Sandworms of Dune

by Frank Herbert

  Teg continued to hurry. The pulsing alarm lights flickered on to off, like a sun rising and setting. Another hour gone in his own frame of reference. In real time, only a few seconds had passed since his disappearance from the bridge. Next, he turned to the engines, which were essential to their escape.

  The primary linkages had been disrupted, with Holtzman catalysts shaken from their cradles, shoved out of alignment, made inoperable. Two reaction chambers were breached. An explosion had nearly broken through the hull. He stood stunned, his arms shaking, thinking he couldn't possibly fix this. But he forced such thoughts away, went back to work.

  Teg's muscles trembled with exhaustion, and his lungs burned from gasping air so fast the oxygen molecules could barely move into position.

  Fixing the hull should be easy enough. Teg ran to the maintenance sectors, where he located extra plates. Since he could never make the ship's heavy-lifting machinery operate fast enough for his time-sense, he decided that suspensors would have to do. He applied the null-gravity projectors to the heavy plates and hurried with them down corridors, dodging petrified people.

  With each second, the Enemy battleships were getting closer. Some of his fellow passengers were only just now learning of the mines that had been detonated. He put on another burst of speed, and the suspensor carriers kept up with him.

  In a few "hours," according to his metabolism, and only a few moments in reality, he fixed the hull damage that could have resulted in an engine breach. Sweat poured off of Teg's body, and he was near collapse. But in spite of that utter exhaustion, he could not let himself slow down. Never before had he allowed himself to fall so deeply into a pit of burning metabolism.

  Teg's body could not maintain this pace for long. But if he didn't, the ship would be captured, and they would all die. Fangs of hunger gnawed at his stomach. This would not do. He had to concentrate, had to fuel the engine of his body so that he could do what must be done.

  Ravenous, not slowing from his superspeed, he raided the ship's stores, where he found energy bars and dense food wafers. He ate concentrated nutrients until he was gorged. Then, burning calories as fast as he could swallow them, Teg ran again from one disaster area to the next.

  He spent subjective days at these highly focused labors; to observers on the outside, caught in the glacial pace of normal time, only a minute or two passed.

  When the task grew overwhelming, the Bashar struggled to reassess what the ship needed in order to function. What was the bare minimum of repairs that would let Duncan fly through the weakened loophole?

  The exploding mines had led to a cascading series of damages. Teg nearly got lost in the details, but reminded himself of the immediate need and forced himself to skate the thin ice of possibilities.

  Teg and his brave men had stolen this very vessel from Gammu more than three decades ago. Though it had performed admirably since then, the Ithaca had not undergone any of the usual necessary maintenance at Guild shipyards. Worn components had not been replaced; systems were breaking down from age and neglect, as well as the depredations of the saboteurs. Limited by the spare parts and materials he could find in the maintenance bays, he tried and discarded possible fixes.

  Alarms continued to pulse slowly. He was moving too fast for sound waves to mean anything. In real time, there would be shrieking sirens, shouting people, conflicting orders.

  Teg fixed another of the Holtzman catalyst cradles, then took the time to look at a viewer. In the image displayed between scan lines, he saw that the Enemy ships had finally arrived, massive and heavily armed . . . a full fleet of monstrous, angular things that bristled with weapons, sensor arrays, and other sharp protrusions.

  Though he already felt used up, Teg knew with a sickening certainty that he needed to go even faster.

  He raced to the ship's melange stores and broke the locks with a twist of his hand because he was moving so fast. He removed cakes of the dark brown compressed substance, stared at it with Mentat calculation. Considering his hypermetabolism and his body churning through its biochemical machinery faster than it ever had before, what was the proper dosage? How quickly would it affect him? Teg decided on three wafers--triple the maximum he had ever consumed--and gobbled them all.

  As the melange rushed through his body and poured into his senses, he felt alive again, recharged and capable of accomplishing the requisite impossibilities. His muscles and nerves were on fire, and his feet left marks on the deck as he ran.

  He repaired the next system in a few moments. But in that time, the Enemy battle fleet had closed in, and the no-ship still could not fly.

  Teg looked down at his forearms and saw that his skin seemed to be shriveling up, as if he was consuming every drop of energy within his flesh.

  Outside, the encroaching vessels launched a volley of destructive blasts. Balls of energy tumbled forward like storm clouds approaching with exquisite slowness. Those blasts would clearly render his repairs useless, maybe even destroy the ship.

  In another burst of extreme speed, Teg dashed to the defensive controls. Thankfully, he had restored a few of their weapons. The Ithaca's defensive systems were sluggish, but the firing controls were swift enough. With a scattershot cannonade, like a burst of celebratory fireworks, Teg returned fire. He launched beams carefully targeted to intercept and dissipate the oncoming projectiles. Once he had fired the volley, though, Teg turned his back on the weapons systems and raced to the next damaged engine.

  Bashar Teg felt like a candle that had been burnt entirely down to a lump of discolored wax. Despite his best efforts, the exhausted man still saw their doom closing in.

  How do we repay a man who has done the impossible?

  --BASHAR ALEF BURZMALI,

  A Dirge for the Soldier

  On the navigation bridge, Duncan stared at the sensor projections for moments after Miles had disappeared. He knew what the Bashar must be doing.

  After the internal explosions, the Ithaca hung dead in space, surrounded by Enemy ships that bristled with more weaponry than he had seen on an entire Harkonnen battle fleet. The mines had disabled the no-field generator, leaving the great ship visible and vulnerable in space.

  After almost a quarter century of fleeing, they were caught. Maybe it was about damned time he faced the mysterious hunters. Who were his strange and invincible foes? He had only ever seen the ghostly shadows of the old man and old woman. And now . . .

  On the screens before him, the discontinuity in the gossamer net shifted, almost closed, and then strayed open again, as if taunting him.

  Duncan spoke aloud, more to himself than anyone else. A prayer of sorts. "As long as we breathe, we have a chance. Our task is to identify any opportunity, however transitory or difficult it might be."

  Teg had said he would fix their systems. Duncan was aware of the Bashar's closely held abilities. For years, Teg had concealed his talent from the Bene Gesserits, who feared such manifestations as the sign of a potential Kwisatz Haderach. Now those abilities might save them all. "Don't let us down, Miles."

  The encroaching ships fired a series of blasts at the no-ship. Duncan barely had time to shout a curse and brace for impact--when a flurry of impossibly fast and deft defensive bursts intercepted the Enemy volley. Precisely targeted, instantly fired. All shots blocked.

  Duncan blinked. Who had launched the return salvo? He shook his head. The no-ship should have been incapable of even basic maneuvers or defense. A chill of delight coursed down his spine. Miles!

  Suddenly, the control deck's systems began to glow; green indicator lights winked on by themselves. One after another, systems came back online. Sensing movement, Duncan snapped his head to the left.

  The Bashar materialized in front of him, but it was a different Miles Teg--not the young ghola whom Duncan had raised and awakened, but a horribly drained man, as desiccated and ancient as an ambulatory mummy. Teg looked wrung out and ready to collapse. He had exerted himself through time far beyond the point where a normal man wou
ld have already died.

  "Boards . . . active." His gasping voice cost him more energy than he had left. "Go!"

  Everything happened in an instant, as if Duncan, too, had fallen into an accelerated time frame. His first instinct was to grab his friend. Teg was dying, might already be dead. The aged Bashar could no longer hold himself upright. "Go--damn it!" They were the last words Teg could force out of his mouth.

  Thinking with Mentat clarity, Duncan whipped back to the control panels, vowing not to waste what the Bashar had done for them. Priorities. He reached the piloting board, where his fingers skittered like a startled spider across the controls.

  Teg crumpled to the deck, arms and legs akimbo, as dead as a dried leaf, older even than the first old Bashar had been in the last moments of Rakis. Miles! All their years together, teaching, learning, relying on each other. Few people in all of Duncan's many lives had ever mattered so much.

  He drove away his thoughts of shocked grief, but Mentat memory kept every experience clear and sharp. Miles! Teg was no more than an ancient husk on the floorplates. Duncan had no time for anger or tears.

  The no-ship began to accelerate. He still saw how to slip out of the cruel net, but now he also had to contend with the entire fleet of Enemy ships. They had cut loose with a second volley.

  The blurred crackle ahead seemed to invite them. Duncan steered toward it, moving as fast as his human reflexes could go. The no-ship ripped the stubborn strands free. "Come on!" Duncan said, willing it to happen.

  More blasts glanced across the Ithaca's hull, grazing the ship as it yawed and rolled. Duncan steered with all of his skill.

  The Holtzman engines were hot and the diagnostic boards showed numerous errors and system failures, but none were immediately fatal faults. Duncan pushed the vessel closer and closer to the loophole. The Enemy ships couldn't head them off, couldn't move fast enough to stop them.

  More of the net broke away. Duncan could see it happening.

  He forced his attention back to the engines, applying acceleration far beyond what the systems normally allowed. In his frantic repairs, Teg had not bothered with the niceties of fail-safes and protective limitations. With increased velocity, they pulled free of the enclosing cordon.

  "We're going to make it!" Duncan said to the fallen Bashar, as if his friend could still hear him.

  A giant torpedo-shaped Enemy vessel leapt forward. No human could possibly pilot a ship so swiftly, changing directions with g-forces that would snap bones like a handful of straw in a clenched fist. Burning its engines, the attacker exhausted all of its fuel in one burst of forward motion--throwing the craft directly into their path.

  With his maneuvering already hampered, Duncan could not dodge in time. The no-ship was too huge, with too much inertia. Impossibly, the suicidal Enemy vessel scraped the lower hull of the Ithaca, knocking it off course, damaging the engines yet again. The unexpected impact sent the no-ship spinning. The Enemy rammer tumbled and exploded, and the shock wave knocked them farther off course, out of control . . . back into the remaining strands of the net.

  Duncan uttered a curse in dismay and rage.

  Unable to fold space, the no-ship dropped back, its engines whining. The bridge control panels blazed red, then went dim. A small internal explosion further damaged the Holtzman engines. The Ithaca hung motionless in space. Again.

  "I'm sorry, Bashar," Duncan said, heartbroken. With nothing else to do, he knelt beside the husk of his friend.

  A message formed on the primary screen on the bridge, a powerful transmission from the surrounding battleships. Even in his stunned sorrow, Duncan was surprised to see the true face of the Enemy at last.

  The smooth flowmetal face of a sentient machine appeared on the screen. "You are our prisoners. Your vessel is no longer capable of independent flight. We will deliver you to the evermind Omnius."

  Thinking machines!

  Duncan struggled to understand what he was seeing and hearing. Omnius? The evermind? The Enemy, posing as a kindly old couple, were really thinking machines? Impossible! Thinking machines had been outlawed for thousands of years, and the last evermind had been destroyed in the Battle of Corrin at the end of the Butlerian Jihad.

  Machines? Somehow allied with the new Face Dancers?

  The Enemy ships pounced like hyenas on a fresh carcass.

  Some people complain of being haunted by their past. Utter nonsense! I revel in it.

  --BARON VLADIMIR HARKONNEN, the ghola

  Trapped by the machine fleet, the Ithaca was held captive with its engines damaged and weapons burned out. Duncan could do nothing but wait and mourn his dead friend. Consequences and memories roared around him. He moved methodically, relying on Mentat focus to perform even simple actions.

  Sheeana was beside him on the navigation bridge. Though she prided herself in Bene Gesserit purity, holding all emotions at bay, she seemed profoundly troubled as the two of them picked up Teg's body from where it lay crumpled on the deck. Duncan couldn't believe how fragile and lightweight the Bashar's remains were. He seemed to be made of spiderwebs and sinew, dried leaves and hollow bone.

  "Miles gave his life for all of us," Duncan said.

  "Two times," she said.

  Her remark made Duncan think of all the lives of his own he had given for the Atreides. In a raspy voice, he said, "This time, the sacrifice was for nothing. Miles used up his entire life span to give us the repairs we needed, and I couldn't break us free. He shouldn't have done it."

  Sheeana fixed a hard look on him. "He shouldn't have tried? We're humans. We have to try, no matter what the odds are. There are never any guarantees. Every action in life is a gamble. The Bashar fought to the last instant of his existence, because he believed there was a chance. I intend to do the same."

  Duncan looked down at the sunken, mummified face of his friend, remembering all the determination and hard training the old Bashar had given him when he was a young ghola. Sheeana was right. Even though Duncan hadn't been able to free the Ithaca and let them escape, he and Miles had shown the Enemy that humans were unpredictable and resilient, that they were not to be underestimated. And it wasn't over yet. Instead of a simple capture, the thinking machines had been forced to sacrifice one of their largest battleships simply to stop them.

  "We'll take him to one of the small airlocks," he announced. Since their every movement was now dictated by the Enemy ships that dragged them along, it was pointless to remain at the controls. "I have no intention of letting the thinking machines have him."

  The remnants of the Bashar would fly alone into the cosmos. The rest of them might be trapped, to be used in thinking-machine experiments, or for whatever reason the old man and woman had been pursuing them over the decades. But not Miles. This act would be another small victory--and enough small victories could win an entire war.

  They arrived at one of the chambers, which Duncan recognized as the same airlock he had used to jettison Murbella's last possessions, items that had clung to him like cobwebs until he forced himself to let go. They placed the tragically lightweight husk of Teg's body inside the chamber and sealed it. Duncan looked through the observation port, saying his last goodbyes.

  "It isn't the ceremony I would have imagined for him. Last time, the Bashar had all of Rakis for his funeral pyre. But there's no time." Before he could have second thoughts, Duncan pushed the button that evacuated the airlock, opening the outside hatch so that the body tumbled out into the void. "We should summon everyone aboard the ship and prepare our defenses."

  "What defenses?"

  He looked at her. "Anything we can think of."

  SHOULDERED FORWARD BY a hundred thinking-machine vessels, the battered no-ship was forced down into Synchrony, where shifting buildings moved aside to form an acceptable place for the captured craft to land. The now-visible Ithaca descended like a trussed wild animal, the trophy of big game hunters.

  Baron Harkonnen thought it a glorious sight. From an extruded balcony in one of Om
nius's capricious high towers, he studied the vessel as it descended. The no-ship's configuration was unfamiliar to him, massive but not as intimidating as he'd imagined it would be. This design was much more organic and alien-looking than huge Guild Heighliners, deadly Sardaukar craft, House Harkonnen military vessels, or his own family frigates. It seemed to be convergent evolution, eerily similar to the flow-form curves of the thinking-machine structures.

  Strange ship, strange passengers.

  According to initial reports from the machine scouts who had seized the no-ship, many of those aboard were gholas from his own past, annoyances resurrected from history, exactly as Erasmus had suspected--Lady Jessica, another Paul Atreides, a minor Swordmaster named Duncan Idaho, and who knew how many others? Gholas coughed up and spat out like wads of phlegm.

  A keyed-up Paolo stood beside him on the balcony, facing the makeshift spaceport that waited to accommodate the new vessel. "Will we kill them all, Grandfather? I don't want there to be another Kwisatz Haderach. I'm supposed to be the only one. I should take the ultraspice that Khrone delivered right now."

  "I would have you do it if I could, dear boy, but Omnius won't permit that. Be patient. Even if there is another version of Paul Atreides aboard that no-ship, he's probably soft and compassionate. He doesn't have the advantage of being toughened by me." The Baron's full lips curled down in distaste. Paolo himself didn't realize just how much of his fundamental personality had been changed. "You will have no trouble defeating him."

  "I have already visualized it," Paolo replied. "Real, prescient dreams--and now I understand what is going to happen."

  "Then you have nothing to worry about."

  The Omnius-formed buildings swayed like reeds, then embraced the battered no-ship as it landed, pulling the Ithaca down into a living metal cradle. The landing and lockdown process seemed interminable. Was it really necessary for so many structural braces to fold around the ship like claws? Considering the obvious damage to the engines, the captives could never find a way to launch the vessel again. However, Omnius had a penchant for doing things in a brute-force manner. The Baron could understand that.