Dune - House Atreides

by Brian Herbert

  "No doubt about that," Rabban said, but in a more ominous tone.

  Seated alone in the rear of the troop transport, huddled in his desert gear, Kynes felt uncomfortable in such company. He had no interest in the glorious ambitions of the Baron's nephew . . . but if this excursion gave him a good look at one of the monsters, it could be worth months of intensive effort on his own.

  Rabban stared out through the front of the transport; his hard, squinting eyes were surrounded by thick folds of skin. He scrutinized the desert as if it were a delicacy he intended to eat, seeing none of the beauty Kynes noted in the landscape.

  "I have a plan, and this is how we'll follow it." Rabban turned to the troops and opened the comsystem to the spotter ornithopters flying in formation around the transport. They cruised out over the expanse of open sand. The dune ripples below looked like wrinkles on an old man's skin.

  "That outcropping of rock down there" -- he gestured, and read off the coordinates -- "will be our base. About three hundred meters from the rock we'll touch down in the open sand, where we'll drop Thekar with a gadget he calls a thumper. Then we'll lift off to the safety of the rock outcroppings, where the worm can't go."

  The lean desert man looked up in alarm. "Leave me out there? But m'Lord, I'm not --"

  "You gave me the idea." He turned back to address the uniformed troops. "Thekar here says that this Fremen device, a thumper, will bring a worm. We'll plant one along with enough explosives to take care of the beast when it comes. Thekar, we will leave you behind to rig the explosives and trigger the thumper. You can run across the sands and make it to safety with us before a worm can come, right?" Rabban gave him a delicious little grin.

  "I -- I . . ." Thekar stammered. "It appears I have no choice."

  "Even if you can't make it, the worm will probably go for the thumper first. The explosives will get the beast before you become its next target."

  "I take comfort in that, m'Lord," Thekar said.

  Intrigued by the Fremen device, Kynes considered obtaining one for himself. He wished he could watch this desert native up close to witness how he ran across the sands, how he eluded pursuit from the vibration-sensitive "Old Man of the Desert." But the Planetologist knew enough to remain quiet and avoid Rabban's notice, hoping that the hot-blooded young Harkonnen wouldn't volunteer him to assist Thekar.

  Inside the personnel compartment at the back of the craft, the Bator -- a commander of a small troop -- and his underlings looked through the weapons stockpile, removing lasguns for themselves. They rigged explosives to the stakelike mechanism that Thekar had brought along. A thumper.

  With curious eyes, Kynes could see that it was just a spring-wound clockwork device that would thunk out a loud, rhythmic vibration. When plunged into the sand, the thumper would send reverberations deep below the desert to where "Shai-Hulud" could hear them.

  "As soon as we land, you'd better rig up these explosives fast," Rabban said to Thekar. "The engines of these ornithopters will do a good job of attracting the worm, even without the help of your Fremen toy."

  "I know that all too well, m'Lord," Thekar said. His olive skin now had a grayish, oily tinge of terror.

  The ornithopter struts kissed the sands, throwing up loose dust. The hatch opened, and Thekar -- determined, now -- grabbed his thumper and sprang out, landing with spread feet on the soft desert. He flashed a longing glance back up at the flying craft, then turned toward the dubious safety of the line of solid rock some three hundred meters away.

  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. Awe, 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 several 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

  0f 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 move
d: 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 ace-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-plat, 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.