But Rabban wanted the boy to run and hide, and he knew he wouldn't get very far. For the moment Duncan had to act on instinct tempered with cleverness. It wasn't the time for an unexpected, reckless action. Not yet.
Duncan would wait at the cruiser until the hunters explained the rules to him, though he could certainly guess what he was supposed to do. It was a bigger arena, a longer chase, higher stakes . . . but in essence the same game he had trained for in the prison city.
The upper hatch slid open behind him to reveal two light-haloed forms: a person he recognized as the hunt captain from Barony, and the broad-shouldered man who had killed Duncan's mother and father. Rabban.
Turning away from the sudden light, the boy kept his dark-adapted eyes toward the open meadow and the thick shadows of black-needled trees. It was a starlit night. Pain shot through Duncan's ribs from the earlier rough training, but he tried to put it out of his mind.
"Forest Guard Station," the hunt captain said to him. "Like a vacation in the wilderness. Enjoy it! This is a game, boy -- we leave you here, give you a head start, and then we come hunting." His eyes narrowed. "Make no mistake, though. This is different from your training sessions in Barony. If you lose, you'll be killed, and your stuffed head will join Lord Rabban's other trophies on a wall."
Beside him, the Baron's nephew gave Duncan a thick-lipped smile. Rabban trembled with excitement and anticipation, and his sunburned face flushed.
"What if I get away?" Duncan said in a piping voice.
"You won't," Rabban answered.
Duncan didn't press the issue. If he forced an answer, the man would simply have lied to him anyway. If he managed to escape, he would just have to make up his own rules.
They dumped him out onto the frost-smeared meadow. He had only thin clothes, worn shoes. The cold of the night hit him like a hammer.
"Stay alive as long as you can, boy," Rabban called from the door of the cruiser, ducking back inside as the throb of the engines increased in tempo. "Give me a good hunt. My last one was very disappointing."
Duncan stood immobile as the craft lifted into the air and roared off toward a guarded lodge and outpost. From there, after a few drinks, the hunting party would march out and track down their prey.
Maybe the Harkonnens would toy with him a while, enjoying their sport . . . or maybe by the time they caught him they would be chilled to the bone, longing for a hot beverage, and they'd simply use their weapons to cut him to pieces at the first opportunity.
Duncan sprinted toward the shelter of trees.
Even when he left the meadow behind, his feet left an obvious trail of bent grass blades in the frost. He brushed against thick evergreen boughs, disturbed the chuff of dead needles as he scrambled upslope toward some rugged sandstone outcroppings.
In the handlight beam, he saw cold steam-breath bursting like heartbeats from his nostrils and mouth. He toiled up a talus slope, tending toward the steepest bluff faces. When he struck the rocks, he grasped with his hands, digging into crumbling sedimentary rock. Here, at least, he wouldn't leave many footprints, though pockets of old, crystalline snow had drifted like small dunes on the ledges.
The outcroppings protruded from the side of the ridge, sentinels above the carpet of forest. Wind and rain had eaten holes and notches out of the cliffs, some barely large enough for rodents' nests, some sufficient to hide a grown man. Driven by desperation, Duncan climbed until he could barely breathe from the exertion.
When he reached the top of an exposed sandwich of rock that was rust and tan in his light beam, he squatted on his heels and looked all around, assessing his wilderness surroundings. He wondered if the hunters were coming yet. They wouldn't be far behind him.
Animals howled in the distance. He flipped off the light to conceal himself better. The old injuries to his ribs and back burned with pain, and his upper arm throbbed where the pulsing locator beacon was implanted.
Behind him, more shadowy bluffs rose tall and steep, honeycombed with notches and ledges, adorned with scraggly trees like unsightly whiskers sprouting from a facial blemish. It was a long, long way to the nearest city, the nearest spaceport.
Forest Guard Station. His mother had told him of this isolated hunting preserve, a particular favorite of the Baron's nephew. "Rabban's so cruel because he needs to prove he's not like his father," she had once said.
The young boy had spent most of the nearly nine years of his life inside giant buildings, smelling recycled air laden with lubricants, solvents, and exhaust chemicals. He had never known how cold this planet could get, how frigid the nights . . . or how clear the stars.
Overhead, the sky was a vault of immense blackness, filled with tiny light-splashes, a rainstorm of pinpricks piercing the distances of the galaxy. Far out there, Guild Navigators used their minds to guide city-sized Heighliners between stars.
Duncan had never seen a Guild ship, had never been away from Giedi Prime -- and now doubted he ever would. Living inside an industrial city, he'd never had reason to learn the patterns of stars. But even if he had known his compass points or recognized the constellations, he still had no place to go ....
Sitting atop the outcropping, looking out into the sharp coldness, Duncan studied his world. He huddled over and drew his knees up to his chest to conserve body heat, though he still shivered.
In the distance, where the high ground dipped into a wooded valley toward the stark silhouette of the guarded lodge building, he saw a train of lights, bobbing glowglobes like a fairy procession. The hunting party itself, warm and well armed, was sniffing him out, taking their time. Enjoying themselves.
From his vantage point, Duncan watched and waited, cold and forlorn. He had to decide if he wanted to live at all. What would he do? Where would he go? Who would care for him?
Rabban's lasgun had left nothing of his mother's face for him to kiss, nothing of her hair for him to stroke. He would never again hear her voice as she called him her "sweet Duncan."
Now the Harkonnens intended to do the same to him, and he couldn't prevent it. He was just a boy with a dull knife, a handlight, and a rope. The hunters had Richesian beacon trackers, heated body armor, and powerful weapons. They outnumbered him ten to one. He had no chance.
It might be easier if he just sat there and waited for them to come. Eventually the trackers would find him, inexorably following his implanted signal . . . but he could deny them their sport, spoil their fun. By surrendering, by showing his utter contempt for their barbaric amusements, he could gain a small victory at least: the only one he was likely to have.
Or Duncan Idaho could fight back, try to hurt the Harkonnens even as they hunted him down. His mother and father hadn't had an opportunity to fight for their lives, but Rabban was giving him that chance.
Rabban considered him a mere helpless boy. The hunting party thought that gunning down a child would provide them with some amusement.
He stood up on stiff legs, brushed his clothes, and stopped his shivers. I won't go down like that, he decided just to show them, just to prove they can't laugh at me.
He doubted the hunters would be wearing personal shields. They wouldn't think they'd need such protection, not against the likes of him.
The knife handle felt hard and rough in his pocket, useless against decent armor. But he could do something else with the blade, something painfully necessary. Yes, he would fight -- for all he was worth.
Crawling up the slope, climbing from rock to fallen tree, maintaining his balance on the scree, Duncan made his way to a small hollowed-out hole in the lumpy sandstone. He avoided the patches of remaining snow, keeping to the iron-frozen dirt so as to leave no obvious tracks.
The tracer implant would bring them directly to him, no matter where he ran.
Above the cave hollow, an overhang in the near-vertical bluff wall provided his second opportunity: loose, lichen-covered sandstone chunks, heavy boulders. Perhaps he could move them ....
Duncan crawled inside the shelter of t
he cave hollow, where he found it no warmer at all. Just darker. The opening was low enough that a grown man would have to belly-crawl inside; there was no other way out. This cave wouldn't offer him much protection. He'd have to hurry.
Squatting there, he switched on the small handlight, pulled off his stained shirt, and brought out the knife. He felt the lump of the tracer implant in the meat of his upper left arm, the back of the tricep at his shoulder.
His skin was already numb from the cold, his mind dulled by the shock of his circumstances. But when he jabbed with the knife, he felt the point dig into his muscle, lighting the nerves on fire. Closing his eyes against reflexive resistance, he cut deeply, prodding and poking with the tip of the blade.
He stared at the dark wall of the cave, saw skeletal shadows cast by the wan light. His right hand moved mechanically, like a probe excavating the tiny tracer. The pain shrank to a dim corner of his awareness.
At last the beacon fell out, a bloody piece of micro-constructed metal clinking to the dirty floor of the cave. Sophisticated technology from Richese. Reeling with pain, Duncan picked up a rock to smash the tracer. Then, thinking better of it, he set the rock down again and moved the tiny device deep into the shadows where no one could see it.
Better to leave the tracer there. As bait.
Crawling outside again, Duncan scooped up a handful of grainy snow. Red droplets spattered on the pale sandstone ledge. He packed the snow against the blood streaming from his shoulder, and the sharp cold deadened the pain of his self-inflicted cut. He pressed the ice hard against the wound until pink-tinged snow melted between his fingers. He grabbed another handful, no longer caring about the obvious marks he left in the drift. The Harkonnens would come to this place anyway.
At least the snow had stanched the flow of blood.
Then Duncan scrambled up and away from the cave, careful to leave no sign of where he was going. He saw the bobbing lights down in the valley split up; members of the hunting party had chosen different routes as they climbed the bluff. A darkened ornithopter whirred overhead.
Duncan moved as quickly as he could, but took care not to splash fresh blood again. He tore strips from his shirt to dab the oozing wound, leaving his chest naked and cold, then he pulled the ragged garment back over his shoulders. Perhaps the forest predators would smell the iron blood scent and hunt him down for food rather than sport. That was a problem he didn't want to consider right then.
With loose pebbles pattering around him, he circled back until he reached the overhang above his former shelter. Duncan's instinct was to run blindly, as far as he could go. But he made himself stop. This would be better. He squatted behind the loose, heavy chunks of rock, tested them to be sure of his strength, and dropped back to wait.
Before long, the first hunter came up the slope to the cave hollow. Clad in suspensor-augmented armor, the hunter slung a lasgun in front of him. He glanced down at a handheld device, counterpart to the Richesian tracer.
Duncan held his breath, making no move, disturbing no pebbles or debris. Blood sketched a hot line down his left arm.
The hunter paused in front of the hollow, noting the disturbed snow, the bloodstains, the targeting blip on his tracer. Though Duncan couldn't see the man's face, he knew the hunter wore a grin of scornful triumph.
Thrusting the lasgun into the hollow ahead of him, the hunter ducked low, bending stiffly in his protective chest padding. On his belly, he crawled partway into the darkness. "Found you, little boy!"
Using his feet and the strength of his leg muscles, Duncan shoved a lichen-smeared boulder over the edge. Then he moved to the second one and kicked it hard, pushing it to the abrupt dropoff. Both heavy stones fell, tumbling in the air.
He heard the sounds of impact and a crack. A sickening crunch.
Then the gasp and gurgle of the man below.
Duncan scrambled to the edge, saw that one of the boulders had struck to one side, bouncing off and rolling down the steep slope, gathering momentum and taking loose scree along with it.
The other boulder had landed on the small of the hunter's back, crushing his spine even through the padding, pinning him to the ground like a needle through an insect specimen.
Duncan climbed down, gasping, slipping. The hunter was still alive, though paralyzed. His legs twitched, thumping the toes of his boots against the frost-hard ground. Duncan wasn't afraid of him anymore.
Squeezing past the man's bulky, armored body into the hollow, Duncan shone his handlight down into the man's glazed, astonished eyes. This wasn't a game. He knew what the Harkonnens would do to him, had already seen what Rabban had done to his parents.
Now Duncan would play by their rules.
The dying hunter croaked something unintelligible at him. Duncan did not hesitate. His eyes dark and narrow -- no longer the eyes of a child -- he bent forward. The knife slipped in under the man's jawline. The hunter squirmed, raising his chin as if in acceptance rather than defiance -- and the dull blade cut through skin and sinew. Jugular blood spurted out with enough force to splash and spatter before forming a dark, sticky pool on the floor of the cave.
Duncan could not spend time thinking about what he had done, could not wait for the hunter's body to cool. He rummaged through the items on the man's belt, found a small medpak and a ration bar. Then he tugged the lasgun free from the clenching grip. Using its butt, he smashed the blood-smeared Richesian tracer, grinding it into metal debris. He no longer needed it as a decoy. His pursuers could hunt him with their own wits now.
He figured they might even enjoy the challenge, once they got past their fury.
Duncan crawled out of the hollow. The lasgun, almost as tall as he was, clattered as he dragged it behind him. Below, the hunting party's trail of glowglobes came closer.
Now better armed and nourished by his improbable success, Duncan ran off into the night.
Many elements of the Imperium believe they hold the ultimate power: the Spacing Guild with their monopoly on interstellar travel, CHOAM with its economic stranglehold, the Bene Gesserit with their secrets, the Mentats with their control of mental processes, House Corrino with their throne, the Great and Minor Houses of the Landsraad with their extensive holdings. Woe to us on the day that one of those factions decides to prove the point.
-COUNT HASIMIR FENRING,
Dispatches from Arrakis
Leto had barely an hour to rest and refresh himself in his new quarters in the Grand Palais. "Uh, sorry to rush you," said Rhombur as he backed through the sliding door into the crystal-walled corridor, "but this is something you won't want to miss. It takes months and months to build a Heighliner. Signal me when you're ready to go to the observation deck."
Still unsettled but mercifully alone for a few moments, Leto rummaged through his luggage, made a cursory inspection of his room. He looked at the carefully packed belongings, much more than he could ever need, including trinkets, a packet of letters from his mother, and an inscribed Orange Catholic Bible. He had promised her he would read verses to himself every night.
He stared, thinking of how much time he would need just to make himself at home -- a whole year away from Caladan -- instead left everything in its place. There would be time enough to do all that later. A year on Ix.
Tired after the long journey, his mind still boggling at the weighty strangeness of this underground metropolis, Leto stripped off his comfortable shirt and sprawled back on the bed. He had barely managed to test out the mattress and fluff up the pillow before Rhombur came pounding on his door. "Come on, Leto! Hurry up! Get dressed and we'll, uh, catch a transport."
Still fumbling to get his arm through his left sleeve, Leto met the other young man in the hall.
A bullet tube took them between the upside-down buildings to the outskirts of the underground city, and then a lift capsule dropped them to a secondary level of buildings studded with observation domes. After emerging, Rhombur bustled through the crowds gathered at the balconies and broad windows. He grabb
ed Leto's arm as they pushed past Vernius guards and assembled spectators. The Prince's face was flushed, and he turned quickly to the others there. "What time is it? Has it happened yet?"
"Not yet. Another ten minutes."
"The Navigator's on his way. His chamber's being escorted across the field right now."
Muttering thanks and pardons, Rhombur led his confused companion to a broad metaglass window in the sloping wall of the observation gallery.
At the far end of the room another door glided open, and the crowd parted for two dark-haired young men -- identical twins, from the looks of them. Small in stature, they flanked Rhombur's sister Kailea as proud escorts. In the brief time since Leto had last seen her, Kailea had somehow managed to change into a different dress, less frilly but no less beautiful. The twins seemed drunk with her presence, and Kailea seemed to enjoy their fawning attention. She smiled at both of them and guided them toward a good spot at the observation window.
Dune - House Atreides Page 15
