fool he had been.
Somewhere in the distance, familiar voices—two of them?—called out to him. “Vergyl! Vergyl! Shut the damn thing off, Noret!”
He tried to lift his head and look around, but could not move. Chirox continued to press the sharp point against his jugular vein. His muscles were paralyzed, as if frozen inside a block of ice.
“Get me a disruptor gun!” He recognized the voice at last. Xavier. Somehow, incongruously, Vergyl worried more about his brother’s disapproval than dying.
But then the mek straightened and removed the dagger blade from his throat.
He heard more voices, the thumping of boots, and the clattering of weaponry. Peripherally, Vergyl saw movement, and crimson-and-green jihadi uniforms. Xavier shouted commands to his men, but Chirox retracted the jagged dagger, his other weapons, and all four arms into his torso. The fiercely glowing optic threads dulled to a soft glimmer.
Zon Noret placed himself in front of the robot. “Don’t shoot, Segundo. Chirox could have killed him, but didn’t. He is programmed to take advantage of a weakness and deliver a mortal blow, yet he made a conscious decision against it.”
“I did not wish to kill him.” The combat robot reset itself to a stationary position. “It was not necessary.”
Vergyl finally cleared his head enough to push himself into a stiff sitting position. “That mek actually showed … compassion?” He still felt dazed from the mysterious stun blast. “Imagine that, a machine with feelings.”
“It wasn’t compassion at all,” Xavier said, with a contentious scowl. He reached down to help his brother to his feet.
“It was the strangest thing,” Vergyl insisted. “Did you see the gentleness in his eyes?”
Zon Noret, intent on his training mek, looked into the machine’s panel box, studied instrument readings, and made adjustments. “Chirox simply assessed the situation and went into survival mode. But there must have been something buried in his original programming.”
“Machines don’t care about survival,” Xavier snapped. “You saw them at Peridot Colony. They hurl themselves into battle without concern for personal safety.” He shook his head. “There’s something wrong with your mek’s programming, a glitch.”
Vergyl stared over at Chirox, caught the gaze of the glowing optic threads. In the depths of the lights, the young construction officer thought he detected a flicker of something animate, which intrigued and frightened him at the same time.
“Humans can learn compassion, too,” Chirox said, unexpectedly.
“I’ll run him through a complete overhaul,” Noret said, but his voice was uncertain.
Xavier stood in front of Vergyl, checking him for serious injuries. Then he spoke in a shaky voice as he led his brother out of the training chamber. “That was quite a scare you gave me.”
“I just wanted to fight a real enemy for once.”
Xavier looked deeply saddened. “Vergyl, I fear that you will have your chance, eventually. This Jihad will not be over anytime soon.”
THE FACES OF A MARTYR
A Tale of the Butlerian Jihad
I’m sorry,” Rekur Van said to his fellow Tlulaxa researcher as he slipped the knife deftly through the victim’s spine, then added an extra twist. “I need this ship more than you do.”
Blood seeped around the slender steel blade, then spilled in a final dying gush as Van yanked the knife back out. His comrade jittered and twitched as nerve endings attempted to fire. Van tumbled him out the hatch of the small vessel, discarding him onto the pavement of the spaceport.
Explosions, shouts, and weapons fire rang through the streets of the main Tlulaxa city. The fatally wounded genetic scientist sprawled on the ground, still shuddering, his close-set eyes dimming as they blinked accusations at Rekur Van. Discarded, like so many other vital things …
He wiped the blood on his garments, but his hands remained sticky. He would have time to launder the clothes and clean his skin, once he escaped. Blood … it was the currency of his trade, a genetic resource filled with useful DNA. He hated to waste so much of it.
But now the League of Nobles wanted blood. His blood.
Though he was one of the most brilliant Tlulaxa scientists and well connected with powerful religious leaders, Van had to flee his homeworld to escape the lynch mobs. Outraged members of the League blockaded the planet and swept in to extract their justice. If they caught him, he could not begin to imagine the retribution they would inflict upon him. “Fanatics—all of you!” he shouted uselessly toward the city, then sealed the hatch.
With no time to retrieve his priceless research documents and forced to leave his personal wealth behind, Van used his bloodstained hands to operate the stolen ship’s controls. Without a plan, wanting only to get off the planet before the vengeful League soldiers could seize him, he launched his vessel into the sky.
“Damn you, Iblis Ginjo!” he said to himself. It gave him very little consolation to know that the Grand Patriarch was already dead.
Ginjo had always treated him as a lower form of life. Van and the Grand Patriarch had been business associates who depended on each other but shared no feelings of trust. In the end, the League had discovered the horrific secret of the Tlulaxa organ farms: missing soldiers and Zensunni slaves were cut up to provide replacement parts for other wounded fighters. Now the tables had turned. All of the Tlulaxa were in turmoil, scrambling for their lives to escape the League’s indignant vengeance. Flesh merchants had to go into hiding, and legitimate traders were run off of civilized worlds. Disgraced and ruined, Van was now a hunted man.
But even without his laboratory records, his mind still carried vital knowledge to be shared with the highest bidder. And sealed in a pocket he took with him a small vial of special genetic material that would allow him to start over again. If he could only get away …
Reaching orbit in his stolen ship, Van saw powerful javelin battleships manned by angry jihadis. Numerous Tlulaxa vessels—most of them flown by inexperienced and panicked pilots such as himself—streaked away in a pell-mell fashion, and the League warships targeted all Tlulaxa craft that came within range.
“Why not just assume we’re all guilty?” he snarled at the images, knowing no one could hear him.
Van increased acceleration, not knowing how fast the unfamiliar ship could go. With the end of his sleeve, he wiped away a blot of drying blood on the control panel so he could read the instruments better. The League javelins took potshots at him, and an angry voice over the commline.
“Tlulaxa craft! Stand down—surrender or be destroyed.”
“Why not use your weapons against the thinking machines?” Van retorted. “The Army of the Jihad is wasting time and resources here. Or have you forgotten the real enemies of humanity?” Surely any supposed Tlulaxa crimes were minimal compared to decades of devastation by the computer evermind Omnius.
Apparently, the javelin commander did not appreciate his sarcasm. Exploding projectiles streaked silently past him, and Van reacted with a sudden lurch of deceleration; the artillery detonated some distance from its intended target, but the shock-wave still put his stolen ship into a spin. Flashing lights and alarm signals lit the control panels in the cockpit, but Van did not send out a distress signal. Noiselessly, he tumbled out of control, playing dead—and the League ships soon left him to hunt other hapless Tlulaxa escapees. They had plenty of victims to choose from.
When the League battleships were finally gone, Van felt he was safe enough to engage stabilizers. After several exaggerated attempts, he compensated for the out-of-con
trol rolling and got his ship back on course. With no destination in mind, intent only on escaping, he flew out of the system as far and as fast as he could go. He did not regret what he was leaving behind.
For most of his life, Van had worked to develop vital new biological techniques, as had generations of his people before him. During the Jihad, the Tlulaxa had made themselves fabulously wealthy, and presumably indispensable. Now, though, Serena’s fanatics would raze the original organ farms, destroying the transplant tanks, and “mercifully” putting the donors out of their misery. Short-sighted fools! How the League would complain in coming years when eyeless or limbless veterans wailed about their injuries and had nowhere else to go.
The myopic League idealists didn’t consider practical matters, didn’t plan well at all. As with so many things in Serena Butler’s Jihad, they chased unrealistic dreams, were driven by foolish emotions. Van hated those people.
He grasped the ship’s control bar as if to strangle it, pretending it was Iblis Ginjo’s thick neck. Despite a full résumé of despicable acts, the Grand Patriarch had succeeded in keeping his own name clean while shifting blame onto an old, hard-bitten war hero, Xavier Harkonnen, and the whole Tlulaxa race. Ginjo’s ever-scheming widow falsely portrayed her fallen husband as a martyr.
The League could steal the “honor” of the Tlulaxa people. Mobs could take their wealth and force his people to live as outlaws. But the betrayers could never take away Rekur Van’s special knowledge and skills. This scapegoat was still able to fight back.
Finally, Van made up his mind where he should go, where he should take his secret and innovative cloning technology, as well as viable cells from Serena Butler herself.
He headed out past the boundaries of League space to find the machine worlds, where he intended to present himself to the evermind Omnius.
ON SALUSA SECUNDUS, capital of the League of Nobles, a screaming, unruly crowd set fire to the figure of a man.
Road to Dune Page 40
