Hunters of Dune

1

Sheeana danced among the worms again as she had done as a child on Rakis.

Inside the Ithaca's huge cargo hold, the seven creatures rose around her, twisting and waving their bodies like flexible metronomes. They formed a bizarre audience as Sheeana stamped her bare feet, flailed her arms, and twirled on the crest of the dune.

Among the people of Rakis, the sacred dance had been called Siaynoq. She kicked up dust and sand with her frenzied movements, losing herself. Siaynoq burned away her emotions and her excess restless energy. The intensity was enough to drive doubts from her mind and misery from her heart.

Responding to her dance, the worms pulled themselves high above her and swayed. Sheeana drove herself harder. Sweat droplets flew from her forehead and soaked her matted hair. She had to cleanse her thoughts, to burn this fear and doubt from her mind.

Three years ago, after leaving the dead plague planet of the Honored Matres behind its failing no-shield, Sheeana had felt the dark specter of dismay building in her mind. A world full of dead women, along with their followers and slaves—wiped out by something they could not comprehend, something that had blindsided them.

Sheeana knew that the hated Honored Matres deserved whatever appalling punishment they had brought down upon themselves. But every single person on an entire planet? Surely they had not all deserved to die in such a horrific fashion.

And that was only one world. How many other strongholds had been extinguished by the Enemy's plagues? How many trillions had perished from a disease with a 100 percent mortality rate? And how many more would the Enemy kill, now that the whores had fled like a pack of wild dogs into the vulnerable Old Empire—drawing the incredible foe with their scent?

Sheeana tripped in her dance on the soft sand. Regaining her balance, she did a backflip and continued her gyrations. Despite the exertions, she did not find the inner peace she desperately sought. The endless dance only clarified her troublesome ideas. The mélange-heavy breath of the sandworms drifted around her like the mist of an approaching storm.

At the brink of total exhaustion, Sheeana collapsed onto the sand. First she let her knees buckle, then she rolled over, heaving great hot breaths. She lay back, looking up at the high ceiling of the cargo hold. Her muscles ached, her limbs trembled. With her eyes shut, she could feel her heart beating to the rhythm of imagined war drums. She would have to consume a great deal of mélange to restore herself.

One of the creatures came close, and she could feel the sand vibrating beneath her. She sat up as the monster glided past, pushing up a dune mound and then stopping. Finding a last scrap of energy within her, Sheeana pulled herself forward and leaned against the worm's hard, curved rings. It was encrusted with dust, and she could feel the solidity of this thing, the power it contained.

She lifted her arm and rested it against the side of the beast, wishing she could just climb up on the ring segments of this worm and ride off to the horizon. But here inside the no-ship, the horizon—the hull—was not far away.

"Old Shaitan, I wish I had your knowledge."

Long ago, when she and the simpering Tleilaxu Master Waff and Reverend Mother Odrade had ridden into the desert of Rakis, a sandworm had carried them purposely to the empty remains of old Sietch Tabr. Inside, Odrade had found a hidden message from Leto II. With his incredible prescience, the God Emperor had foreseen that encounter in the far-distant future and had left words specifically for Odrade.

With such prescience, how could the God Emperor not have predicted the destruction of Rakis—or had he? Had the Tyrant made his own plans? How far did the Golden Path extend? Had his supernatural foresight been responsible for Sheeana's rescue of the last worm, so that it could reproduce on a new world, Chapterhouse? Surely, Leto II had not foreseen the Honored Matres or the Enemy of Many Faces.

Sheeana wondered if she still saw too little of the overall picture. Despite their struggles, maybe they were all unwittingly following an even larger plan the God Emperor had laid out for them.

Sheeana felt the pearl of Leto IPs awareness in the strong sandworm against her. She doubted that any plan devised by Bene Gesserits or Honored Matres could really be more prescient than the God Emperor himself.

The desert dragons began to churn the sands again. She looked up to the high plaz window and saw two small figures there, looking down at her.

2

From the high observation gallery above the cargo hold, two boys peered through a dust-smeared plaz window to watch Sheeana and the sandworms.

"She dances," said eight-year-old Stilgar with clear awe in his voice. "And Shai-Hulud dances with her."

"They're only responding to her movements. We could find a rational explanation for it if we studied her long enough." Liet-Kynes was a year older than his companion, who showed amazement at the dance. Kynes couldn't deny that Sheeana did things with the worms that no one else could do. "Don't try to do that yourself, Stilgar."

Even when Sheeana was not inside the hold with the great beasts, the two young friends often came to the observation gallery and pressed their faces against the plaz to stare at the uneven sands. This tiny patch of captive desert beckoned to them. Kynes squinted, letting his vision grow blurry to make the walls of the cargo hold disappear, so that he could imagine a much larger landscape.

During their intensive lessons with Proctor Superior Garimi, Kynes had seen historical images of Arrakis. Dune. With penetrating curiosity, young Kynes had delved deep into the records. The mysterious desert planet seemed to call to him, as if it were an integral part of his genetic memories.

His quest for knowledge was insatiable, and he wanted to know more than dry facts about his past life. He wanted to live them again. All of his reborn life, the Bene Gesserit had trained him and the other ghola children for that eventuality.

His father Pardot Kynes, the first official Imperial Planetologist sent to Arrakis, had formulated a grand dream of converting the wasteland into a huge garden. Pardot had provided the foundation for a new Eden, recruiting the Fremen to make initial plantings and setting up great sealed caves where plants were grown. Kynes's father had died in an unexpected cave-in.

Ecology is dangerous.

Thanks to work and resources invested by Muad'Dib and his son Leto II, Dune had eventually become lush and green. But as a cruel consequence of so much poisonous moisture, all the sandworms had died. Spice had dwindled to a trickle of a memory. Then, after thirty-five hundred years of the Tyrant's rule, the sandworms returned again from Leto's body, reversing the ecological progress and restoring the vast desert to Arrakis.

The scope of it! No matter how much battering leaders and armies and governments did to Arrakis, the planet would restore itself, given enough time. Dune was stronger than all of them.

Stilgar said, "Just looking at the desert soothes me. I don't exactly remember, but I do know that I belong here."

Kynes also felt at peace looking at this swatch of a long-lost planet. Dune was where he belonged, as well. Thanks to the advanced Bene Gesserit training methods, he had already studied as much background as he could get his hands on, learning about ecological processes and the science of planetology. Many of the original and still-classic treatises on the subject had been written by his own father, documented in Imperial archives and preserved for millennia by the Sisterhood.

Stilgar rubbed his palm across the observation window, but the blur of dust was inside the plaz. "I wish we could go in there with Sheeana. A long time ago I knew how to ride the worms."

"Those were different worms. I've compared records. These come from sandtrout spawned by the dissolution of Leto II. They are less territorial, but more dangerous."

"They are still worms," Stilgar said with a shrug.

Down on the sand, Sheeana had stopped her dance and was resting against the side of one worm. She looked up, as if she knew the two ghola boys were in the observation chamber, watching her. As she continued to stare toward them, the largest of the worms also lifted its head, sensing they were there.

"Something's happening," Kynes said. "I've never seen them do that before."

Sheeana dodged lightly away as the seven worms came together and piled one on top of the other, twisting into a single, larger unit that reared up high enough to reach the observation plaz.

Stilgar pulled away, more in reverence than fear.

Sheeana scrambled up the side of the entwined creatures, all the way to the top of the tallest ringed head. While the two ghola boys watched in astonishment, she resumed her gyrations for several minutes, but now she was on top of the worm's head, both a dancer and a rider. When she stopped, the worm tower divided and unraveled into its seven original components, and Sheeana rode one of them back down to the ground.

Neither of the ghola boys spoke for several minutes. They looked at each other with grins of wonder.

Below, an exhausted Sheeana walked with dragging steps toward the lift. Kynes considered making some excuse to rush down and speak with her while she was fresh from the sands, as a good planetologist should do. He wanted to smell the flinty odor of worms on her body. It would be very interesting and potentially informative. He and Stilgar both longed to understand how she could control the creatures, though each boy had a different reason for wanting to know.

Kynes followed her departure with his gaze. "Even after we get our memories back, she's going to be a mystery to us."

Stilgar's nostrils flared. "Shai-Hulud does not devour her. That is enough for me."

3

Doria's life had become ridiculous, as Bellonda-within reminded her incessantly.

You're getting fat yourself, said the other Reverend Mother.

"It's your fault!" Doria snapped. Indeed, she had gained weight, and a significant amount, though she'd continued her vigorous training and exercises. Each day she monitored her metabolism with her own inner techniques, but to no avail. Her once lithe and wiry body now showed noticeable signs of bulk. "You weigh like a heavy stone inside me." She heard Bellonda's chuckle clearly in her head.

Grousing to herself as quietly as she could, the former Honored Matre tramped up the face of a small dune, slogging through loose sand. Fifteen other Sisters traipsed along behind her wearing identical singlesuits. They chattered amongst themselves while reading aloud from the instruments and charts they carried. This group actually liked doing such miserable work.

These spice-ops recruits took regular spectral and temperature readings on the sand, mapping out the narrow spice veins and limited deposits. The readings were dispatched to the desert research stations, then combined with firsthand observations to determine the best locations for harvesting operations.

As the planet's free moisture diminished dramatically, the growing worms were finally producing more mélange—more "product," as the Mother Commander put it.

She was anxious to press the New Sisterhood's advantage, to pay for the huge shipments of armaments being assembled on Richese, and to bribe the Guild to facilitate the ongoing war preparations. Murbella spent mélange and soostone wealth as fast as it came in, then demanded more, and more.

Behind Doria, two young Valkyrie trainees practiced fighting maneuvers on the soft sand, attacking and defending. The women had to adjust their techniques depending on the steepness of dune slopes, loose dust or packed sand, or the buried hazards of dead trees.

Feeling the hot blood of her Honored Matre past, Doria would rather have been fighting, too. Perhaps she would be allowed to join the final assault on Tleilax, whenever Murbella decided she had gathered enough forces for the great battle. What a victory that would be! Doria could have fought on Buzzell, on Gammu, on any number of the recent battlefields. She would have made an excellent Valkyrie herself—and now she was little more than… than an administrator! Why couldn't she be allowed to shed blood for the New Sisterhood? Fighting was her best skill.

Trapped in her position, Doria continued to come out to the desert, but she had grown impatient over the years. Am I sentenced to babysit this planet forever? Is this my punishment for the single mistake of killing fat old Bellonda?

Ah, you admit it was a mistake now? prodded the annoying voice within.

Quiet, you bloated old fool.

She could never get away from Bellonda inside her head. The constant taunting reminded Doria of her own shortcomings and even offered unwanted advice in how to fix them. Like Sisyphus, Doria would roll that boulder up a hill for the rest of her life. And now she found her body growing fat as well.

Inside her head, Bellonda actually seemed to be humming. Presently, the internal voice said, In ancient times on Terra, people had something called a doorbell, which a visitor rang when coming to a door.

"So what?" Doria said aloud, then quickly turned her face away from the trainees, who looked at her oddly.

So, that is our combined name: Doria-Bellonda. DorBell. Ding-dong, ding-dong, can I come in!

No, damn you. Go away!

Fuming, Doria concentrated on the analytical instruments. Why couldn't the Mother Commander find a dedicated planetologist somewhere out in all the surviving worlds of humanity? On her scanners, she saw merely numbers and electronic diagrams that were of no real interest to her.

Each day for six infuriating years, Doria had gritted her teeth and tried to ignore Bellonda's inner nagging. It was the only way she could go about her tasks. Murbella had told her to subjugate herself to the needs of her Sisters, but like so many Bene Gesserit concepts, "subjugation" worked better in theory than in practical application.

The Mother Commander had been able to mold others into what she wanted, forging the united Sisterhood, even retraining and incorporating some of the captured rebel Honored Matres. Though Doria had insinuated herself into a position of power beside Murbella, she could not completely suppress the natural violence embedded in her nature, the quick and decisive responses that often resulted in bloodshed. It was not in her nature to compromise, but pure survival dictated that she become what the Mother Commander wanted her to be.

Damn her! Has she actually succeeded in making me a Bene Gesserit, after all?

Bellonda-within chuckled again.

Ultimately, Doria wondered if she would have to face off against Murbella herself. Over the years, many others had challenged the Mother Commander, and all had died in the attempt. Doria did not fear for her life, but she did fear the possibility of making the wrong decision. Yes, Murbella was stern and maddeningly unpredictable, but after almost two decades, it was not so clear that her merger scheme had been wrong. Suddenly Doria tore her mind from its preoccupation, and she noticed the distant mounds of sand in motion, ripples drawing closer and closer.

The voice of Bellonda harangued her. Are you blind as well as stupid? You have stirred up the worms with all your stomping around.

"They are stunted."

That may be, but they are still dangerous. You are as arrogant as ever, thinking you can defeat anything that gets in your way. You refuse to acknowledge a real threat.

"You weren't much of a threat," Doria muttered.

One of the trainees cried out, pointing to the two moving mounds out on the sand. "Sandworms! Traveling together!"

"Over there, too!" another said.

Doria saw that worms were all around them and closing in as if drawn by a common signal. The women scrambled to take readings. "Gods! They're twice the size of the average specimens we recorded two months ago."

Inside Doria's head, Bellonda harped, Stupid, stupid, stupid!

"Shut up, damn you, Bell! I need to think."

Think? Can't you see the danger? Do something!

The worms rushed in from several directions; they showed definite signs of cooperative behavior. The shifting lines in the sand reminded Doria of a pack.

A hunting pack.

"To the 'thopters!" Doria saw that their group had come too far out along the dunes. The flying vehicles were some distance away.

The newly trained Sisters began to panic. Some of them ran, sliding in tumbles of loose sand down the slipface of the dunes. They dropped their instruments and charts on the ground. A Sister sent an urgent commlink message back to Chapterhouse Keep.

See where your stupid plan got you, Bellonda said. If you had not killed me, I would have been able to keep watch. I would never have let this happen.

"Shut up!"

Those worms are stalking you now. You stalked me, and now they're stalking you.

One of the Sisters screamed, and then another. More worms rose up from the dunes, homing in on the moving figures. Several Valkyrie trainees stood together, trying to fight against the impossible.

Doria stared, wide-eyed. The creatures were each at least twenty meters long, and moved with astonishing speed. "Begone! Back to your desert!"

You're not Sheeana. The worms will not do as you say.

Crystal teeth flashed as the worms darted forward, scooping up sand and Sisters, swallowing victims into the furnaces of their gullets.

Idiot! Bellonda-within exclaimed. New you've killed me twice.

A fraction of a second later, a worm rose up then dove down, consuming Doria in a single mouthful. At last, the irksome voice went quiet within.

4

Despite the constant hone-grating fear for his life, Uxtal continued his work with the numerous Waff gholas, and he did it well enough to keep himself alive. The Honored Matres could see his progress. Three years ago he had decanted the first eight identical gholas of the Tleilaxu Master. Accelerated in their bodily development, the little gray children seemed more than twice their actual age.

As he watched them at play, Uxtal found them quite appealing with their disarmingly gnomish appearance, pointed noses, and sharp teeth. After undergoing rapid educational impression, they had learned to speak in only a few months, but even so they seemed feral in a way, tied together in their private world and interacting little with their prison-keepers.

Uxtal would prod them in any way he felt necessary. The Waff gholas were like small time bombs of vital information, and he had to find a way to detonate them. He no longer thought, or cared, about the first two gholas he had created. Khrone had taken them away to Dan long ago. Good riddance!

These offspring, however, were his to command and control. Waff was one of the heretical old Masters, ripe for reindoctrination. God had certainly taken a circuitous route to show Uxtal his true destiny. Desperate for spice, the Navigators believed Uxtal was their tool, that he was doing their bidding. To him, though, it didn't matter if the Navigators reaped the benefits, or if Matre Superior Hellica hoarded all the profits. Uxtal wouldn't see any of it.

I am performing holy work now, he thought. That is what matters.

According to the most sacred writings, the Prophet—long before he reincarnated as the God Emperor—had spent eight days in the wilderness where he received his magnificent revelations. Those days in the wilderness had been a time of trial and tribulation, much like the Lost Tleilaxu race had faced during the Scattering, much like Uxtal's own recent ordeals. In his darkest hour, the Prophet had received the information he needed, and now so had Uxtal. He was on the right path.

Though the little researcher had never formally been declared a Master, he nonetheless considered himself one by default. Who else had a greater position of power now? Who else had more authority, more genetic knowledge? Once he learned the secrets locked in the minds of these Waffs, he would surpass any Elder of the Lost Tleilaxu and any old Master who had ever lived in Bandalong.

He would have it all (even if the Navigator and the Honored Matres took it from him).

Uxtal began the process of cracking these eight identical gholas as soon as they could speak and think. If he failed, he could always try with the next eight, which had already been grown. He would hold them—and all subsequent batches—in reserve. One of the Waffs would reveal his secrets.

Within only a few years, the rapidly growing bodies of the initial eight would reach physical maturity. Though they might be cute, Uxtal mainly saw the children as meat to be harvested for a specific purpose, like the sligs next door at Gaxhar's farm.

At the moment, the Waff gholas were running around inside an electronic enclosure. The accelerated children wanted to get out, and each one had a brilliant little mind. The Waffs probed the shimmering field with their fingers to see how it worked and how to disable it. Uxtal thought they might just accomplish that, given enough time. They rarely spoke except amongst each other, he knew how fiendishly intelligent they must be.

But Uxtal knew that he was smarter.

Interestingly, he observed dissension and competition, but very little cooperation among the eight children. The Waffs fought over toys and play equipment, over food, over a favorite place to sit, uttering very few words.

Were they somehow telepathic? Interesting. Perhaps he should dissect one of them.

Even when they scrambled onto each other's shoulders to see if one of them could leap over the force field, they argued over who got to stand on top.

Though the gholas were identical, they didn't trust one another. If he could pit them against each other, Uxtal was sure he could apply the right amount of pressure to wring out the information he needed.

One of the children tumbled off the edge of a slippery ramp and fell onto the hard floor. He began crying and holding his arm, which appeared to be broken, or at least severely sprained. To keep track of them, Uxtal had pressed tiny numerical brands onto their left wrists. This one was Number Five. As the child wailed, his genetic siblings ignored him.

Uxtal told two of his lab assistants to open the force field to let him step through. He was disgusted and impatient with the need to provide unnecessary medical attention; maybe these children would be easier to control if he just strapped them to the tables, like their sperm-donor predecessors.

Old Ingva was there as always, watching, leering, and silently threatening.

Uxtal tried to concentrate on his immediate obligations. Kneeling by the injured toddler, he tried to inspect Number Five's arm, to see how badly it was injured. The Waff yanked himself away, refusing to let Uxtal near.

Abruptly, the other seven Waffs formed a circle around the researcher. When they moved closer, he could smell their sour breath. Something was wrong. "Get back!" he barked, trying to sound intimidating. They were on all sides of him, and he had an uneasy feeling that they had tricked him, lured him inside.

The eight Waffs fell upon him with bared sharp teeth, biting and ripping at his skin and clothing. He thrashed and struck back, shouting for his assistants, knocking the small, gnomish gholas away. They were only children, yet they had formed a deadly sort of pack. Were they working together in a hive mentality, like Face Dancers? Even the supposedly injured boy threw himself into the fray, his "broken arm" a sham.

Fortunately, the Waffs were not strong yet, and he sent them skidding across the floor. The anxious lab assistants helped Uxtal keep them at bay while they pulled the shaken researcher back out through the field.

Breathing hard and sweating, he tried to gather his composure and looked around for someone to blame. His injuries were minor, only a few scrapes and bruises, but he was appalled that they had taken him by surprise.

Left in their pen, the identical gholas ran about in a frenzy of frustration.

Finally, they all fell silent and went off to different parts of the enclosure to play, as if nothing had happened.

"'Men must do God's work,'" Uxtal reminded himself, from the catechism of the Great Belief. Next time, he would be more careful with these little monsters.

5

Another blind jump through foldspace. The Ithaca emerged safely, following its random course according to the whims of prescience. With Duncan at the controls, the no-ship cruised toward a bright, comfortable-looking planet. A new world. He and Teg had conferred on the course, on the wisdom of making another journey at all even though the hunters had not found them again—and the two of them had brought the great vessel to this place.

Even from a distance the planet looked promising, and excitement blossomed among the refugees aboard the vessel. At long last, after almost two decades of wandering, three years since the dead no-planet, could this be a place to rest and recuperate? A new home?

"It looks perfect." Sheeana set aside the summary of the scan data, looked at Duncan and Teg. "Your instinct guided us true."

Standing with them on the navigation bridge, anxious Garimi looked at the landmasses, oceans, clouds. "Unless it's another plague world."

Duncan shook his head. "We're already detecting transmissions from small cities, so there's an active populace. Most of the continents are forested and fertile. Temperature is well within habitable norms.

Atmospheric content, moisture, vegetation… It may be one of the worlds settled in the Scattering, long ago. So many groups were lost, disappearing into the wilderness."

Garimi's eyes gleamed. "We have to investigate. This could be the place to found our new Bene Gesserit core."

Duncan was more practical. "If nothing else, it would be good for us to refresh the ship's supplies of air and water. Our stores and recycling systems can't last forever, and our population is gradually growing."

Garimi blurted, "I will call an all-ship meeting. There is more at stake here than simply replenishing our supplies. What if the inhabitants down there welcome us? What if it is a suitable place for us to settle?" She looked around. "At least for some of us."

"Then we will have an important decision to make."

EVEN WITH every adult onboard in attendance, the Ithaca's huge convocation chamber looked mostly empty. Miles Teg sat back against a low-tier seat, continually repositioning his long legs. Though he would observe the discussion with interest, he expected to make few comments. He had always followed the mandate of the Bene Gesserit, but at the moment he wasn't sure what the mandate was.

A young man took a seat adjacent to Teg, the ghola of Thufir Hawat. The heavy-browed twelve-year-old did not usually go out of his way to be with the Bashar, but Teg knew that Thufir watched him intently, almost to the point of hero worship. In the archives, Thufir often studied details of Miles Teg's military career.

Teg nodded to the young man. This was the loyal weapons master and warrior Mentat who had served the Old Duke Atreides, then Duke Leto, and finally Paul, before being captured by the Harkonnens. Teg felt he had much in common with the battle-seasoned genius; someday, after the Thufir Hawat ghola had his memories again, they would have many things to discuss, commander to commander.

Thufir leaned over, gathered his courage, and whispered, "I have wanted to speak with you, Bashar Teg, about the Cerbol Revolt and the Battle of Ponciard. Your tactics were most unusual. I cannot imagine they would have worked, and yet they did."

Teg smiled with the memory. "They wouldn't have worked for anyone else. As the Bene Gesserit use their Missionaria Protectiva to plant the seeds of religious fervor, so my soldiers created a myth about my abilities. I became larger than life, and my opponents managed to intimidate themselves more than my soldiers or weapons could have done. I really did very little in each battle."

"I disagree, sir. In order for your reputation to become such a potent tool, you first had to earn it."

Teg smiled and kept his voice low, almost wistful as he admitted the truth in his own mythology. "Ah, and earn it I did." He explained to the fascinated young man how he had also averted a massacre on Andioyu, a confrontation against the desperate dregs of a losing army that would surely have resulted in their deaths as well as the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians.

Much had hung in the balance on that day…

"And then you died on Rakis fighting the Honored Matres."

"As a point of fact, I died on Rakis to provoke the Honored Matres, as part of the overall Bene Gesserit plan. I played my role so that Duncan Idaho and Sheeana could escape. But after I was killed, the Sisterhood brought me back because they considered my Mentat skills and experiences to be invaluable—like your own. That is why they brought us all back."

Thufir was completely engrossed. "I've read the history of my own life, and I'm convinced that I can learn much from you, Bashar."

With a smile, Teg squeezed the boy's shoulder. Thufir was abashed. "Have I said something amusing, sir?"

"When I look at you, how can I not remember that I myself learned a great deal from studying the famous warrior-Mentat of House Atreides? You and I could be very useful to each other." The boy blushed.

When the debate began, Teg and Thufir turned their attention to the center of the convocation chamber. Sheeana remained seated in the imposing Advocate's Chair, a carryover from when this vessel had been designed for other groups.

Garimi, as usual, was anxious to provoke a change in the status quo. She strutted forward to the podium and spoke without preamble, loud enough for everyone to hear. "We did not depart on a race or a journey. Our goal was to get away from Chapterhouse before the Honored Matres destroyed everything. Our intent was to preserve the core of the Sisterhood, and we have done so. But where are we going? That question has plagued us for nineteen years."

Duncan stood. "We escaped from the true Enemy who was closing in. They still want us—that hasn't changed."

"Do they want us?" Garimi challenged. "Or do they want you?"

He shrugged. "Who can say? I am not willing to be captured or destroyed just to have your questions answered. Many of us have special talents on this ship—especially the ghola children—and we need all of our resources."

The Rabbi spoke up. Though he was still fit and healthy, his beard and hair were grayer and longer now; behind spectacles, his bird-bright eyes were surrounded by a mesh of wrinkles. "My people and I did not choose any of this.

We asked for rescue from Gammu, and we've been trapped in your folly ever since. When will it end? After forty years in the wilderness? When will you let us go?"

"And where would you like to go, Rabbi?" Sheeana's voice was calm, but Teg thought it sounded somewhat patronizing.

"I would like us to consider—seriously consider—the planet we have just found.

I am reluctant to call it Zion, but perhaps it is enough to call it home." The old man looked back at his handful of followers, all of whom wore dark clothes and adhered to their old ways. Though aboard the Ithaca they no longer needed to hide their religion, the Jews mostly kept to themselves, unwilling to be assimilated by the other passengers. They had their own children, ten so far, and raised them as they saw fit.

Finally, Teg spoke. "According to our scans, this planet appears to be an excellent place to settle. The population is minimal. Our group of refugees would cause almost no disturbance at all to the local inhabitants. We could even choose an isolated spot and settle far from the natives."

"How advanced is their civilization? Do they have technology?" Sheeana asked.

"At least at pre-Scattering levels," Teg said. "Indications show minor local industries, a few electromagnetic transmissions. No apparent spaceflight capability, no visible spaceports. If they settled here after the Scattering, they haven't done any more traveling to other star systems." In running scans of the new planet, he had enlisted the aid of eager young Liet-Kynes and his friend Stilgar, both of whom had stud' ied more about ecology and planetary dynamics than most of the adult Sisters. All of the readings checked out.

"It could be a new Chapterhouse," Garimi said, as if the discussion were already over.

Duncan's face darkened. "We would be vulnerable if we settled there. The hunters have found us several times already. If we remain too long in one place, we will be ensnared in their net."

"Why would your mysterious hunters have any interest in my people?" the Rabbi said. "We are free to settle on this world."

"It's clear that we must investigate further," Sheeana said. "We will take a lighter down to the surface on a fact-finding mission. Let's meet these people and learn from them. Then we can all make an informed decision."

Teg turned to the young ghola in the seat beside him and said impulsively, "I intend to go on this expedition, Thufir, and I would like you to accompany me."

6

While the mission to the planet was being assembled, the Ithaca rode unseen in orbit. Though the no-field limited the ship's sensors, it was a necessary safety factor until they learned more about the inhabitants.

As the de facto captain, Duncan would remain aboard the no-ship, ready in the event of an emergency, since only he could see the mysterious web. Sheeana wanted Miles Teg with her, and the Bashar insisted on bringing the ghola of Thufir Hawat. "Physically he is only twelve years old, but we know Thufir has the potential to become a great warrior-Mentat. We must encourage those skills to blossom if he is to be useful to us." No one argued with his choice.

Concurrent with the fact-finding mission, Duncan made arrangements for a small contingent of workers to go to an uninhabited part of the planet with equipment to gather water, air, and any available food, in order to bolster the no-ship's supplies. Just in case they decided to move on.

As Sheeana was finalizing the details for departure, the Rabbi entered the navigation bridge and stood as if expecting a challenge.

His eyes flashed, and his stance stiffened, though no one had yet argued with him, or even spoken to him. His demand surprised them. "I will go down to the planet with this expedition. My people insist on it. If this is to be a home for us, I will make that decision. You will not stop me from going along. It is my right."

"It is a small group," Sheeana cautioned. "We don't know what we'll encounter down there."

The Rabbi jabbed a finger at Teg. "He plans to bring one of the ghola children. If it is safe enough for a twelve-year-old boy, then it is safe enough for me."

Duncan had known the original Thufir Hawat. Even without his memories restored, he would not consider the ghola a mere child. Nevertheless, he said, "I don't object to you joining the party, if Sheeana will have you."

"Sheeana does not decide my fate!"

She seemed amused by his posturing. "Don't I? It seems to me that all the decisions I make aboard this no-ship have a direct impact on your situation."

Impatient, Teg cut off their bickering. "We have had nineteen years aboard this vessel to argue amongst ourselves. A planet waits for us. Shouldn't we see what we are quarreling about first?"

BEFORE SHE COULD depart for the planet, Sheeana was called to the brig levels by a nervous worker. The Futars let out a great caterwauling, far more restless than usual inside their locked, metal-walled arboretum. They paced, searching for a way out. Whenever they came close to each other, they snapped and snarled, halfheartedly slashing at each other. Then, before more than a few droplets of blood could fly into the air, the beast-men lost interest and continued prowling. One of them emitted a bloodcurdling shriek, a noise perfectly programmed to evoke primal human fear. In all the years aboard the no-ship, the Futars had never exhibited such frantic behavior before.

Sheeana stood at the arboretum doorway, looming like a goddess; against her better judgment, she deactivated the lock field and stepped inside. Only she could soothe the four creatures and communicate with them in a primitive way.

As the largest of the Futars, Hrrm had taken the position of dominance, partly because of his strength and partly because of his connection with Sheeana. He bounded toward her, and she did not move, did not flinch. He bristled, showing his canine teeth, raising his claws.

"You not Handler," he said.

"I am Sheeana. You know me."

"Take us to Handlers."

"I have already promised you. As soon as we find the Handlers, we will deliver you to them."

"Handlers here!" Hrrm's next words were unintelligible growls and snarls, then he said, "Home. Home down there." He hurled himself against the wall. The other Futars yowled.

"Home? Handlers?" Sheeana sucked in a quick breath. "This is the home of the Handlers?"

"Our home!" Hrrm came back to her. "Take us home."

She reached out to scratch the sensitive spot on his back. Her decision was obvious. "All right, Hrrm. I will take you home."

The predator rubbed against her. "Not Handler. You Sheeana."

"I am Sheeana. I am your friend. I will take you to the Handlers." She saw that the other three half-human creatures had been standing still, their muscles coiled to pounce if she had given the wrong answer. Their eyes glowed yellow with an inner hunger and a desperate need.

The planet of the Handlers!

If the Bene Gesserits hoped to make a good impression on the inhabitants below, returning four lost Futars might gain them leverage. And it would be good for her to bring them back where they belonged.

"Sheeana promised," Hrrm said. "Sheeana friend. Sheeana not bad lady Honored Matre."

Smiling, she stroked the creature again. "You four will accompany me."

7

Now that Matre Superior Hellica had provided the services of her pet Lost Tleilaxu researcher, Edrik was confident that Uxtal could re-create one of the old Masters who knew how to manufacture spice. Had not the Oracle herself told him there was a solution?

But now the Matre Superior demanded something in return. If he meant to have his manufactured spice, Edrik could not refuse.

Reluctantly, the Navigator accepted the task, knowing full well the consequences he risked. The witch Murbella would be furious, which was only part of the reason he took pleasure in what they were about to do.

Five years ago, brash Honored Matres from Gammu had tried to launch their last few Obliterators against Chapterhouse itself, but that had been a flawed plan from the start. Even the Navigator aboard that Heighliner had been unaware of the scope of the threat. By attacking Chapterhouse, the Honored Matres had meant to wipe out the only remaining source of mélange. Idiocy! The foolish whores had failed, and Mother Commander Murbella had seized their Obliterators. Shortly afterward, she had crushed the Honored Matres on Gammu and destroyed their entire enclave.

This time, though, the objective was different, and Edrik had no qualms about helping Hellica punish Murbella and her greedy witches. The Bene Gesserit would feel the sting, and a billion people would die on Richese in a matter of moments. Edrik did not feel guilty, however. The Spacing Guild had not provoked this crisis. Therefore, the blood would be on Murbella's hands.

The New Sisterhood's draconian spice policies had done little to ensure loyalty or cooperation from the Navigators. The Guild paid exorbitant prices for black-market mélange squeezed out of ancient stockpiles, while the Administrator faction happily sought alternative guidance systems that would also make the Navigators obsolete.

Edrik had been forced to seek his own source of spice, relying on the memories locked inside the gholas of Tleilaxu Master Waff. Once those memories were awakened, the Navigators would have their own cheap and secure source of mélange.

His Heighliner winked into existence above the industrialized planet. For millennia, Richese had been a sophisticated technological hub. The New Sisterhood had poured fortunes into Richese, and over the past several years the shipyards had grown larger than any of the famed Guild facilities on Junction or elsewhere—the most extensive the human race had ever put together.

The Sisterhood claimed their newly manufactured weapons were to be used against the Outside Enemy. Without question, however, Murbella would first turn that might against the Honored Matres on Tleilax.

"Destroy it," said Matre Superior Hellica from her observation lounge below the Navigator's deck. "Destroy it all."

From spaceport complexes below and satellite stations, monitors pinged them with inquiries and communication bursts. Though Richese was a huge manufacturer of armaments, engaged in full-scale preparations for the coming battles, they'd never had any reason to suspect a threat from the Spacing Guild.

"Guild Heighliner, we were not aware of a scheduled arrival."

"Please transmit your manifests. Which docking centers will you utilize?"

"Heighliners, we will prepare our outgoing shipments. Is a CHOAM representative aboard?" Edrik did not answer. The Matre Superior issued no ultimatum, delivered no warning. She did not even open the channel so that she could gloat.

Guildsmen followed the detailed preparations for deploying the last few Obliterators the rebel Honored Matres had kept on Tleilax. Floating in his sealed tank, Edrik smiled. This would set back the New Sisterhood's military plans by years, if not decades. All those weapons gone, as well as the industrial capability to manufacture more. In a single strike Matre Superior Hellica would remove a keystone from the arch of human civilization.

I do it for spice, Edrik thought. The Oracle promised us a new source of mélange.

Hatches opened in the Heighliner's belly, disgorging Obliterators that dropped toward the planet like molten cannonballs. Reaching the appropriate atmospheric depths, the weapons fissioned and spread ripples of hot annihilation. The people of Richese could not conceive of what was happening as their whole planet began to catch fire.

Cracks raced across the continents, and flamefronts roared through the atmosphere. The electromagnetic bands were full of desperate cries, screams of terror and pain, and then piercing EMP feedback as the Obliterators completed their work. Across the planet, weapons shops, construction yards, cities, mountain ranges, and whole oceans vanished into ionized vapor. The ground itself turned to a blistering, baking ceramic.

Even Edrik was awed by what he saw. He hoped that Hellica understood what she was doing. This was an aggression Mother Commander Murbella could never ignore, and she would know whom to blame. Tleilax was the only rebel Honored Matre enclave left.

In silence, the Heighliner departed, leaving the now-dead Richese behind.

8

"There is a time for violence, and for talking. This is not the time for talking." Murbella had called both Janess and the former Honored Matre Kiria to stand beside her in the highest tower of the Keep. After the annihilation of Richese, her anger grew hot enough to sear even the voices in Other Memory.

"We need to cut the head off the monster."

So many vital weapons had been destroyed there, a gigantic and fully armed fleet nearly completed, so much potential for the defense of humanity—all ruined by the bitch queen Hellica! Aside from the armament shipments they had already received, Murbella had nothing but cooling slag to show for her years of payments to Richese.

It was an overcast morning on Chapterhouse, with clouds that owed more to dust storms than to rain. A cold front had swept in. Such were the vagaries of climate in the ecosystem's death throes. On the practice field far below, the Valkyries wore heavy-hooded black robes and gloves against the biting wind, though Reverend Mothers could manipulate their metabolism to endure temperature extremes. Their furious mock combat engagements were breathtaking as they abandoned themselves to violence. They had all heard the news of the destruction of Richese.

"Tleilax is our last and only target," Kiria said. "We should move without delay. Strike now, and without mercy."

Janess was more cautious. "We cannot afford anything but total victory. That is their most powerful remaining stronghold, the one where the whores are most entrenched."

Murbella's expression turned cagey. "That is why we will employ a different tactic. I need the two of you to open the way."

"But we will strike Tleilax?" Kiria was fixated on the idea.

"No, we will conquer it." The bitter breeze increased in intensity. "I will kill Matre Superior Hellica myself, and the Valkyries will eradicate the rest of the rebel whores. Once and for all."

Murbella wanted to bravely reassure them that the New Sisterhood would get other weapons, other ships. But from where? And how would they pay for such a massive expenditure when they were already nearly bankrupt, their credit extended beyond any realistic ability to repay?

The necessary steps were clear to her. Increase spice-harvesting efforts in the Chapterhouse desert band and offer more spice to the ravenous Guild, which should convince them to cooperate with the Sisterhood's much larger plan to defend humanity. If she fed their insatiable hunger for mélange, the Guild would be happy to help her mount an effective military operation. A small enough price to pay.

"What is your plan, Mother Commander?" Janess asked.

She turned to her grim-faced daughter and the brash Kiria. "You two will take a team down to Tleilax in secret. Dress as Honored Matres and move among them, exposing their weaknesses. I give you three weeks to find ways to bring down our enemies from within their own ranks, and then to implement the scheme. Be ready in time for my full-scale assault."

"You want me to pretend to be one of the whores?" Janess asked.

Kiria sniffed. "It will be simple for us. No Honored Matre could control herself well enough to walk undetected among us, but the converse is not true." She flashed a feral grin at Janess. "I can show you how."

The other young woman was already grasping the possibilities. "By moving secretly among them, we can plant explosives in key strongholds, sabotage their defenses, and transmit encoded plans with all the details of how well entrenched they are in Bandalong. We can cause chaos and disruption at a critical moment—"

Kiria cut her off. "We will open the way for you, Mother Commander." She flexed her clawlike fingers, anxious to let herself become bloodthirsty again.

"I look forward to it."

Murbella stared into the distance. After Tleilax was secured, the New Sisterhood, the Spacing Guild, and all other allies of humanity could face the real Enemy. If we are to be destroyed, let it be at the hands of our true foe, rather than from a knife in the back.

"Send for a Guild representative, immediately. I have a proposal to make."

9

Teg circled the no-ship's lighter over a forested area near one of the unusual native settlements. Sheeana noted a parklike city with cylindrical towers interspersed through thick trees, camouflaged to blend in with the forest landscape. The Handlers (if that was who they truly were) distributed their settlements evenly throughout the wooded zones. The people seemed to prefer open spaces to life in a dense, hivelike metropolis. Maybe the Scattering had quenched any desire for crowding.

Though he'd had little opportunity to practice flying, the Bashar obviously remembered his skills from his first life. When they touched down in a flower-spangled meadow, Sheeana barely felt a bump. Young Thufir Hawat sat in the copilot's seat observing everything his mentor did.

The forest city's main buildings were tall cylinders several stories high, made of golden-lacquered lumber like wooden organ pipes for a wilderness cathedral. Guard towers? Defensive structures? Or were these nothing more than observation platforms from which to gain an unblocked view of the serene and rolling woods?

All around them, the thick forest of silver-barked aspen derivatives was beautiful and healthy, as if the natives tended it with loving care.

Previously, using the curt descriptions the Futars could give her, Sheeana had done her best to make the no-ship's arboretum reminiscent of the home they remembered. As she looked at the sweeping aspen analogs around them, however, Sheeana saw that she had failed miserably.

Secure in the cargo chamber at the back of the lighter, the four anxious Futars rumbled and yowled, as if they sensed they were home and knew the Handlers were near. When the vessel's side hatch opened and the boarding ramp extended, Sheeana stepped forward first. Teg and Thufir joined her on the soft grass, while the Rabbi hung back in the shelter of the lighter's door.

She drew a breath of bitingly clean air laden with a resinous scent of wood pulp and old leaves, scattered sawdust, and rain. Tiny yellow and white flowers added perfume to the air. The endlessly recycled air aboard the Ithaca had never smelled so good, nor had the dry air of Rakis where Sheeana had been a child, nor even Chapterhouse.

Not far away, Sheeana saw figures atop the towers. Other silhouettes appeared behind small windows cut through the lacquered mosaic of flat boards. Lookouts signaled from the circular roofs. Horns blew with a vibrating blat, while strobing light signals flashed to more-distant receivers. Everything looked bucolic, natural, and refreshingly primitive.

When a delegation finally came forward, Sheeana and her companions got their first look at the supposed Handlers. As a race, the people were tall and thin with narrow shoulders and elongated heads. Their long limbs were loose, and bent easily at the joints.

The leader was a comparatively handsome man with bristly silver-white hair.

Most striking was the dark band of pigment that ran across his pale face and around his green eyes, like a bandit's mask. All of the natives, males and females, had the same raccoonlike pigmentation, which did not appear to be artificial.

As the group's spokesperson, Sheeana stepped forward. Before she could say a word, she noted an instant spark of suspicion as the natives focused on her, assessing, condemning. Ignoring the Rabbi, the Bashar, and Thufir Hawat, they directed their sharp gazes at her. Only her. She became instantly alert, her mind racing. What had she done wrong?

Then, when Sheeana considered their ambassadorial party—an old man, a young man, and a boy, all of whom accompanied a strong woman who clearly assumed command—she suddenly realized her foolishness. Handlers had bred Futars to hunt down and kill Honored Matres. Therefore, they must consider the whores their mortal enemies. And when they saw her supposedly in charge of these men—

"I am not an Honored Matre," she blurted out before they could draw an erroneous conclusion. "And these males are not my slaves. We have all fought the Honored Matres, and now we flee them."

The Rabbi reacted with surprise, frowning at Sheeana, as if he couldn't understand what she was talking about. "Of course you're not an Honored Matre!" He had not noticed the undercurrent of suspicion.

Teg, though, nodded with quick understanding. "We should have known better."

Thufir Hawat also sorted through the information, reaching the same conclusion.

The tallest man with the raccoon eyes considered her words for a moment, glanced at the three men with Sheeana, and then bowed his elongated head. His voice was quiet but resonant, as if it emerged from deep in his chest instead of his throat. "Then we share the same enemies. I am Orak Tho, this district's Chief Handler."

Handlers. It is true, then. Sheeana felt a rush of excitement, and relief.

Orak Tho leaned forward, uncomfortably close to Sheeana. Instead of extending his hand in a more traditional greeting, he drew in a long, loud sniff at the base of her neck. He straightened in surprise. "You have Futars with you. I smell them on your skin and clothing."

"Four of them, rescued from the Honored Matres. They asked us to bring them here."

Teg whispered something to Thufir, and the young man obediently hurried back to the lighter. Showing no fear, he released the four beast-men from the secure compartment. The Futars bounded free, surging happily past the young man with Hrrm in the lead. Taking graceful leaps, he sprang across the soft meadow grass toward the Chief Handler and his companions.

"Home!" Hrrm purred in his throat.

Orak Tho bent his streamlined face closer to Hrrm's. The Handlers' movements also had a hint of the animal about them. Maybe such mannerisms helped the Handlers bond with the Futars, or maybe these two codependent branches of humanity were not so far apart after all.

The freed Futars milled among the Handlers, who touched and sniffed them excitedly. Sheeana smelled the heavy, musky odor of pheromones, released either for communication or control. Hrrm broke away just long enough to turn back toward Sheeana. In the glow of his yellow predator's eyes, she could read immense gratitude.

10

After three years of unsuccessful attempts and different torture techniques to awaken his memories, Vladimir began to fear that Khrone might be losing interest, or losing hope. Trapped in a rut of ineffective methods, the Face Dancer simply didn't know what he was doing. Even so, the fifteen-year-old ghola had come to look forward to their little "sessions of suffering." Having figured out that Khrone would never really hurt him, he had come to revel in the pain.

Today, when the Face Dancer guards told the ghola to lie back on a different table, he didn't bother to suppress his broad grin. Such smiles seemed to make them quite uncomfortable.

Vladimir had no real interest in cooperating just for the sake of pleasing Khrone, but he was very curious to access the thoughts of the historical Baron Harkonnen. He was sure those memories would be full of excellent ideas for amusing himself. Unfortunately, the fact that he wanted to have his memories back, and the perverse pleasure he derived from the pain inflicted upon him, turned out to be a hindrance.

While waiting, he looked around the stone-walled dungeon chamber of the restored castle, envisioning what it might have been like here in ancient times. The Atreides had probably made it sunny and bright, but he wondered if some long-forgotten duke had used this very chamber to torture captive Harkonnens.

Yes, Vladimir could imagine what such devices might have been like. Electronic probes that could be inserted into living bodies, tunneling instruments that could seek and destroy specific organs. Archaic, old-fashioned, and effective…

When Khrone entered the chamber, his normally placid face showed tiny marks of tension around the mouth and eyes. "In our last session you were very nearly terminated. Too much cerebral stress. I shall have to gauge your limits better."

"Oh, how awful that must have been for you!" the fifteen-year-old said sarcastically and gave an exaggerated sigh. "If restoring my memories requires so much pain that it kills me, then all your hard work will be for nothing.

What to do? What to do?"

The Face Dancer leaned close. "You will see soon enough."

Vladimir heard the sounds of machinery, the noise of something clattering and rolling into the room. It came toward the top of his head, but remained out of his range of vision. The anticipation and ominous fear felt delicious. What would Khrone do differently this time?

The unseen machine sounded like it was directly behind him now, but it did not stop. Vladimir turned his head from side to side and saw a thick-walled cylindrical chamber sliding slowly forward, beginning to engulf him as if he were being swallowed by a whale. The cylinder was like a large pipe or a medical diagnostic unit. Or a coffin.

Vladimir felt a thrill of pleasure as he guessed what this machine must be. A whole-body Agony Box! The Face Dancers must have built it specially for him to create a more intimate experience. The young man grinned, but asked no questions, for fear of spoiling any surprises the Face Dancers might have in store for him. From outside, Khrone watched him with an unreadable expression as the table slid entirely into the chamber. The ugly, patchwork observers were also there, but no one spoke.

The machine's end cap snapped shut and sealed with a hiss. Vladimir's ears popped as the pressure changed. Khrone's voice came over a tinny-sounding speaker system. "You are about to experience a variation on the processes used by old Tleilaxu Masters to develop their Twisted Mentats."

"Ah, I had a Twisted Mentat once." Vladimir laughed with genuine fearlessness.

"Are you going to talk about the device, or use it?"

The illumination shut off inside the cylinder, plunging him into complete blackness. Indeed, something different!

"Do you think I'm afraid of the dark?" he shouted, but the walls of the cylinder were coated with a sound-absorbing substance that swallowed even the whisper of an echo. He couldn't see anything.

Surrounded by a faint hum, he felt himself growing weightless. The table dropped away beneath him and he could no longer feel it against his back.

Cradled in a suspensor field that held him perfectly balanced and immobile, he could no longer feel anything or see anything. The temperature was perfect inside the chamber, imparting no sensation of heat or cold. Even the faint humming stopped, leaving him in a silence so absolute that he could hear nothing but a slight ringing in his ears, and even that faded.

"This is boring! When is it going to start?"

The darkness remained, and silence, its companion, as well. He felt nothing and could not move.

Vladimir made a rude noise. "This is ridiculous." Khrone clearly did not grasp the nuances of sadism. "You play with my body to get to my mind, and play with my mind to get to my body, twisting, contorting. Is that all you have?"

Ten minutes later — or was it an hour? — he still had no answer. "Khrone?"

Nothing happened. He remained perfectly comfortable, detached from all sensation. "I am ready! Do your worst!"

Khrone didn't answer. No pain came. Nothing. They must be trying to drive his anticipation to a fever pitch. He licked his lips. It would start any second now.

Khrone left him there in dark, weightless isolation for an eternity.

Vladimir tried to clutch at memories of previous sensations, but they kept slipping away, fading from his mind. Struggling to retrieve the thoughts, he followed a mental pathway and felt himself carried on a neural conduit deep into his own brain, a realm of total darkness. The experiences he sought were pinpoints of light ahead, and he swam toward them. But they swam away faster, and farther than he could reach.

Another eternity passed.

Hours? Days?

He could feel nothing, absolutely nothing. Vladimir didn't want to be here. He wanted to swim back out to the light that was his ghola life before this session had begun. But he couldn't. It was a trap!

Eventually, he screamed. At first, it was just to make noise, to disturb the throbbing emptiness. Then he screamed for real, and once he started he could not stop himself.

Even so, the silence remained. He thrashed and struggled, but the field kept him immobile. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't hear. Had the Face Dancers blinded him somehow? Made him deaf?

Vladimir wet himself, and for a few moments the mere sensation was a revelation, but it quickly faded. And he was left alone in empty, silent, darkness. He needed sensation, stimulus, pain, interaction, pleasure.

Anything!

Finally, he became aware of a gradual change around him. Nonexistent illumination, sounds, and smells seeped in, gradually filling the stygian universe, converting it to something else. Even the tiniest glimmer was like an explosion. With that catalyst, senses poured into his conscious and unconscious mind, filling every cavity. Pain, a mental pain, made his head feel as if it would explode.

He screamed again. This time, the pain brought no semblance of pleasure whatsoever.

The full life of the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen flooded back into the ghola body with all the subtlety of an avalanche. Every thought and experience came back to him, all the way up to the moment of his first death on Arrakis. He saw the little girl Alia stabbing him with the poisoned needle, the gom jabbar—The internal universe expanded, and he became aware of voices again. He was outside the chamber now, withdrawn from the large coffinlike device.

The Baron sat up indignantly, pleased and surprised to note his younger body, which was a bit plump from overindulgence but not ravaged by the bloating and debilitating disease the witch Mohiam had inflicted upon him. He looked down at himself, grinned up at the Face Dancers. "Oh ho! The first thing I want is a better wardrobe. And then I want to see that Atreides brat you've been raising for me."

Khrone stepped closer, his expression inquisitive. "You have access to all of your memories, Baron?"

"Of course! Baron Harkonnen is indeed back." He wandered into his thoughts, reassured by the things he had achieved in his original, glorious lifetime. He was delighted to be himself again.

But deep inside his brain, lurking at the back of his mind, he sensed that something was wrong, out of his control. An unwanted presence had joined him inside his mind, hitchhiking on his memories.

Hello, Grandfather, a girl's voice said. She giggled.

The Baron's head jerked. Where was that coming from? He didn't see her.

Did you miss me, Grandfather?

"Where are you?"

Where you won't lose me. I will always be with you now. Just like you were with me, haunting me, appearing in visions, refusing to give me rest. The girl's giggle became more shrill. Now it's my turn.

It was the Abomination, Paul's sister. "Alia? No, no!" His mind must be playing tricks on him. He dug his fingers against his temple, but the voice was inside, unreachable. With time, she would go away.

Don't count on it, Grandfather. I am here to stay.

11

Though he was genetically identical to the other seven gholas in the first batch, Waff Number One did not like being so short, small, and weak. His accelerated body had reached its mature size in less than four years, but he wanted to be strong enough to escape this maddening confinement.

As he peered out through the shimmering confinement field, Waff seethed at Uxtal and the laboratory assistants. His seven counterparts did the same. The Lost Tleilaxu researcher was like a nervous prison guard, constantly prodding and herding the eight matching gholas. All of the Waffs loathed him.

He imagined sinking his teeth into Uxtal's neck and feeling the hot blood surge into his mouth. The researcher and his assistants were too cautious now, though. The ghola brothers shouldn't have made their earlier attack on him, before they were ready to succeed. That had been a tactical mistake. A year ago they had been so much younger.

Standing safely on the other side of the confinement field, Uxtal frequently lectured the eight gholas about his Great Belief, implying that all the original Tleilaxu people had been criminals, heretics. Yet all of the Waffs could tell that he wanted something from them. Very badly.

They were smart enough to realize they were pawns.

The withered Honored Matre Ingva often talked with Uxtal about mélange, as if she didn't think—or care—that the Waffs could hear her. She demanded to know when the children would reveal their secrets.

Waff wasn't aware that he had any secrets. He didn't remember any.

"They mirror and mimic each other," Uxtal said to Ingva. "I have heard them speak simultaneously and make the same noises, the same motions. The other ghola groups are growing even faster, it seems."

"When can we get started?" Ingva hovered close to him, making the little researcher squirm. "I am not reluctant to threaten you—or tempt you—with a sexual experience beyond your most incredible fantasies."

Uxtal seemed to shrink into himself and answered in a voice that cracked with fear. "Yes, those eight are as ready as they are ever going to be. No sense in waiting any longer."

"They are expendable," said Ingva.

"Not exactly expendable. The next batch is six months younger, and the others are even more recently removed from the tanks. Twenty-four in all, of varying ages. Even so, if we are forced to kill all eight of these, there will be others soon. We can try again and again and again." He swallowed hard. "We have to expect a certain number of mistakes."

"No, we don't." Ingva released the force field and licked her lips. She and Uxtal entered the protected chamber while the lab assistants stood guard outside. The eight gholas clumped together, backing away. Until now, they had not known that numerous other Waff gholas were being raised elsewhere in the large laboratory building.

Uxtal gave the accelerated ghola children a forced smile of encouragement, which none of the Waffs believed. "Come with us. There's something we have to show you."

"And if we refuse?" demanded Waff Three.

Ingva chuckled. "Then we will drag you—unconscious, if necessary." Uxtal wheedled, "You will learn why you are here, why we made you, and what you have that we need."

Waff One hesitated, looked at his identical brothers. It was a temptation they could not resist. Though they had received forced educational induction, given inexplicable background to lay a foundation for something, the gholas were hungry to understand.

"I will go," Waff One said, and he actually took Uxtal's hand, pretending to be a sweet child. The nervous researcher flinched at the touch, but led the way out of the protected chamber. Waffs Two through Eight followed.

They entered a confined laboratory where Uxtal paraded the gholas in front of a spectacle—several brain-dead Tleilaxu Masters hooked up to tubes and instruments. Drool curled down gray chins. Machines covered their genitalia, pumping, milking, filling translucent bottles. The victims all looked uncomfortably like Waff, only older.

Uxtal waited while the staring children absorbed what they saw. "You used to be that. All of you."

Waff One raised his pointed chin with some measure of pride. "We were Tleilaxu Masters?"

"And now you must remember what you were. Along with everything else."

"Line them up!" Ingva ordered. Uxtal handed the Waff roughly to an assistant and waited until all of the accelerated children stood in front of him.

Strutting back and forth in front of the identical copies like a caricature of a commander, Uxtal made explanations and demands. "The old Tleilaxu Masters knew how to manufacture mélange using axlotl tanks. You have that secret. It is buried within you." He paused, clasped his small hands behind his back.

"We don't have our memories," one of the Waffs said.

"Then find them. If you remember, we will let you live."

"And if we don't?" Waff One asked defiantly.

"We have eight of you here, and others elsewhere. We need only one. The rest of you are completely disposable."

Ingva chuckled. "And if all eight of you fail us, then we will simply turn to the next eight and repeat the process. As many times as necessary."

Uxtal tried to look intimidating. "Now, which of you will reveal what we need to know?"

The matching gholas stood in the line; some fidgeted, some remained defiant.

It was a standard ghola-awakening technique, to drive a person to psychological and physical crisis, forcing the buried chemical memories to overcome the barriers inside.

"I don't remember," the Waffs all said in perfect unison.

A commotion interrupted them, and Uxtal turned as Matre Superior Hellica, resplendent in a purple bodysuit and flowing veils and capes, strode into the chamber leading a small Guild delegation and a floating, hissing chamber that held a mutated Navigator. Edrik himself!

"We came to watch the completion of your task, little man. And to reach financially acceptable terms with the Navigators, should you succeed."

Surrounded by plumes of cinnamony-orange gas, Edrik approached a viewing window in his tank. The eight gholas felt the tension in the chamber increase.

Uxtal gathered enough courage to yell at the Waffs, though he seemed almost comical doing so. "Tell us how to make spice in the axlotl tanks! Speak, if you want to live."

The Waffs understood the threat and believed it, but they had no memories to reveal, no stored knowledge. Sweat blossomed on their small gray foreheads.

"You are Tleilaxu Master Tylwyth Waff. All of you. You are everything he was.

Before he died on Rakis, he prepared replacement gholas of himself here on Tleilax. We used cells from those"—he jerked his head toward the miserable mindless men on their extraction tables—"to create the eight of you. You hold his memories stored in your minds."

"Obviously, they require more incentive," Matre Superior Hellica said, looking bored. "Ingva, kill one of them. I don't care which."

Like a murderous machine, the old Honored Matre had been waiting to be activated. She could have attacked with a traditional flurry of kicks and blows, but she had come prepared for something more colorful. She drew a long slaughtering knife she had confiscated from the neighboring slig farmer. With a sideways sweep of the monoblade and a quick flash of blood, Ingva decapitated Waff Four in the middle of the line.

As the head hit the floor, Waff One cried out in sympathetic pain, along with his surviving brothers. The head rolled to a stop at an odd angle, to stare with glazing eyes at the blood pooling out from the neck stump. The gholas all tried to run like panicked mice, but were brutally restrained by the assistants.

Uxtal turned greenish, as if he might either faint or vomit. "The memories are triggered through psychological crisis, Matre Superior! Simply butchering one of them is not sufficient. It must be prolonged, an extended anguish. A mental dilemma—"

Hellica nudged the bloody head with her toe. "The torture wasn't intended for this one, little man, but for the seven others. It's a basic rule: If one inflicts only pain, the subject can cling to hope that the torture will end, that he may somehow survive." A thin smile robbed the Matre Superior's face of all beauty. "Now, however, the others have not the slightest doubt that they will be killed if I say they are to be killed. No bluffing. That certainty of death should provide the correct trigger… or they will all die. Now, proceed!"

Ingva left the small body lying there.

"Seven of you remain," Uxtal said, reaching a crisis point of his own. "Which of you will remember first?"

"We don't know the information you request!" Waff Six shouted.

"That is unfortunate. Try harder."

As Hellica and the Navigator watched, Uxtal signaled Ingva. The woman took her time choosing, drawing out the tension, walking slowly up and down the ranks of the young gholas. The Waffs trembled and then shook, as she prowled behind them.

"I don't remember!" Waff Three wailed.

Ingva responded by thrusting the point of her bloody slaughtering knife into his back and out his chest, piercing his heart on the way through. "Then you are of no use to us."

Waff One felt a sharp pain strike his own heart, as if an echo of the blade had stabbed there, too. The clamor in his mind reached a crescendo. He no longer had any thought of defiance or of withholding information. He did not resist the memories or past lives inside him. He squeezed his eyes shut and screamed silently to himself, begging his body to divulge what it knew.

But nothing came to him.

Ingva lifted her long blade, jerking the Waff Three ghola into the air with it, his legs still kicking. Then she let him slide off the tip, and he thudded to the floor. Ingva stepped back, waiting to be called again. She was clearly enjoying this.

"You make this more difficult than it needs to be," Uxtal said. "The rest of you can stay alive—all you have to do is remember. Or does death mean nothing to a ghola?"

With a disappointed sigh, he nodded again, and Ingva killed another one.

"Five left." He looked down at the unpleasant mess, then glanced apologetically to Hellica. "There is a possibility that none of these gholas is acceptable. The next batch will be ready soon, but perhaps we should prepare more axlotl tanks, just in case."

"We're trying!" one of the Waffs cried.

"You are also dying. Time is running out." Uxtal waited for a moment, until his anticipation turned to clear dismay. He was sweating, too; his entire career, such as it was, was hanging on the line.

Ingva killed another one. Half of the Waffs now lay dead on the floor.

Moments later she killed a fifth, stepping up behind him, grabbing his dark hair, and slitting his throat.

Frantic, the remaining three Waffs tore at their own hair and struck themselves in the chests and faces, as if physical blows could dislodge memories. Weaving back and forth with her long knife, Ingva slashed at them, making shallow and playful cuts in their gray skin. Despite their continued frantic protestations, she murdered a sixth ghola.

Only two remained.

Waff One and his last identical sibling—Waff Seven—could feel hidden thoughts and experiences boiling through the turmoil in their minds, like regurgitated food. Waff One watched the agony around him, saw the corpses of his brothers.

The memories were locked away, but not by the veils of time; rather, he suspected the old Masters had implanted some sort of internal security system.

"Oh, just kill them all!" Hellica said. "We have wasted your time today, Navigator."

"Wait," Edrik said through a speaker in his tank. "Allow this to play out."

The tension and the panic in the two remaining gholas had reached a peak. By now the pressure of the crisis should have caused a critical meltdown.

Acting on her own, without looking at Uxtal or the Matre Superior, Ingva drew the slaughtering knife across the belly of Waff Seven and eviscerated him.

Blood and entrails spilled out, and he doubled over, screaming, trying to hold his intestines inside. He took a long time dying, and his moans filled the room, with Uxtal's repeated demands for information as a counterpoint.

Now the Matre Superior herself strode forward, glaring at Uxtal. "This is a tedious failure, little man. You are worthless." She drew a small, stubby dagger from her waist. Moving up to Waff One, she pressed the point against his temple. "This is the thinnest point in your skull. I'd barely need to press at all to shove my blade into your brain. Maybe that will cut loose your memories?" The knife's tip drew a drop of dark blood. "You have ten seconds."

Waff was giddy with terror, and only distantly aware that both his bowels and his bladder had let loose. Hellica began counting down. Numbers like sledgehammers struck his mind. Numbers… formulae, calculations. Sacred mathematical combinations.

"Wait!"

The Matre Superior completed her countdown. The Navigator continued to observe. Uxtal himself trembled in terror, as if convinced she would kill him next.

Waff suddenly started babbling a steady stream of information that he had never learned from the forced-education systems. It flowed out of him like sewage from a burst pipe. Materials, procedures, random quotations from the secret catechism of the Great Belief. He described secret meetings with Honored Matres aboard a no-ship, about how the old Tleilaxu had meant to betray the Bene Gesserit, how he and his fellow Masters did not trust the oddly changed Lost Tleilaxu from the Scattering. Lost Tleilaxu such as Uxtal…

"Please withdraw your knife, Matre Superior," the Navigator said.

"He has not yet revealed what we need!" Ingva brandished her own blade, apparently anxious to murder the last ghola, as if she had not yet spilled enough blood for one day.

"He will." Uxtal looked at the terrified, miserable ghola. "This Waff has just been buried by the mudslide of his past life."

"Many lives!" In desperate self-defense, the reawakened Master spewed forth what he could. But his memory was imperfect, and he couldn't get it all. Whole segments of knowledge were corrupted—a side-effect of the forbidden acceleration process.

"Give him time to sort through it all," Uxtal said, sounding pathetically relieved. "Even with what he has said already, I can see the path to new methods that may yield mélange." Hellica still pressed her short knife against Waff's head. "Matre Superior! He is too great a resource to waste at this time. We can coax more out of him."

"Or torture it out," Ingva suggested.

Uxtal grabbed the sweaty hand of the last ghola. "I require this one for my work. Otherwise, there will be delays." Without waiting for an answer, he yanked the weak-kneed Waff away from the macabre scene.

"Clean this up," Hellica demanded of Ingva, who in turn ordered the lab assistants to do it.

As Uxtal hurried away with his young charge, he lowered his voice to a threatening whisper. "I lied to save your life. Now give me the rest of the information."

The ghola nearly collapsed. "I remember nothing more. It is all still churning inside me, but I can sense great gaps. Something is wrong—"

Uxtal cuffed him. "You had better come up with something good anyway, or both of us are dead."

12

The Handlers welcomed their visitors as friends and allies, wanting to hear more about their struggles with the Honored Matres. The group sat on the roof of one of the wide cylindrical towers. On a flat stone in the middle of the plank floor, a brazier sent a warm, comforting glow into the night.

"We knew you would be coming," Orak Tho said. "When you dropped the no-field to launch your small ships, we detected your great vessel above us. We are aware that you have also sent scavenging teams to uninhabited portions of our world. We were waiting for you to come visit us directly."

Squatting next to Sheeana, Miles Teg was surprised, since these people seemed to have very little technology. "It would take sensitive detectors to spot us."

"Long ago we developed a means to sense the ships flown by Honored Matres, for our own protection. Because those women think they are infallible, it is easier to detect them."

"Hubris is their principal weakness," Thufir Hawat said.

Green eyes flashed from the bandit mask of dark skin. "They have many weaknesses. We've had to learn how to exploit them."

They shared a meal of nuts, fruit, smoked fish, and medallions of a spiced dark meat that apparently came from an arboreal rodent. The Rabbi was more relaxed than Sheeana had ever seen him, though he seemed worried about the origin of the food. She could tell that the old man had already made up his mind: He wanted his people to settle here, if the Handlers would have them.

While they sat together on the open rooftop, listening to the buzz of night insects and watching the swoop of dark birds, Sheeana felt very isolated.

According to scan reports, the Handlers' population was relatively large, with mines and industries in other parts of the world. They had apparently developed a quiet and peaceful civilization. "We assume your people originated in the Scattering, long ago after the Tyrant's death. Was this planet the first stop on your wandering?"

The Chief Handler shrugged his bony shoulders. "We have myths about that, but it was more than a thousand years ago."

"Fifteen centuries," Thufir suggested. He was a bright student. Considering his past and his place in history, the Mentat ghola was quite interested in spans of time.

"Our race spread to many nearby worlds. We were not an empire but a… political brotherhood. Then out of nowhere the Honored Matres came like a stampede of blind and clumsy animals, as destructive in their ignorance as in their malevolence." Orak Tho bent his elongated face toward the brazier's glow. Orange light washed across his skin.

Other Handlers sat around the upper deck's circular wall, listening and muttering. Their distinctive body smells drifted into the cool air. Their race seemed to have an affinity for scents, as if smell was an important part of their communication abilities.

"Without warning, they came to pillage, destroy, and conquer." Orak Tho's face was as hard as petrified wood, his long jaw set. "Naturally, we had to stop this feral incursion." His lips curved in a faint smile. "So we developed our Futars."

"But how did you do that?" Sheeana asked. If these deceptively simple people could detect orbiting ships and create sophisticated genetic hybrids, their technology must be far more advanced than was evident.

"Some of those who joined us in settling these worlds were orphans of the Tleilaxu race. They showed us how to change our offspring to create what we needed, since God and evolution would be much too slow to provide them for us."

"The Futars," Teg said. "They are most interesting." After their initial reunion, the Handlers had taken the predatory creatures off to holding areas, where they could be with others of their own kin.

"What happened to these Tleilaxu?" The Rabbi looked around. He had never much liked Master Scytale.

"Alas, they are all dead."

"Killed?" Teg asked.

"Extinct. They don't breed the same as others do." He sniffed, as if disinterested in that part of the story. "Our Futars were bred to hunt Honored Matres. Those women came to our planets, confident they would conquer us. But we turned the tables on them. They are fit to serve as food for our Futars, nothing more."

FOR SAFETY, TEG suggested that their group sleep in the lighter with the hatches sealed and defensive fields up, which obviously displeased their hosts. The Chief Handler cast a glance over his shoulder. "Though these forests are well tamed, a few of the old predators still roam the grounds at night. It would be better if you stayed with us, up here in the safe towers."

A flicker of dismay crossed the Rabbi's face. "What old predators?" He didn't want to hear about any flaws with this world.

"The feline beasts that supplied genetic material for creating the Futars."

Orak Tho gestured with his loose arms across to another cylindrical wooden tower. "We have a grand show tomorrow. You should be well rested for what you will witness."

"What kind of show?" Hawat sounded eager. At times he seemed no more than the boy he truly was, rather than a potential warrior-Mentat.

With a mysterious smile, the Chief Handler motioned for them to follow him.

His green irises now looked like blazing emeralds.

It was full dark outside. Unfamiliar constellations sparkled like a million eyes reflecting firelight. He guided the four visitors across a sturdy plank walkway to a nearby tower, then down a spiraling interior staircase that circled the cylinder twice before reaching the ground level. They walked across the leaf-strewn forest floor to a much shorter tower that looked like a thick, man-made stump.

The stench struck them first. The base of the stout artificial tree had been hollowed out, like a dank lair. Thick vertical bars extended deep into the mulchy ground, blocking off the hollow to form a dirt-floored cell.

Teg raised his eyebrows. "You have prisoners."

The chamber contained five ragged, angry captives. Despite their tattered and beaten appearance, Sheeana could tell they were human. All were females with matted hair, rough hands, and bloodied knuckles. The remnants of torn leotards clung to their pale skin, and their eyes flashed faintly orange.

Honored Matres!

One of the whores saw them approach. Snarling, she lunged toward the wooden bars of her cage, flying sideways to deliver a devastating kick. Her bare foot slammed into the iron-hard wood. The impact produced a faint but hollow crack, and as the Honored Matre limped away, Sheeana realized the crack had been the fracture of bone, not wood. The women had already battered themselves bloody against the barricade.

Orak Tho's face constricted as if a thunderstorm were brewing behind it.

"Honored Matres came down in a transport ship three months ago, expecting easy prey. We massacred them, but managed to save some for… training purposes."

His lips curled back. "It is not the first time they have tried to harass us.

They form isolated cells that don't necessarily know what the others are doing. Thus they repeat the same mistakes."

Two Futars prowled around the base of the wooden tower, circling and sniffing.

Sheeana recognized one of them as Hrrm; the second beast-man had a black stripe in the wiry hair of its chest. One of the captive Honored Matres called out in a threatening voice. "Free us, or our Sisters will peel strips of meat from your bones while you still live!"

Hrrm snarled and hurled himself at the cage, backing off only at the last moment. Hot spittle from his mouth splattered the captive Honored Matre. Three of the beaten women came forward to the bars, looking as bestial as the Futars.

"As I said," Orak Tho continued in his calm and confident voice, "Honored Matres are fit for little more than food."

A Handler came with a wooden bowl of red bones to which clung scraps of meat and fatty skin with patches of fur. A second bowl held slick-looking entrails and purplish organs. He dumped the offal through a slot into the cage. The filthy Honored Matres looked at it in disgust.

"Eat, if you wish to have strength for tomorrow's hunt."

"We don't eat garbage!" said one of the Honored Matres.

"Then you starve. It matters not to me."

Sheeana could tell the women were ravenous. After a shaky hesitation, they grabbed for the scraps, tearing off raw pieces and eating until their faces and fingers were smeared with grease and covered with old blood. They looked through the bars at their captors with such hateful expressions that they seemed capable of putrefying flesh.

One of the women glowered at Sheeana. "You don't belong here."

"Neither do you. However, I am outside the cage, while you are behind the bars."

The woman slammed the palm of her hand against the wooden barricade with a loud crack, but it was a halfhearted attempt at an attack. Hrrm pounced beside Sheeana as if to protect her, then prowled in front of the cage, his muscles rippling. He seemed very agitated.

Sheeana found it ironic, knowing what the Honored Matres had done to Hrrm and to his companions. The sexual perversions, the whippings and deprivations. It seemed a strikingly odd turnabout to see the women imprisoned, with the Futars prowling free.

She turned to the Chief Handler. "Honored Matres abuse their captive Futars.

Your punishments are appropriate."

"My guests, tomorrow we will put you in our best observation stations, from which you can watch the hunt." Orak Tho reached over to pat both Futars on their heads. "It will be good for this one to run with his brothers, and get in practice again. It is what he was born to do."

With his bestial eyes fixed on the Honored Matres, Hrrm bared his teeth in a menacing smile.

Before they all slept, Teg returned to the lighter to transmit an optimistic report back to the Ithaca.

13

The Guild Navigator finally came to Chapterhouse in response to the Mother Commander's summons. Though she was impatient and frustrated with him, he did not explain where he had been or why he had delayed coming for several days.

In the meantime, Janess, Kiria, and ten other handpicked Valkyries—most of them from the original Honored Matres who had undergone Bene Gesserit training — had already been secretly deposited on Tleilax to begin their underground work. They would be infiltrating the last stronghold of the rebel whores to undermine their defenses, planting the seeds of destruction while setting up for a surprise ambush. A part of Murbella wished she could be with her daughter's team, wearing traditional Honored Matre clothing again, letting the predator half of her dual nature come to the fore.

But she trusted Janess and her companions. For now, Murbella had to arrange the rest of the details and secure Guild cooperation, either through bribery or threat. She had to be the Mother Commander, not just an average fighter.

The mutated Navigator swam in his tank, not looking at all eager or interested, which troubled the Mother Commander. She had hinted that he would be rewarded well for speaking with her, but he did not seem excited by the prospect.

"The gas looks thin in your tank, Navigator," she said.

"It is only a temporary shortage." He did not seem to be bluffing.

"We may be ready to increase your supply of mélange, if the Guild is ready to cooperate with us and participate in the fight against the oncoming Enemy."

Edrik's metallic voice came through the speakers of his tank. "Your offer comes much too late, Mother Commander. For years you have tried to frighten us with the existence of this shadow Enemy, and you have tantalized us with promises of mélange. But your treasure has lost its luster. We have been forced to seek other alternatives, other supply lines."

"There are no other sources of mélange." Murbella glided forward to stand close to the curved plaz and peer inside.

"The Spacing Guild is in crisis. The severe shortage of spice—perpetuated by your Sisterhood—has split us into two factions. Many Navigators have already died from withdrawal, while others do not have sufficient mélange to perceive safe paths through foldspace. One faction of the Guild led by human Administrators has clandestinely hired the Ixians to develop improved navigation machines. They intend to install them in all Guildships."

"Machines! Ix has been talking about such things for centuries. People in the Scattering used navigational devices, and so did Chapterhouse. They have never been fully acceptable before."

"And after years of intensive research, it seems they may have a viable solution to the ancient impossible problem. I believe they are inferior substitutes, not at all comparable to Navigators. Still, they do work."

The Mother Commander's mind raced ahead, chasing several desirable possibilities she had not previously considered. If the Ixians had developed reliable devices for guiding ships through foldspace, then the New Sisterhood could use them in its own fleet. No longer needing to force the cooperation of the Navigators, they could be independent, not at the mercy of a volatile and unpredictable power base such as the Guild. If indeed Ix would sell such devices to the Sisterhood. Surely the Guild must have some sort of exclusive contract…

Then she realized that even the short-term solution of using navigation machines for her own battle fleet had its drawbacks. Second—and third—order consequences. Only Chapterhouse had spice. With that single substance they could pay and control the Navigators so that no other party could compete. If mélange became unnecessary, then the whole worth and strength of the New Sisterhood would diminish.

Only a moment had passed as Murbella considered all of this. "Navigation machines would mean the end of Navigators such as yourself."

"And it would also remove one of the primary customers for your mélange, Mother Commander. Therefore, my faction seeks a reliable and secure source of spice, so that Navigators can continue to exist. Your New Sisterhood has driven us to this extreme. We cannot depend on you for the spice we need."

"And you have discovered another supplier of mélange?" She let a scoffing tone into her voice. "I find that doubtful. We would know about it."

"We have a high level of confidence in our alternative." Edrik drifted away, came back.

Murbella shrugged nonchalantly. "I offer you an immediate increase in spice."

With a gesture, she directed three of her assistants to move a small suspensor barrow into the room; it was heaped high with packages of spice, as much as one Navigator could use in the better part of a Standard Year.

The tank's speakers remained silent, but she could see the hunger in Edrik's strange eyes. Murbella feared for a moment that he would turn her down, and all of her carefully thought out tactics would come to naught.

"One can never possess too much spice," the Navigator said after an interminable pause. "We have learned the painful lesson of relying on any single source. It would be better for the Navigators, and for the New Sisterhood, if we could reach some sort of accommodation."

I was right, she thought. "You need our spice, and we need your ships."

"The Guild will listen to your proposal, Mother Commander—provided it is a discussion rather than a threat. A business proposal between respected partners, not the sting of a bully's lash."

She stared at the tank, surprised by his bold statement. He might really have another source of spice, or at least the possibility of one. But he seems to harbor doubts and wants to play it safe.

"I need two Guild ships for transport to Tleilax. One equipped with a no-field and the other a traditional Heighliner."

"Tleilax? For what purpose?"

"We will grind down the only remaining stronghold and eliminate the last viable threat of the Honored Matres, once and for all."

"It will be arranged, within two days. I will take the spice now."

RENEGADE HONORED matres. The mysterious Enemy. Face Dancers. Murbella could not avoid them all, but the process of physical exercise—running, sweating, and straining—helped her to think as she planned her final assault on Tleilax.

Dressed in a clinging singlesuit, she sprinted along a stony path toward a hill near the Keep. She pushed herself until each breath slashed her lungs like a razor. Some of the inner voices scolded her for wasting time when there was so much work to be done. Murbella only ran harder.

She wanted to stimulate and provoke those Other Memories, needed them alert.

The clamorous sea of past lives was always there, but not always available, and certainly not always helpful. Making sense out of the collective wisdom was a constant challenge, even for the most influential of Sisters.

Upon passing through the Spice Agony, a new Reverend Mother was like a baby thrown into a vast ocean and commanded to swim through the waves of Other Memory to survive. With so many Sisters inside, she could always ask questions, but she also risked getting sucked down into the whirlpool of churning advice.

Other Memory was a tool. It could be a great boon, or a great peril. Sisters who delved too deeply into this reservoir of the past were in danger of going insane. That had been the fate of the Kwisatz Mother, Lady Anirul Corrino, so long ago during the time of Muad'Dib. It was like reaching for a sword and grabbing the blade instead of the hilt. A matter of balance.

The floating souls viewed Murbella's mind from the inside, and some thought they knew her better than she knew herself. But even though she could see the past Sisters of the Bene Gesserit, her Honored Matre ancestry remained blocked from her by a black wall.

As a little girl Murbella had been captured in one of the Honored Matre sweeps, taken from her family and trained in cruelty and sexual domination. A whore. Yes, the Bene Gesserit name was appropriate.

Those terrible women from the Scattering had their dark secrets, their shame, their ignominious crimes. Somewhere in the past they knew their origin, knew what they had done to provoke the Enemy. If only she could find that information inside herself, she would know the truth about the vicious women she was about to face.

Reaching the rustling grasses and flat brown rocks on the hill, she climbed to the boulder-strewn crest and sat on the highest point of rock. From this vantage she could see Chapterhouse Keep to the east and the encroaching dunes to the west. Her heart pounded from the exertion, and perspiration trickled down her forehead and cheeks. Her body had been pushed to a physical edge, and now it was time to do the same with her mind.

She had accomplished much as Mother Commander. Murbella had managed to keep the two poles of the New Sisterhood from tearing each other apart, but the scars still ran deep. She had crushed or consolidated all but one of the enclaves of renegade Honored Matres.

She needed to know more, needed to understand the Face Dancers that had infiltrated the Old Empire, the Enemy… and the Honored Matres. I must have that information before we depart for Tleilax.

Murbella opened a small pack at her waist and removed three wafers of fresh, concentrated mélange shipped up from the deep desert. She held the brownish-red wafers in her hand, feeling the spice tingle slightly as it mixed with the perspiration of her palm. She consumed all three wafers, intending to use the spice as a mental battering ram.

I will go deep this time, she thought. Guide me, my Sisters, and bring me back out, for I have important information to discover. The spice began to work within her. Closing her eyes, she dove inward, following the taste of mélange.

She could see the sweeping landscape of Bene Gesserit memories extending to an infinite horizon of human history. She seemed to be running down a kaleidoscopic corridor of mirrors, mother to mother to mother. Fear threatened to overwhelm her, but the Sisters within parted and drew her into their midst, absorbing her consciousness.

But Murbella demanded to know about the other half of her existence, to discover what lay behind the black wall that blocked all Honored Matre paths.

Yes, the memories were there, but muddled and disorganized, and they seemed to reach a dead end after only a handful of centuries, as if she had sprung from nowhere.

Were the whores descended from lost and corrupted Reverend Mothers, isolated out in the Scattering, as had been postulated? Had they formed their society with surviving Fish Speakers from the God Emperor's private guard, creating a bureaucracy based on violence and sexual domination?

Honored Matres rarely looked to the past, except when they glanced fearfully over their shoulders as the Enemy pursued them.

The spice washed through Murbella, sending her still deeper into her crowded thoughts, slamming her up against the obsidian barrier. In a trance atop the dry rocky hill, Murbella backed through generation after generation. Her breathing constricted, her external vision blurred into blindness; she heard a whimper of pain pass her lips.

Then, like a traveler emerging from a narrow defile, she beheld a mental clearing, in which shadowy ghost-women helped her forward. They showed her where to look. A crack in the wall, a way through. Deeper shadows, cold… and then—I see! The answer made her reel.

Yes, during the Famine Times, a splinter group of rogue Bene Gesserits, a few untrained wild Reverend Mothers, and fugitive Fish Speakers had indeed escaped in the turmoil after the Tyrant's death. Yet that was only a small part of the answer.

In their flight, those women had also encountered isolated and insular Tleilaxu worlds. For more than ten thousand years, the fanatical Bene Tleilax had used their females only as breeding machines and axlotl tanks. In a closely guarded secret, they kept their women immobilized, comatose, and uneducated, no more than wombs on tables. No Bene Gesserit, no outsider, had ever seen a Tleilaxu female.

When those rogue Bene Gesserits and militant Fish Speakers discovered the horrific truth, their reaction was swift and unforgiving; they left not a single Tleilaxu male alive on those outlying worlds. Liberating the breeding tanks, they took the Tleilaxu females with them on their journey, tending them, trying to bring them back.

A great many of the mindless tanks died, for no medical reason other than that they were unwilling to live, but some Tleilaxu females recovered. When they grew strong, they vowed reprisal for the monstrous crimes the males had committed for a thousand generations. And they never forgot.

The core of the Honored Matres were vengeful Tleilaxu females!

The renegade Reverend Mothers, militaristic Fish Speakers, and recovered Tleilaxu females had united to form the Honored Matres. Lost out in the Scattering for more than a dozen centuries, they had no access to mélange, could no longer undergo the Spice Agony, and were unable to find an alternative that would allow them access to Other Memories. Over time, interbreeding with males from populations they encountered, then dominated on other worlds, those women had become something else entirely.

And now Murbella knew why her chain of predecessors ended in dark emptiness.

She traveled back, generation to generation, all the way to a Tleilaxu female who had been a comatose breeding tank, a mindless womb.

Gathering her courage and focusing her rage, Murbella pushed harder and became the paralyzed tank that Tleilaxu female had once been. She shuddered as the dim and helpless sensations and memories seeped into her. She had been that young girl raised in captivity, understanding little of the world beyond her pitiful confinement, unable to read, barely able to speak. In the month of her first menstruation, she had been dragged away, strapped to a table, and turned into a flesh vat. No longer conscious, the nameless woman had no idea how many offspring her body had produced. Then she had been awakened and liberated.

The Mother Commander understood what it meant to be that Tleilaxu female and others, and why the Honored Matres became so ferocious. No longer the degraded, despised mothers of Tleilaxu males, they demanded to be revered, to be known from that time forth as "Honored Matres"… honored mothers. And through her Bene Gesserit eyes, Murbella recognized their humanity after all.

With understanding came release, and then everything else along the Honored Matre line came to her in a flood. She awoke and found herself sitting on the rock again, but no longer in sunlight. Hours had passed as she journeyed through her other lives. Now a dry night wind chilled her.

Shuddering from the aftereffects of the mélange and her devastating journey, Murbella lurched to her feet. She finally had her answers, would share this crucial information with her advisors.

Hearing distant shouts, she looked back toward the Keep. Lights were fanning out from the fortress as searchers came looking for her. She had been a searcher, too, and now she needed to tell the rest of the New Sisterhood what she had found.

The Valkyries would be preparing their assault on Tleilax.

14

Though nearly two hundred people remained aboard, the Ithaca felt empty to Duncan. The lighter had landed safely on the new planet, bearing Sheeana, Teg, the old Rabbi, and Thufir Hawat. Recovery teams had discreetly collected water and air, then returned to the no-ship. Everything was calm, on schedule.

The Bashar's recent message had indicated no sign of threat from the Handlers, and Duncan took the opportunity to leave the navigation bridge. Now that he had thought of it, he couldn't get the idea out of his head.

He felt like a prowler, sneaking off to do something forbidden as he stood alone before the sealed nullentropy chamber. He hadn't touched it in years, hadn't even thought about those perfectly preserved items it contained. He moved quietly, making certain the corridors were empty. Though Duncan assured himself he was doing nothing wrong, he did not want to have to explain himself to anyone.

He had fooled himself and many of the people aboard. But still he was not free of the addictive, debilitating hold Murbella had over him. He doubted she even realized the strength of the painful bond; when they had been together, when he had been able to get as much of her as he wanted, Duncan had never felt the weakness.

But in all those years since…

The corridor's glowpanels were bright. The breathy white noise of air-recirculation systems was the only sound Duncan could hear except for the pounding of his own heart.

Before he could think too much, forsaking his Mentat ability to project possible consequences, he applied his thumbprint ID and deactivated the nullentropy field. The storage locker opened with a faint exhalation of adjusting atmospheric pressures. And with it came Murbella's smell, like a slap across his face… as if she were here, in front of him.

Even after nineteen years, her scent was as fresh as if he had just held her.

Her garments and other personal articles carried that unmistakable fragrance that was so essentially her. He pulled out the items one by one, a loose tunic, a soft towel, the pair of comfortable leggings she often wore when they engaged in combat practice in the training room. He touched each one with a nervous caution, as if afraid he might find hidden knives there.

Duncan had gathered these items and hidden them in storage very soon after escaping from Chapterhouse. He had not wanted to see traces of Murbella in his personal quarters or in the training rooms. He had sealed them away because he couldn't bear to destroy them. Even then, he had realized the chains she had on him.

Now, he looked at the collar of a rumpled tunic and, as he had hoped, saw a few loose strands of dark amber hair, like fine wires spun from precious metal. And at the end of each strand the pale root. He hoped he had stored these items in time, so many years ago.

Viable cells.

Duncan realized he wasn't breathing. He looked at the strands of loose hair and let his eyes fall closed, intentionally blocking the automatic Mentat trance. The idea was an impossible temptation to him.

It had been years since another ghola baby had been created, though the axlotl tanks remained functional. Sheeana's disturbing vision dream had forced her to call a halt to the project. Nevertheless, they had the capability of growing any ghola they wished. The tanks weren't being used right now. He had every right to consider this, after all he'd done for the people aboard the Ithaca.

He picked up one of Murbella's loose tunics, brought it to his nose and inhaled a long breath. What did he really want?

Duncan had distracted himself with enough duties and problems that her ghost image had faded back into his subconscious. He had thought he was over her.

But his obsessive thinking about Murbella had nearly made him lose the ship to the old man and woman several years ago, and only Teg's quick instincts had saved them.

If I hadn't been distracted, preoccupied… obsessed! His mistake had almost cost them their freedom. Murbella was dangerous. He had to let her go. Duncan would not allow his weakness to endanger them again.

But when he'd remembered these items in nullentropy storage, when the idea occurred to him that it was possible—possible—to have another Murbella, it was like touching a hot flame to dry tinder.

If he could gather the courage—and ignore his own rational reservations—he could talk to the Tleilaxu Master about the process before Sheeana and the others returned from the planet of the Handlers. He rationalized it to himself, pretending there would be no harm in simply raising the idea to Scytale. It implied no decision on his part.

He threw the articles back into the storage bin. Doing so seemed like swimming upstream against a strong current. The idea had latched itself firmly onto his mind. He slammed the cubicle door shut and sealed it again.

For now.

15

The hunt began at dawn.

The tall, raccoon-faced men used stunner goads to roust the five captive Honored Matres from their stinking cell beneath the wooden tower. Hrrm and the black-striped Futar prowled about; six younger Futars whined and growled anxiously.

With glimmering orange eyes, the women had noticed the Ithaca's lighter on the far side of the clearing. Now, two of the Honored Matres burst impulsively out of the noisome cell, delivering swift kicks and blows, knocking aside the stunner goads.

But the Handlers and Futars were well practiced in fending off any resistance.

Before the whores could run, the black-striped Futar pounced, driving one of them to the ground. He bared his long teeth at her throat, barely restraining himself from ripping out her larynx and ending the anticipated hunt too soon.

She thrashed wildly, but the Futar dug claws into her shoulder, pinning her with his strength and weight.

Hrrm had trapped the second woman, circling her, his muscles coiled. A hungry growl bubbled in his throat. The younger Futars paced nearby, wanting part of the kill. "Not yet." The Chief Handler allowed a calm smile to flow across his long, streamlined face. Hrrm and Black Stripe froze; the younger ones howled.

Miles Teg had no great love for the Honored Matres, knowing the havoc they had wrought among the Bene Gesserit and how they had tortured him. They had already killed him once, when they devastated Rakis. But as a military commander, the Bashar viewed them as opponents against whom he should carry no undue malice. Young Thufir Hawat, seeing the Bashar's intense concentration, imitated him, gathering data as the basis for making further decisions.

The old Rabbi looked squeamish at the very thought of the hunt, even though Honored Matres had hunted his people, too, on Gammu. Sheeana stood by silently, accepting the violence that was sure to take place. She was quite intrigued.

"We will kill you," snarled the Honored Matre whom Hrrm held at bay. She crouched, holding her hands out as weapons, ready to spring. Hrrm was not intimidated by her.

The six young Futars snapped and snarled, eager for their own hunt. Their primal hunger went beyond the desire for mere food. The other three whores emerged from the tree-stump cell. Although they were wary and ready to fight, they decided to wait for a better chance.

"We will kill you," repeated the first trapped Honored Matre.

"You will have the opportunity to try." Orak Tho stood straight, the dark band across his eyes falling into shadow. "Take them into the forest where they can run."

"Why not just execute us here?"

"Because we would not enjoy that as much." Several of the Handlers smiled.

They were calm and confident in their superiority.

As she watched, Sheeana tried to formulate a conjecture about these mysterious isolated people, where they had come from and what their true goals might be.

She took a step toward the nearest Honored Matre. "Tell us your names, so that I might make a body record when this day is done."

The whore that was still pinned under the black-striped Futar thrashed and yowled. The calmer Honored Matre merely fixed Sheeana with a frozen gaze. Orak Tho raised his hand lightly, cutting off any further shows of bravado. "Your name will be forgotten by the time your flesh passes through the digestive systems of these Futars. You will end your physical existence as excrement on the forest floor."

The Chief Handler turned his back and strode away with his long-legged, loose-jointed gait. The ravenous Futars closed in to prevent the women from making another escape attempt, herding them along.

"Come, out into the forest." Orak Tho glanced back at the seething Honored Matres. "Out there, you will have your chance to shed blood, or die in the attempt."

ATOP A tall, open-framed lookout tower constructed of smooth silvery-blond wood, Teg stood on the open platform, grasped a railing, and looked down into the forest. Sheeana was with him. Handlers guarded the base of the tower, their stun-goads ready in case the hunted Honored Matres should come at them like an unexpected ricochet in their flight from the prowling Futars. The guards did not look worried, though they kept Teg and Sheeana safe, high above the killing grounds.

The Chief Handler's guests were allowed to observe from this vantage point, supposedly the best view of the action. Because the range of the hunt itself was unpredictable, the Rabbi and young Thufir Hawat had been sent to a different lookout tower a kilometer away. The old man had made weak protestations, claiming he would rather wait back at the lighter, but the Handlers insisted that they observe the show.

"This will prove we are not your enemies," Orak Tho had said. "Witness what we do to Honored Matres. Certainly you wish to see them suffer, considering the pain they have caused you, too?"

"I would like to observe the hunt and witness your Futars in action," Thufir had said, then glanced meaningfully at Teg. "It is important to see how these women fight, isn't it, Bashar? That way we can prepare, should we run into more of them."

After the four observers were situated in the separate lookout towers, loud vibrating horns blew through the forest. Sheeana and Teg looked down into the maze of enormously tall aspens. The Handler guards at the base of the tower sent out another signal. Somewhere out of sight, the five Honored Matres split up and dashed into the under-brush, scattering dry leaves.

To Teg, it was obvious the Handlers and Futars had done this many times before.

Beneath them, two muscular beast-men bounded along between the aspen trunks, intent on tracking down their quarry. Teg could almost sense the bloodlust from there. The Honored Matres would put up a good fight, but the whores had no real chance. Quickly, the hunting Futars vanished into the labyrinth of trees.

He and Sheeana continued to watch. The great forest that extended out from the tower settlement was an endless maze of autumn gold and silvery bark.

Traditional aspen groves were genetically identical, branching off from the same tree as runners rather than being deposited as fertilized seeds. Nature's clones. The tall trunks were surrounded by fallen yellow leaves, like antique solari coins scattered on the ground. From this perspective, the endless straight and rigid trunks looked like the bars of a giant cage.

Slipping into intense Mentat awareness as he waited for the hunt to come closer, Teg analyzed the forest, fitting all the tiny pieces together until he resolved an unexpected pattern cleverly hidden among randomness. At one time, all of the great gray-trunked trees had been laid out in a precise order, carefully staged to present an appearance of "geometrical naturalness."

He studied further. There could be no mistaking it. "This forest was artificially cultivated."

Sheeana looked at him. "A Mentat projection?"

He responded with the barest nod, concerned that listening devices might have been planted in the observation tower. He did not like being separated from Thufir and the Rabbi. Had this hunt been staged to break their party in half so the Handlers could spy on their private conversations?

He made a second-order projection. Obviously, although the original planters of this sweeping forest had strived to create the appearance of wildness, they had not been able to get past their innate sense of order.

Had original colonists from the Scattering cultivated this forest in barren ground generations ago? Or had the true natural chaos been so disturbing to them that they razed the existing trees to the ground and designed a new wilderness according to an acceptable blueprint?

From far off came sounds of crashing through the trees, snarling Futars, and female shouts. Abruptly, the disturbance moved toward the observation tower.

Sheeana leaned closer to the Bashar, masking her movement with a show of peering down at the hunt below. She spoke in a low whisper, "You have concerns, Miles?" They had just sent a signal to Duncan that everything was safe and under control.

"I have… thoughts. This hunt is an example. For instance, we know the Handlers bred their Futars for the specific purpose of killing Honored Matres."

"Considering how dangerous the whores are, it seems a perfectly reasonable thing for the Handlers to create and imprint such predators to protect themselves," Sheeana said. "The Chief Handler's arguments make sense. There's no mistaking that we share a common enemy in the Honored Matres."

"Ask yourself who else might wish the Honored Matres to be destroyed, and the alliances become less clear-cut," Teg continued. "Simply because we both hate the Honored Matres does not guarantee that the Handlers have the same goals as we do."

Third-order projection: If the Handlers had learned their specialized genetic knowledge and sophisticated techniques from the Tleilaxu who fled in the Scattering, then what part did the Bene Tleilax play in this overall conflict?

Where did their allegiance lie?

He would have to speak frankly with Master Scytale as soon as they returned to the Ithaca. Obviously, the last old Master harbored much resentment toward the Lost Tleilaxu who had betrayed his people. Those Tleilaxu stepbrothers had been changed out in the Scattering. Maybe Scytale knew more than he had yet revealed.

His Mentat awareness raced along. He felt his heart pounding, his metabolism speeding up. We are not the only ones who hate the whores. The Honored Matres had somehow enraged the Outside Enemy enough to draw them toward the Old Empire.

Teg gripped the wooden rail more tightly. Sensing his tension, Sheeana gave him a questioning look, but with the faintest shake of his head, he warned her not to speak openly. He tried to think of a way to alert Duncan.

Sheeana grabbed his arm. "Look down there."

One of the five Honored Matres charged through the aspen forest, dodging and weaving around the trunks. Behind her, three Futars surged after their prey, their wiry hair erect and claws extended. The woman ran like the wind, her sinewy muscles and bare feet carrying her through the underbrush as she kicked up leaves like golden clouds of dust.

At the base of the observation tower, two of the bandit-faced watchers held out their stun-goads, but did not interfere. They would let the Futars do the killing.

Though she raced headlong, the Honored Matre could not outrun the beast-men.

Her hair was disheveled, her eyes wide, her jaw set with determination, as if she was ready to turn and use her own teeth to rip out her pursuers' throats.

With several swift bounds, the young Futars closed on her, hungry and boisterous. Teg wondered if they had yet been blooded, or if this was their first hunt.

Smelling the hot breath behind her, knowing the Futars were within steps of bringing her down, the Honored Matre leapt into the air, struck the nearest smooth aspen trunk with her bare feet, and rebounded sideways. The nearest Futar tried to turn so swiftly he scuffed up a spray of dirt and twigs.

The woman landed on the ground, then sprang in the opposite direction, arms extended, teeth bared. She crashed into the second oncoming Futar, and the force of her impact was enough to knock the beast-man off balance. She rolled with him, used two fingers like bony spikes to jab out his feral eyes. The blinded creature yowled and thrashed. In a move like liquid lightning, the woman grabbed its muzzle and with a vicious twist snapped the Futar's neck.

Without a moment's pause, barely even panting, she lunged toward the third young Futar, her bloody fingers outstretched. Before the Honored Matre could strike, though, the Futar let out a brutal, shivering shriek, louder and more terrible than anything Teg had ever heard.

The effect of the shriek — no doubt exactly as the Futar and his trainers had intended — was to make the woman freeze. She stumbled as if her muscles had locked involuntarily. An animal version of Voice?

Before the Honored Matre could recover, the first Futar struck her down from behind and rolled her onto her back. With a slash of his claws, he tore long, bloody gouges across her face. With his other hand, he dug into her abdomen, ripping through her hardened muscles and reaching in up to his elbow to extract her heart.

The woman twitched in a pool of blood, then lay still. The other Futar sniffed at the body of his dead companion and went over to join the first one as they began to feed on the prey.

Teg watched with fascinated disgust. The Handler guards picked up the body of the slain Futar. The remaining two beast-men paid them no attention as they slashed and tore, wetly devouring the stringy flesh of their victim.

Farther off, from the direction of the tower where Thufir and the Rabbi observed, came the sounds of more horns, more snarling and thrashing. The hunt continued.

16

Even as her undefeated Valkyries traveled toward Tleilax, the Mother Commander felt uneasy. Tleilax… the Tleilaxu females… the Honored Matres. So much now made sense to Murbella. The whores' mindless destruction of all Tleilaxu worlds was no longer entirely incomprehensible.

But understanding did not lead to mercy. The New Sisterhood's plans would not change. Much hung in the balance here, the culmination of an energy-draining conflict that diverted attention from preparing for the main struggle. The thwarted attack on Chapterhouse, the obliteration of Richese, the insurgents and Face Dancers on Gammu. After today, this part would all be over.

The immense Heighliner carried Murbella's troops and equipment to the last stronghold of the rebel whores. After the Guildship disgorged her obvious fleet of Valkyries in the same warships she had used to attack both Buzzell and Gammu, the show of force would certainly be impressive. From what she knew of Matre Superior Hellica, however, Murbella doubted simple intimidation would be enough. The Valkyries were willing to expend as much violence as might be necessary; in fact, they looked forward to it.

Navigator Edrik insisted on guiding the Heighliner himself. Citing the Spacing Guild's long-standing neutrality, he would not participate in the actual combat, but he clearly wanted to be present during the takeover of Bandalong.

Murbella got the sense that the Navigator faction had something to gain here.

Was the Guild hiding something on Tleilax? Though the Navigators and human Administrators had vehemently denied any involvement, some ship had delivered Hellica's Obliterators to Richese. She had assumed it was an Honored Matre vessel, but it could have been a Guildship… like this one.

In a transparent chamber above them, the Navigator swam in fresh spice gas supplied by the Chapterhouse stockpiles. She didn't trust him.

Earlier in the week, an innocuous-seeming Guild supply vessel had sent a coded transmission containing the New Sisterhood's specific plans to Janess, hiding among the Honored Matres. Her team's camouflage was secure, and the intelligence data Janess provided in return had given Murbella much to consider, a wealth of information that allowed her to plan a perfect coup de grace. Along with Kiria and the other ten faux Honored Matres, Janess had made preparations to strike the soft white underbelly of the overconfident whores while they stared up at the skies.

Soon…

Emerging from foldspace, the giant vessel went into orbit over Tleilax. Bashar Wikki Aztin already had her orders.

From the Navigator's bridge, Murbella looked down at the planet. The continents still showed great black scars from the original violent takeover by the Honored Matres. The women had unleashed terrible weapons, but stopped short of completely sterilizing the main Tleilaxu world, choosing to crush and conquer the remnants instead of wiping them out. Unconscious revenge on behalf of countless generations of Tleilaxu females. No doubt Matre Superior Hellica did not know her own history, but she knew her hatred well.

In the subsequent decades since the original attack, the draconian women had salvaged what seemed unsalvageable. Now, as Murbella studied the terrain below, her tactical advisors matched details with the intelligence reports Janess and her spies had sent. Though incommunicado, Bashar Aztin would be making a last broad assessment, formulating and finalizing plans for the main, unexpected strike.

The whores down there must certainly have noted the Heighliner's unscheduled arrival. Murbella gave her signal, and more than sixty of the attack ships from Chapterhouse dropped out of the great vessel's hold to hover in neatly organized squadrons, like pilot fish around a large shark. Seeing the military force, the Honored Matres could have no question about the newcomers' intent.

Her communications officer hit the transmit toggle. "Mother Commander Murbella of the New Sisterhood wishes to speak with Hellica."

A woman responded in a defiant tone. "You are referring to the Matre Superior.

You will show proper respect."

Murbella's voice was infused with confident authority. "As will you. I have come to facilitate your surrender."

The woman sounded indignant and outraged, but moments later another voice took control. "Brash words from an opponent I know is weak. We have annihilated whole worlds. A Heighliner and a handful of ships do not frighten us!"

"Oh? Even if we carry some of the planet-burning weapons you yourself used on Richese?"

"We are not unarmed either," Hellica retorted. "I remain unconvinced of the need to surrender."

Instead of being intimidated, Murbella felt more confident. If Hellica truly possessed such defenses, she would have attacked preemptively instead of issuing a warning.

"Your bravado bores me, Hellica. You know that the rest of the Honored Matre rebels have either joined the New Sisterhood or been annihilated. Your cause is lost. We should try to find another solution. Let us meet, face to face."

The Matre Superior gave a brittle chuckle. "I will meet with you, if only to show you your weakness." Murbella knew full well how the Honored Matres thought: They saw the mere suggestion of negotiation to be a deep flaw in the Bene Gesserit way. Hellica would seize any opening, probably attempt to assassinate her, assuming she could then take control of the Sisterhood.

Murbella counted on it.

"Good. I will come down to Bandalong with my escort of sixty ships. Together, we will reach a resolution."

"Come if you dare." The Matre Superior cut off the transmission. Murbella could almost hear the sound of a trap snapping shut.

Earlier, the Mother Commander had pondered the possibility of capturing the pretender queen alive, bringing her into the New Sisterhood as an ally.

Niyela from Gammu had killed herself rather than be converted—no great loss.

But after the heinous destruction of Richese, Murbella had realized that capturing Hellica would be like bringing an armed time bomb back to Chapterhouse. The Matre Superior needed to be destroyed. Duncan would never have made such a tactically foolish error.

Murbella joined one of the Valkyrie ships and began her descent toward Bandalong. These vessels had been sufficient to conquer Buzzell and Gammu in an impressive show of force, but not overwhelming. The Matre Superior would naturally assume that her followers could defeat them.

If you don't want an opponent to see your hidden dagger, make certain an obvious weapon looks large and deadly.

Her ships approached the waiting Palace.

17

From the call to arms and the groups of scurrying Honored Matres in Bandalong, Uxtal could tell that the newly arrived Heighliner was not merely another curious delegation from the Navigators. This was something far more serious.

Since he had already demonstrated his success in reawakening the Waff ghola's memories, Edrik was satisfied. Why would the Guild be bothering them now? He was working as fast as he could! Thus far, Uxtal had succeeded in covering up the significant flaws in the Tleilaxu Master's knowledge.

To make matters worse, during the sudden emergency he received a summons to go to the Palace of Bandalong immediately. He hurried off toward the sickeningly ostentatious building. As he ran the gauntlet of the colonnaded entry, he ignored the magenta columns and the garishly dressed statues of Honored Matres arrayed in threatening positions.

A cowed-looking bonded male stood in a bright yellow tuxedo outside the immense door, wearing a dazed expression. Striding up to him, Uxtal lifted his own chin in a disdainful sniff, since he had never been sexually twisted by the Honored Matres himself. "I am here to see the Matre Superior."

The man blinked at him and said dully, "She is occupied setting up a trap for the witches. We have been threatened by the New Sisterhood."

Bene Gesserit witches? So that was what all the turmoil was about. Overhead in the sky, a swarm of dark ships was descending like a flock of carrion birds.

Uxtal watched nervously, expecting explosives to drop onto the rooftops.

Hellica certainly had a way of provoking other people.

The researcher held out the rolled message he had received. "Perhaps the Matre Superior wants me at her side during the emergency. I am her greatest living researcher, the man who will restore mélange production from the axlotl tanks.

My work may be the key to her negotiations." He crossed his arms over his small chest.

Yes, that must be the real reason. If the witches from Chapterhouse counted on their spice monopoly, then Hellica would want to flaunt Uxtal's success with the Waff ghola. She would offer him as her champion genius! Also, Navigator Edrik would surely never allow harm to come to his work. Uxtal should be safe, no matter what happened.

The tuxedoed man studied the summons, nodded sagely, and then dashed Uxtal's preconceptions. "Ah, now I understand. This is not, in fact, from the Matre Superior. We have prepared a room. Follow me."

"Shouldn't you at least inform her that I am here?"

"No. I was given specific instructions on that account."

Confused and uneasy, the little researcher was escorted down a wide corridor that featured paintings of dead Bene Gesserits in macabre poses. The bonded male indicated for him to pass through an archway and descend a stairway to a large, sunken chamber.

When Uxtal stepped down into the main room, alone, the entire chamber glowed orange as thousands of luminous eyes appeared in the floor. Terrified, he tried to retreat, but the whole staircase melted into the wall, trapping him like an unarmed slave in a combat arena. "Matre Superior? What is it you require of me?" He thought furiously, reminding himself, They need me, that is why I am still alive. They need me! The glowing eyes in the floor went dark, plunging the sunken room into blackness. Through his panic, he became aware of a trickle of noise that entered the chamber like a stream running down the wall. Growing louder, the sound metamorphosed into a woman's grating laughter.

"You see? My eyes are always on you, little man."

Burning light filled the room, dazzling him. Peering through his fingers, Uxtal saw Ingva standing before him completely naked. Her aged body was carved from knots of muscle and taut skin; her breasts were too small to sag. "The Matre Superior clearly does not want you. And now while she is preoccupied with the Chapterhouse witches, I will claim you for my own. Then you will really work for me. Hellica need never know, until I decide to make my move."

"But I have done everything requested of me!" His voice cracked. "I have grown gholas, produced your orange spice drug, restored the Tleilaxu Master's memories. Soon I will provide you with all the mélange you could possibly—"

"Exactly. And that is why I must control you. Against all of my expectations, you have actually proved yourself to be of value." She moved closer, and he felt like a mouse transfixed by a viper. "From this day forth you will be my slave, which will therefore make me indispensable. After my imprinting, no other woman will be sufficient for you—not even another Honored Matre." Her smiling lips looked as ragged as torn paper. "Your service in past years has earned you this reward. Most males do not survive so long among us."

Uxtal didn't dare run, lest he enrage her. This was the lingering threat that he had feared for years. He saw an unquenchable orange fire begin to burn in Ingva's eyes. Sexual bonding, total enslavement—to this hideous crone.

"You are about to discover my pleasures." She caressed his face with a bony, clawed finger. "You're going to enjoy this."

"That is not possible, Honored Matre—"

She cackled. "Little man, I am an adept of the fifth order, a qualified member of the black veil. I can overcome any blockage of desire." She grabbed him by the arm and dragged him to the floor. She was too strong, and he could not fight her off. Smiling as she straddled him, Ingva said, "Now for your reward." The gnarled woman ripped his clothes away, and Uxtal prayed that he would survive this day. He whimpered. Years ago, at the very beginning, the Face Dancers had tried to protect him before delivering him to Bandalong, but Khrone had not shown himself here for some time. The Face Dancer had discarded the Lost Tleilaxu researcher as soon as he'd provided the Paul Atreides ghola.

Khrone had simply left him at the mercy of the Honored Matres. The Face Dancers could do nothing to protect him from Ingva's fury once she discovered what had been done to him.

With sinewy, greedy hands, the crone reached down, gasped, and then hurled him across the floor naked. "Castrated! Who did that to you?"

"Th-the Face Dancers. Long ago. I–I needed to concentrate on my work, without the temptation of an Honored Matre's pleasures."

"You disgusting, stupid little man! Do you know what you have denied yourself?

What you have denied me?"

Uxtal slipped away, scrambling to retrieve the remnants of his clothing before she killed him out of sheer indignation. But Ingva moved like a panther to intercept him. "I have never been pleased with you, little man, and now you have made my job more difficult. Castration, however, does not render you utterly useless as a sexual slave. To an adept with my skill level, even a eunuch is not entirely unreachable. It will require extra effort, but I will imprint you anyway." She pushed him back down to the floor. "You will thank me for this when it's over. I promise you that."

Uxtal argued, whined, and then screamed, but no one heard or cared.

18

Alone on their breezy observation platform above the giant aspen trees, the ghola of Thufir Hawat tried to absorb everything and see everything, adding details together for a correct summation and analysis. He was not yet a Mentat, but according to historical records, Thufir had the potential to be a great warrior, a strategist, and a human computer.

In his original lifetime, he had served three generations of House Atreides.

After the fall of Arrakeen, the Harkonnens had captured him and used a residual poison to coerce him to serve the evil Baron. Hew I must have hated that! Back then, Thufir had been an old veteran, his mind heavy with a lifetime of service and battles… somewhat like the old Bashar. Young Thufir very much wanted to live up to those expectations.

Even here, safely high above the ground, he could smell blood in the air from the hunt. Two lanky Handlers stood guard at the base of the wooden tower to protect him and the Rabbi from the dangerous Futars and Honored Matres loose in the forest. Or were the Handlers simply making certain their two visitors didn't go anywhere off-limits and didn't see anything they weren't supposed to see?

The anxious Rabbi paced across the open platform and peered down into the broad grove of silver-barked trees. Thufir had already made enough of an analysis of the old man to predict how he would react in a situation. Hardened by a lifetime of feeling wrongfully downtrodden, the Rabbi fought for his people while trying not to be seen as a victim. Most of all, he feared being indecisive, anything less than a leader.

Now the old man looked sickened and disappointed, as if his dreams of having a perfect new world for his followers were draining away. Would the Jewish refugees ask to stay on this planet, despite the possibility of further Honored Matre attacks? Even with the Handlers' odd behavior and their vicious Futars, which the Rabbi found repellent for religious reasons? What would the Rabbi decide as he weighed the advantages and disadvantages?

Thufir was sure he and his fellow young gholas would never come here to live.

They belonged on the Ithaca with the Bashar and Duncan Idaho, ready to defend against the Outside Enemy. That was why they had been reborn in the first place.

Even if some of the refugees left the no-ship to settle on the planet, Duncan would never allow the Ithaca to remain here. Motionlessness creates vulnerability. Complacency is dangerous. Regardless of how welcoming the Handlers might seem, this planet could only be a temporary stopover for most of them. Though his past-life memories had not been restored, Thufir's loyalties remained with the people aboard the ship.

In the forest below, he heard snarling Futars and the sharp cracking of branches. He shaded his eyes, trying to discern details from shadows in the trees as the chase came toward them.

"I do not like this." The Rabbi raised his hands in a warding gesture.

"It will take more than a superstitious symbol to block these attackers."

"You may think yourself safer, ghola, because you will someday be a warrior, but I fight in a much more important arena. Faith is my weapon—the only one I need."

Below, they saw the cautious predatory movement of two Futars slinking through the trees to set a trap. Thufir realized what was happening: With loud roars in the distance, other beast-men were driving an Honored Matre in this direction, and then the rest of the pack would close in on her.

Using implanted communication devices, the Handler guards at the base of the tower received an update. They turned their bandit-masked eyes up to the observation platform. "Three of the five Honored Matres have been killed," one called. "The hunting ability of our Futars is proven."

But two of the deadly women remained alive, and one was coming toward the observation tower at that very moment.

She ran out of the trees, her face scratched by lashing branches, her left arm mauled and hanging useless, her bare feet torn and bleeding from fleeing across the rough ground. But she showed no signs of slowing.

The Rabbi squirmed and put a hand over his eyes, as if offended. "I will not watch this."

As the woman burst into the clearing, looking over her shoulder, two Futars sprang from their hiding places in the trees and surprised their prey. Another pair of hunting Futars closed in from behind her, running hard. Thufir leaned over the railing to get a better view, while the Rabbi cringed back.

Without pausing in her stride, the Honored Matre bent to snatch up a fallen branch with her good hand. Using amazing strength, she spun and shoved it like a wobbly, off-balance javelin. The splintered end skewered one of the leaping Futars. Mortally wounded, he fell, yelping and thrashing, as she sprang aside.

Another Futar jumped the woman, striking at her wounded side, hoping to latch onto her shoulder and wrench her already-mauled arm out of its socket. Thufir saw instantly that the Honored Matre had merely been feigning the severity of her injury. Her mangled arm darted up and grabbed the Futar by his throat. His jaws snapped only a centimeter from her face. With a loud grunt, the whore pushed the creature away. The Futar staggered backward and crashed into one of the silvery trunks. Stunned, he struggled to his feet.

As the other two Futars closed with her, the Honored Matre looked sideways.

Her orange eyes fixed on the two Handlers standing guard by the lookout tower.

With a burst of desperate, vengeful speed, she ran directly toward them, leaving the beast-men behind.

Both of the long, lanky men raised their stun-goads, but she outmatched them with a hurricane of movement. Her callused hand knocked the staffs away and she drove in, relishing the brief look of fear behind her first victim's eyes.

With a single, powerful blow, she broke the Handler's neck, and he crumpled to the ground.

She lunged toward the second Handler, but the nearest Futar intercepted her to protect his master. The other two beast-men came closer, one of them limping.

Seeing that she could not fight off the creatures, the Honored Matre grabbed the fallen stun-goad and bounded off into the forest again. Snarling, the Futars ran after her.

Thufir grabbed the Rabbi's arm. "Quickly!" He went to the steep wooden stairs that would take them down to the ground. "Maybe we can help."

The Rabbi hesitated. "But he is already dead, and it is safe up here. We should stay—"

"I am tired of being a spectator!" Thufir descended swiftly, two creaking steps at a time. The Rabbi came after him, grumbling.

When Thufir reached the ground, the remaining Handler guard was bent over his comrade. Thufir expected to hear the lanky man wailing in grief or shouting in anger; instead, he seemed more intent.

Unusual. Curious.

From far off in the forest came a bloodcurdling shriek as the three Futars cornered the Honored Matre again. She hurled obscenities. Thufir heard a crashing violence, a crack that sounded like breaking bone, terrible snarls followed by a brief scream… and then silence. After a moment's pause, Thufir's sensitive ears caught the unmistakable sounds of feeding.

Huffing great breaths, the Rabbi reached the base of the observation tower, and steadied himself by holding the wooden rail. Thufir hurried toward the Handler and his dead companion. "Is there anything we can do to help?"

Hunched over, the surviving Handler's back suddenly tensed, as if he'd forgotten the two were there. He swiveled his head on a long neck and looked at them. The dark band was a heavy shadow across his eyes.

Then Thufir glimpsed the dead Handler lying on the ground.

The corpse's features had shifted, changed… reverted. He was no longer tall and lanky, and his face was not streamlined; he had no black mask around his eyes. Instead, the dead Handler had grayish skin, dark, closeset eyes, and a pug nose.

Thufir recognized it from archival images—a Face Dancer!

The other Handler guard glared at them, then let his face revert to its neutral state. No longer human, but cadaverous… and blank.

Thufir's mind spun, and he wished desperately that he had Mentat abilities.

The Handlers were Face Dancers? All of them, or just a few? Handlers fought the Honored Matres, a common enemy. The Enemy. Handlers, Face Dancers, Enemy… This planet was not at all as it seemed.

He flashed a glance at the Rabbi. The old man had seen the same thing, and though his horror and surprise had made him freeze for an instant, he seemed to be drawing the same conclusions.

The powerful Handler drew himself up and came toward them with his stun-goad.

"We'd better run," Thufir said.

19

From inside the reconstructed Castle Caladan, Khrone pulled his strings, played his roles, and moved his game pieces. The Face Dancer myriad had manipulated the Ixians, the Guild, CHOAM, and the Honored Matre rebels who still ruled Tleilax. They had already achieved many milestones of success.

Khrone had traveled wherever he was needed, wherever he was summoned, but he always came back here to his pair of precious gholas. The Baron and Paolo. The work continued.

On Caladan, year after year, the group of machine-augmented observers sent regular reports to the distant old man and woman. Despite their bodily degeneration, they showed damnable patience, and still they'd found nothing to fault him for. Khrone was always watched by the patchwork observers, but never discovered. Even those hideous spies didn't know everything.

The summons came to him from the castle tower, interrupting his work and concentration. Khrone trudged up the stone staircase to see what the spies wanted. When they invoked the name of their masters, he could not refuse—not yet. He had to keep up appearances for a little while longer, until he could finish this part of his project. He knew the old man and woman understood the wisdom of his alternative plan. Since their efforts to find the lost no-ship kept failing, it made sense to pursue another route for obtaining their Kwisatz Haderach: the Paolo ghola.

But would the old man and woman allow him the necessary time to awaken the child? Paolo was only six, and it would be several years yet before Khrone could even begin the process of triggering his memories, saturating him with spice, preparing him for his destiny. The distant masters had made their demands and set their schedules. According to sparse reports from the patchwork observers, the old man and woman were ready to launch their vast fleet on a long-anticipated conquest of everything, whether the Kwisatz Haderach was ready or not…

Silent and stony, the hideous emissaries awaited him inside the high tower room. Just as Khrone reached the top of the winding stairs, the men turned with stuttering movements to face him. He put his hands on his hips. "You are delaying my work."

One emissary's head twitched from side to side, as if his neurons were firing conflicting impulses that caused his neck and shoulder muscles to spasm. "This message—we cannot deliver—deliver this message—ourselves." He balled his bony hand into a fist. Bubbles gurgled through the tubes. "Deliver a message."

"What is it?" Khrone crossed his arms. "I have work to complete for our masters."

The lead emissary opened his hands wide in a beckoning gesture. The other augmented humans stood motionless, presumably recording his every movement.

Khrone stepped into the gallery room while the pale-faced horrors retreated to the wall. He frowned. "What is this—"

Suddenly his vision fuzzed around the edges, and the walls of the tower became indistinct. Reality shifted around him. At first Khrone saw the ethereal grid of the net, strands of connected tachyons completing an infinite chain. Then he found himself in another place, a simulation of a simulation.

He heard the sound of plodding hoofs, smelled manure, and listened to the creaking of rough wheels. Turning to his right, he saw the old man and old woman sitting in a wooden cart drawn by a gray mule. The beast walked along with infinite weariness and patience. No one seemed to be in a hurry.

Khrone had to take a step to follow the cart, which was loaded high with paradan melons, their olive green rinds mottled with splotchy patterns. He looked around, trying to understand the metaphor of their dream world. Far ahead, the road led toward crowded geometric buildings that seemed to move and flow together, an enormous city that looked alive. The perfectly angled structures were like patterns on a circuit board.

In the foreground the old man sat next to the woman on the buck-board, casually holding leather reins. He looked down at Khrone. "We have news. Your time-consuming project is no longer relevant. We have no need for you or your Baron Harkonnen, or for the Paul Atreides ghola you have grown for us."

The old woman chimed in, "In other words, we will not have to wait so many years for your alternate Kwisatz Haderach candidate."

The man lifted the reins and urged the mule to greater speed, but the beast ignored the command. "It is time to be done with all this tinkering."

Khrone walked along beside them. "What do you mean? I am ever so close to—"

"For nineteen years, our sophisticated nets have failed to capture the no-ship, but now we've been fortunate. We have laid a primitive trap, an old-fashioned trick, and very soon the no-ship and all those aboard will be in our control. We will have what we need without resorting to your alternative Kwisatz Haderach. Your plan is obsolete."

Khrone gritted his teeth, trying not to show his alarm. "How did you find the ship after all this time? My Face Dancers—"

"The ship came to our planet of Handlers, and now we have them." The old man smiled, revealing perfect white teeth. "We are about to spring our trap."

On the buckboard, the woman leaned back and said, "When we have the no-ship and its passengers, we will control what the mathematical prophecy says we require. All of our prescient-level projections indicate that the Kwisatz Haderach is aboard. He will stand beside us during Kralizec."

"Our massive fleets are about to launch a full-scale offensive against the worlds of the Old Empire. It will all be over soon. We have waited so long." The old man snapped the reins again, looked smug.

The old woman's wrinkled lips curled upward in an apologetic smile.

"Therefore, Khrone, your time-consuming and costly plan simply isn't necessary anymore."

Aghast, the Face Dancer took two more steps beside the cart to maintain his pace. "But you can't do that! I have already awakened the Baron's memories, and the Paolo ghola is perfect, ripe for our purposes."

"Speculation. We no longer need him," the old man repeated. "Once we seize the no-ship, we will have the Kwisatz Haderach."

As if she were giving him a consolation prize, the woman reached into the back of the cart, selected a small paradan melon, and extended it to Khrone. "It was nice to work with you. Here, have a melon."

He took it, confused and disturbed. The illusion around him twinkled and washed out, fading until he found himself back in the tower room. He was empty-handed, his palms cradling a nonexistent paradan melon.

He found himself standing at the very edge of the high tower window, his feet on the brink. The plaz panes were open, and a gusty sea breeze slapped his face. The stomach-lurching drop extended to the rugged rocks at the tide line far below. Another half step, and he would plunge to his death.

Khrone pinwheeled his arms and staggered backward, collapsing to the flagstone floor with an embarrassing lack of grace.

The augmented emissaries regarded him coolly from the side of the tower room.

With considerable effort, Khrone maintained his composure. He didn't even speak to the patchwork monstrosities, but stalked out of the tower chamber.

No matter what the old man and old woman said, Khrone would not abandon his plans until he was finished with them.

20

The sixty ships descended to the heart of Bandalong, where Hellica would be waiting for them. Murbella was sure that the Matre Superior intended to savor this confrontation, toying with what she saw as an inferior opponent. The pretender queen would expect true Bene Gesserit behavior from the New Sisterhood—discussions and negotiations. It would be a game to her.

Murbella, though, was not entirely Bene Gesserit. She had a surprise for the Honored Matres below. Several, in fact. Her ships circling over the Palace were far outnumbered by Hellica's forces on the ground. The whores expected civilized behavior from the Mother Commander, diplomatic protocols, ambassadorial courtesies. Murbella had already decided that would be a waste of time. Janess, Kiria, and the other infiltrator Sisters in the city below knew what to do.

Precisely on cue, as Murbella's escort squad prepared to land in the Matre Superior's "trap," seven major buildings in Bandalong erupted into flames.

Concussion waves knocked down walls, blasting Honored Matre emplacements into cinders. Moments later, three bombs vaporized dozens of ships on the spaceport landing field.

Before the stunned whores around the Palace could try to shoot down her escort ships, Murbella yelled into the commline: "Valkyries, launch your attack!"

Her escort ships began their bombardment, wiping out the protective forces that encircled the Matre Superior's seat of power. Out of harsh necessity, Murbella had decreed Bandalong expendable. Hellica and her rebels were a dangerous firebrand to be extinguished. Period. The whores below went into a frenzy, rushing about like hornets from a burning nest.

Then, from orbit, Bashar Wikki Aztin launched a second, far more overwhelming wave of New Sisterhood warships. The second, unseen Guildship dropped its no-field beside Edrik's giant Heighliner. Suddenly two hundred more Valkyrie attack ships plunged out of the open hold and streaked down to the battleground.

Up until the date of its untimely obliteration, Richese had made regular deliveries of armaments and specially tailored battleships. Though the largest part of the huge fleet had been turned to slag along with the rest of the weapon shops, Chapterhouse possessed more than enough firepower to render this last Honored Matre stronghold helpless.

Bashar Aztin led waves of ships in performing surgical strikes on the strategic targets and key installations that had been identified in the covert transmissions from the infiltrator team. From her hiding place, Janess activated her own communication lines and coordinated her saboteurs with the swarms of newly landed troops.

While other Sisterhood fighters fanned out across the city and surrounding lands, the Honored Matres scrambled to mount a defense against such a widespread and thorough assault.

The Mother Commander and her Valkyries landed outside the Palace. Murbella positioned military transport vessels to form a complete blockade. Her black-uniformed fighters poured out onto the ground and surrounded the gaudy structure.

Smiling to herself, Murbella went in to kill the Matre Superior. No prisoners.

It was the only way this could end.

Accompanied by her entourage of Valkyries, the Mother Commander marched through the main entrance. Honored Matre guards in purple leotards and capes rushed to engage the invader, but the Sisterhood fighters swiftly subdued them.

Inside the Palace, her group passed a bubbling fountain of red liquid that looked and smelled like blood. Statues of Honored Matres thrust swords through frozen Bene Gesserit Sisters; scarlet fluid poured from the victims' wounds into the bowl of the fountain. Murbella pointedly ignored the grotesquerie.

Without a misstep, the Mother Commander found her way to the main throne room and strode in under full guard, as if she owned all of Tleilax. Despite the intrinsic violence of the Honored Matres, the victory of the far-superior Sisters was a foregone conclusion. Murbella had learned, however, from studying the Battle of Junction, where even Bashar Miles Teg had been lured by a triumph that was too easy. She kept her mind and body in the highest state of alert. Honored Matres had a way of twisting defeat into victory.

Preening on her high throne, an unrepentant Hellica awaited them, as if she remained in control of the situation. "So nice of you to come calling, witch."

The pretender queen wore a red, yellow, and blue costume that looked more suitable for a circus performer than for the leader of a planet. Her tightly knotted bun of blonde hair was studded with priceless jewels and sharp decorative pins. "You are brave to come here. And foolish."

Boldly, Murbella approached the throne. "It seems to me your city is burning, Hellica. You should have joined us against the coming Enemy. You are going to die anyway. Why not die fighting a real opponent?"

Hellica laughed boisterously. "The Enemy can't be fought! That is why we take what we wish and then move on to fertile ground before the first forces arrive. However, if your witches wish to distract the Enemy with pointless battles, we will welcome the delay, so that we may slip away more easily."

Murbella couldn't understand what Hellica intended to accomplish, why she had rallied her rebels, drawing them all into a debilitating conflict that none of them could win. The enclaves of violent holdouts had caused much damage—Richese was only the worst example—weakening humanity. To what purpose?

"We were nearly ready to depart from Tleilax. Right now, you are in my way."

The Matre Superior stood, then dropped into a fighting stance. "On the other hand, if I kill you and take over your New Sisterhood for myself, perhaps we'll stay a while longer."

"At one time, I might have tried to reeducate you. Now I see that the effort would be wasted."

Hellica wanted this conflict. Apparently, she had no illusions about surviving, knowing about the bloody battles occurring all across Bandalong.

Her intent must have been to maximize casualties, nothing more. More explosions rang throughout the city.

Staring hard at the beautiful woman, Murbella imagined Hellica dead, slumped at the base of the dais holding her throne. The vision was so clear it seemed like a gift of prescience. A classic Swordmaster technique.

At the edges of her vision, Murbella noticed flickering shadows, bodies moving stealthily around the throne room. Dozens of Honored Matre guards closed in, a surprise ambush. But it would never be enough. Her own Valkyries had been waiting for this trap, the desperate last stand. More than prepared to fight, they turned their superior numbers against them and plunged into the fray.

Overhead, Bashar Aztin's clustered attack ships roared across the sky, making the whole Palace shake.

Murbella bounded up the steps to the dais as Hellica vaulted over one of the armrests. The two grappled like asteroids colliding, but Murbella used her balance to throw her weight with a Swordmaster reorienting technique, and drove Hellica to the floor.

Rolling on the stone tiles in a flurry of deadly blows and blocks, Murbella and the pretender queen tore at each other. The Mother Commander clawed a long gouge down Hellica's cheek, then the other woman smashed her forehead into Murbella's, stunning her just long enough to tear herself free.

Springing to their feet, the opponents faced off, and the Matre Superior demonstrated unorthodox fighting techniques, subtly advanced from anything Murbella remembered in her own Honored Matre training. So, Hellica had learned, or changed.

In response, Murbella altered her timing, sought the opportunity to strike, but the other woman moved with an unexpected flash, more swiftly than Murbella could dodge. A hard, stinging blow bruised her left thigh, but the Mother Commander did not go down. She blocked her nerve receptors, numbed the pain in her leg, and then threw herself back into the fight.

An Honored Matre fought with violent impulsiveness, sheer strength and speed; Murbella possessed those traits herself, combined with the finesse of the long-forgotten Swordmaster art as well as the best Bene Gesserit skills. Once Murbella reset her mind and her approach, the Matre Superior had no chance.

Envisioning an unexpected response of her own, Murbella planned a sequence of moves and countermoves a few seconds into the future. The non-pattern in Hellica's fighting style was really a pattern when viewed from a larger perspective. Murbella didn't need a sword—needed no weapon at all, in fact—just herself.

Despite the Matre Superior's flurry of movement, the parries, punches, and kicks, Murbella saw a straight line of vulnerability—and acted. The instant she envisioned it, her path of attack became no more than an afterthought. The action was over, and successful, as soon as she undertook it.

With the force of a pile driver, her right foot found its way under Hellica's rib cage and smashed straight into the heart. Hellica's eyes opened wide, and she mouthed a curse without getting the words out. She spilled onto the floor at the base of the dais, exactly as Murbella had foreseen her, moments before.

Panting, the Mother Commander turned away and assessed the handful of still-living Honored Matre guards locked in combat with the Valkyries. Many discarded bodies in bright leotards already lay strewn across the tiles, along with far fewer Sisters. "Hold! I am your Matre Superior now!"

"We do not follow witches," one woman snapped indignantly, smearing blood from her mouth and ready to keep fighting. "We are not fools."

With her peripheral vision, Murbella noticed the dead Matre Superior beginning to change. The Mother Commander turned back to her victim and caught the impossible shifting. Hellica's face went slack and grayish white; her eyes sank in, her hair writhed and altered. The thing that had been the pretender queen sprawled in gaudy clothes. Pug nose, tiny mouth, black button eyes.

Murbella's mind raced, and she seized the moment of astonishment and disbelief. "You had no qualms against following a Face Dancer! Now who is the fool? How many more of you are Face Dancers?"

Even as they fought the Valkyries, the remaining Honored Matres glimpsed the blank-faced creature that had been Hellica. More of the whores stuttered to a halt, staring in shock.

"Matre Superior!"

"She is not human!"

"Behold your leader," Murbella ordered, strutting forward. "You obeyed the orders of a Face Dancer planted among you. You were deceived and betrayed!"

Only one of the Honored Matre guards continued to battle furiously. The Valkyries soon dispatched her, and Murbella was not shocked to see the fallen woman transform into a second Face Dancer.

Here, and on Gammu—how far had this insidious infiltration spread? Hellica's provocative actions had somehow served the Face Dancers rather than the whores. Was it a plot spawned by the Lost Tleilaxu, or did it extend even farther than that? Who were the shape-shifters really fighting for? Could they already be a vanguard from the Enemy, sent into the Old Empire to assess and weaken the target?

All those rebel enclaves, the dissent and violence that drained the resources of the New Sisterhood. Could it all have been a plot to weaken humanity's defenses? Setting them against each other, killing viable fighters to make them vulnerable so that the Enemy could wade in and finish the job more easily? With the main fight over in the city, more of her Valkyries streamed into the throne room, consolidating their hold on the gaudy Palace. Throughout Bandalong, Hellica's remaining followers fought to the death, while the Guild Heighliner remained up in stationary orbit, observing the fray from a safe distance.

Her daughter Janess, looking battered but bright-eyed, led them. "Mother Commander, the Palace is ours."

21

With the deadly hunt over and all five Honored Matres dead, Sheeana and Teg descended the wooden steps of the open-framed lookout tower. It had been an exhilarating, as well as unsettling, experience. Sheeana sensed that the young Bashar beside her wrestled with his own questions, extrapolations, and suspicions, but he could not voice any of them without the guards overhearing.

The Handlers were gathering by their Futars in the leaf-strewn clearing where the last Honored Matre had been torn to pieces in plain view. Hrrm and the black-striped Futar had fought over, then jointly brought down, the last of the terrible whores.

It had been a dizzying fight, with the two Futars circling, lashing out, and dodging the woman's hands and feet. When she leapt high with a kick, Hrrm had reached out and caught her ankle with his claws, like catching a fish on a hook, and slammed her to the forest floor. Black Stripe had lunged in to tear out her throat. Scarlet droplets spattered the carpet of golden leaves.

Walking away from the observation platform, Sheeana and Teg went to stand by the Futars with cold, wary fascination. Recognizing her, Hrrm gave her a bloody grin, as if expecting Sheeana to come forward and give him a back rub. She sensed his need for acceptance, and for years she had been the only one to give it to him. Though the Handlers—the true masters—were there in the forest now, Sheeana said, "Excellent work, Hrrm. I am proud of you."

A deep purr rumbled in his throat. Then he dug his face into the Honored Matre's pale flesh and ripped out another mouthful of meat. Sheeana had not seen the other three Futars from the no-ship, but knew they must have joined the hunt as well.

Four of the lanky natives, including the Chief Handler, stood watching the grisly scene, apparently satisfied with the creatures' performance. Orak Tho said, "Now you see our true feelings for the Honored Matres."

"We never doubted it," Sheeana said. "But another Enemy is coming—one that those whores provoked. That Enemy is far worse."

"Worse? How do you know this?" the Chief Handler said. "What if there is nothing to fear from this other Enemy? Perhaps you have misunderstood."

Sheeana noticed the other Handlers subtly closing in around them. Teg picked up on it, too, but showed no obvious reaction.

Standing amidst the bloody remnants of the hunt, Orak Tho surprised them by changing the subject. "And now that we have shown our goodwill, I would like to visit your no-ship. I will bring a party of Handlers with me to see it."

Teg gave her a subtle sign of caution.

"That is indeed something we should consider," she said, "but we must first discuss it with our companions. We have much to tell them about your gracious hospitality, and all that you have shown us."

Trying not to reveal his concern, Teg added, "We have only a small lighter.

We'll need to arrange transport for your visiting party."

"We have our own ships." The Chief Handler turned, as if the decision had already been made. Teg and Sheeana flashed a look at each other. Their own ships? The Handlers had already talked about having scanners sophisticated enough to detect the Ithaca in orbit. This civilization was far more technologically sophisticated than it appeared to be. The odors of the Handlers, of coppery spilled blood, and of the musky Futars mixed with the forest air in a medley of confusing and disturbing smells. Sheeana also detected a faint, familiar undertone of unwarranted tension. Beside the half-devoured corpse of the Honored Matre, Hrrm and Black Stripe looked up, sensing something amiss. Both Futars growled deep in their throats.

Sheeana interrupted. "Will the Rabbi and Thufir Hawat be rejoining us soon?"

Orak Tho continued as if he had not heard her question. "I will signal my people. I am certain your companions would agree. We will do this as efficiently as possible."

The nearby Handlers stiffened. Their movements were subtle, but she noticed the people slowly coiling into fighting stances, elbows cocked, legs ready to spring. They are going to attack!

"Miles!" Sheeana shouted.

The young Bashar lashed out in a strike so swift it was no more than a flicker of movement to the naked eye. Sheeana ducked, thrust her palm into the face of another Handler, and flung herself sideways as the people closed in.

Teg struck one man in the center of the chest with a cracking blow strong enough to freeze his heart—an ancient, but deadly, Bene Gesserit fighting technique. Sheeana grabbed the long forearm of another Handler and, snapping it backward, broke the bone above the elbow. More Handlers loped like predators from the dense aspens.

The natives fought with the clear intent to kill, not even asking Sheeana and Teg to surrender. But what will the Handlers do when they kill us? How will they get aboard the no-ship, if that's what they want? Though they were only two people, Sheeana and Teg held their own against the onslaught, but only tenuously.

In a storm of muscles and claws, Hrrm attacked—striking not her or the Bashar, but the Chief Handler. Orak Tho opened his wide mouth in surprise and barked a sharp guttural command, but Hrrm did not stop. The Futar had broken his conditioning. Hrrm drove the Handler to the ground as he snarled her name, "Sheeana!" In unthinking frenzy, he bit down and twisted sideways, snapping Orak Tho's long neck. Hrrm, knowing nothing of politics or alliances, fought the other beast'inan and defended Sheeana against the Handlers. He'd done it for her.

Everything happened in seconds. While the Futar stood from his kill, Orak Tho changed. His dead flesh shifted to the inhuman features of a Face Dancer. The other Handler Teg had already killed also shifted. Face Dancers!

In the past, Sheeana had always trusted her ability to recognize the shape-shifters by their distinctive pheromones, but the new Face Dancers were far more sophisticated, often undetectable even by the Bene Gesserit. She had known that much before leaving Chapterhouse.

Pieces clicked into place like chits on a counting machine. If these Handlers were new-generation Face Dancers, then they were not allies after all, but enemies. Just because both the Handlers and the Bene Gesserit hated Honored Matres did not necessarily mean that the two shared a common cause.

Roaring, the black-striped Futar leapt into the fight and attacked the traitorous Hrrm. The two growling Futars fought, thrashing and flailing in a tumble of claws and teeth. Sheeana could do nothing to help him, turning to see another threat.

Several of the bandit-masked men also reverted to their Face Dancer shapes, no longer bothering to maintain the disguises. All of the Handlers seemed to be Face Dancers.

Orak Tho had wanted to come aboard the no-ship, and now the reasons were obvious: The Handlers intended to capture the Ithaca. For the Enemy! The Enemy had always been after the no-ship. That was why the Chief Handler was so willing to kill the two of them now: Face Dancers could easily take the place of Sheeana and Teg, taking not only their appearance but also memory and personality imprints. Face Dancers could work from within to accomplish what the hunters had not been able to do from afar. She had to warn Duncan!

Sheeana struck at another Handler, driving him back into his comrades. As Teg fought beside her, his Mentat awareness processed the same data, and Sheeana was sure he came to the same conclusions. "They are all connected: the old man and woman, the net, the Handlers, the Face Dancers. Let's go—at least one of us has to live!" Sheeana knew another sickening truth. "Thufir and the Rabbi are probably dead. That's why the Handlers separated us. Divide and kill."

From the edge of the tall aspens, two more hunting Futars bounded into the fray, instinctively drawn to fight against Hrrm, who had turned on them. It was inconceivable that a Futar had attacked a Handler!

Sheeana didn't see how she and the Bashar could possibly defeat all the opponents arrayed against them. Hrrm continued to fight, though he could not last much longer. He surged up, grasped Black Stripe's neck, and sank his claws into the throat, tearing out the larynx in a stringy, bloody lump. Even as his life's blood gushed out, the striped Futar continued to snap with sharp teeth. Then Hrrm went down under the additional Futars in a snarling mass of claws and torn hairy skin.

In a matter of moments, the Futars would turn on her and Teg. "Miles!" Sheeana struck a Handler full in the face, and he went down.

Beside her, Teg suddenly blurred, moving with such speed that she could no longer keep track of him. It was as if a wind rushed through the aspens. All of the Handlers closing in on them dropped to the ground like felled trees.

Sheeana barely had time to blink.

Teg reappeared beside her, gasping for breath and looking drained. "Come with me. Back to the lighter. Now!"

Her questions about him could wait. She ran with him. Hrrm had bought enough time for Sheeana to escape, and she wouldn't let his sacrifice be wasted.

Behind them came the noises of more Futars, their hands and feet crackling in the dry leaves and twigs that covered the forest floor. Would the other three from the no-ship help her, as Hrrm had? She could not count on it. She had seen them take down combat-hardened Honored Matres, and she didn't think much of her own chances against so many of them.

No doubt, more Handlers would be waiting at the wooden city-towers. Some had probably surrounded the lighter already. How coordinated was Orak Tho's plan?

Were all Handlers really Face Dancers, or had they simply been infiltrated?

Sheeana and Teg dashed past the Handlers' main settlement. More raccoon-faced people were emerging from the cylindrical wooden structures, slow to react to the changed situation, all of them closing in.

Ahead in the clearing, the small ship sat waiting for them. As she had feared, two tall Handlers stood in front of the hatch, carrying powerful stun-goads.

Sheeana prepared for a life-or-death fight.

In front of her, Teg shifted and blurred again, shooting forward like a bullet, his speed beyond human possibility. The two Handler guards turned, but they were too late. Teg's blows hit them like lightning strikes. The Handlers snapped aside as if thrown by an invisible force.

Sheeana ran to catch up, her lungs on fire. Slowing enough to reappear, the Bashar kicked the stun-goads out of the way. Reeling with exhaustion, he keyed the entry code into the lighter's main hatch controls. The hydraulics hummed, and the heavy door began to slide open.

"Inside, quickly!" He heaved great breaths. "We've got to take off."

Sheeana had never seen a human look so utterly weary. Teg's skin had gone gray, and he seemed to be on the verge of collapse. She grabbed his arm, fearing that he was in no condition to fly the lighter.

I might have to do it myself.

Handlers swarmed out of the towers carrying staffs and stun-goads. With nothing to hide anymore, most of them had reverted to their pug-nosed Face Dancer appearances. Sheeana feared that some might be armed with projectile throwers or long-distance stunners.

With a shout and a frantic rush behind them, two people bolted out of the dense aspen forest, running for all they were worth. Sheeana pushed Teg inside the ship and paused at the hatch, where she saw Thufir Hawat and the Rabbi running pell-mell toward her. More Handlers were hard on their heels, and she heard Futars crashing through the underbrush. Thufir and the Rabbi were both flushed, stumbling forward only seconds ahead of their pursuers. The young man grabbed the Rabbi and hauled him along. She did not think they would reach the lighter in time.

Finally, with selfless resolve, Thufir propelled the old man toward the still-distant lighter while he turned alone to face the Handlers. With balled fists he lunged toward the closest pursuer, surprising him with his turnabout.

A sharp rabbit punch to the abdomen of the Handler and a chop to his throat caused the Face Dancer to reel and drop. Through his heroics, Thufir had given the Rabbi time to stagger ahead as fast as he could. Panting but refusing to rest, Thufir then ran after him, catching up to the old man as they closed in on the ship in the meadow.

As the first Futar bounded forward, another beast-man crashed in from the side, slamming into the ship. The pair rolled together, clawing and fighting.

A second one of Hrrm's Futars! The delay gained Sheeana and her companions a few more precious seconds.

She grabbed one of the stun-goads from the fallen guards. "Run! Run!" Over her shoulder she called into the open lighter, "Miles, start the engines!"

Thufir and the Rabbi ran with last bursts of adrenaline. "Face Dancers," Thufir gasped. "We saw—"

"I know! Get inside the lighter." The ship's engines began to thrum. Somehow, Teg had found enough energy to drag himself to the pilot's seat.

Sheeana planted her feet in the meadow grass and jabbed the stun-goad at the first oncoming Handler, then swung it to smash the side of another's head.

The old Rabbi stumbled aboard, while the twelve-year-old ghola lurched after him. Three more Futars came bounding out of the trees, followed by another group of Handlers. She threw herself through the hatch, scrambling to activate the ramp controls. She dragged her feet out of the way just as the heavy hatch sealed shut. With a crash, the first Futar slammed into the hull.

"Fly, Miles!" She collapsed onto the deck. "Fly!"

Thufir Hawat was already in the copilot's seat. Beside him, the Bashar looked as if he might lose consciousness at any moment, and Thufir reached for the copilot's controls, ready to take charge. But Teg brushed the boy's hands away. "I'll do it."

The lighter rose above the trees, accelerating into the sky. Heart pounding, Sheeana looked at the Rabbi on the floor beside her. His tear-streaked face was flushed with exertion, and she feared he might die of cardiac arrest now that he'd made it to the escape ship. Then she remembered what Orak Tho had told her: The Handlers had their own spacecraft, and they would no doubt pursue them.

"Hurry." Her voice was no more than a rasping whisper.

Ashen-faced Teg seemed to hear her, though. A burst of vertical acceleration pressed her against the floor.

22

With his mind reeling and his body shuddering, Uxtal could not absorb what Ingva had done to him. Using powers he could neither comprehend nor resist, the old crone had wrung him like a dirty rag, then left him weak and shuddering, barely able to breathe, walk, or think.

It should not have been possible!

Barely even noticing the attack ships closing in on Bandalong, he managed to stumble back to his laboratory. He was more terrified of Ingva than of any falling bombs or raiders. At the same time, he found himself unable to drive the sensations from his mind, the pleasure she had inflicted upon him. He felt sick and unclean, at the indelible memory of it.

Uxtal hated this planet, this city, these women—and he couldn't stand feeling so completely out of control. For years, his greatest skill had been as a tightrope walker, constantly worried about what might happen to him if he didn't maintain his balance and alertness. But after his coital ordeal with Ingva, he could barely keep himself from collapsing at a time when he most needed his mental abilities. Then the massive attack had begun throughout the city, from explosions at strategic centers, to the siege of the Palace, to the sudden appearance of a fleet of Bene Gesserit warships in the skies.

Hidden explosives had already destroyed some walls in his large research complex. Saboteurs and infiltrators must have come here ahead of time, and they had marked his laboratory as an important facility for the Honored Matres.

He staggered back into the main lab and inhaled deeply of the chemicals around the fresh axlotl tanks. He also picked up a caustic cinnamon odor from his initial and unsuccessful experiments that Waff—still terrified—had suggested over the past several days. For now, Uxtal left the half-awakened Tleilaxu Master locked in his chambers.

Uxtal ran for his life. He knew in his heart that, despite the best efforts of Waff, the whole process was flawed. The resurrected old Master did not, in fact, remember enough facts to make spice. His suggested methodology might have been a good beginning, but was not likely to achieve the desired results.

Perhaps the two of them might have worked together to rediscover the process.

But not with Bandalong under attack.

However, if a Guild Heighliner hovered overhead, maybe Navigator Edrik would rescue him! The Guild would surely want the awakened Waff ghola they had encouraged him to create—and Uxtal, too. The Navigator had to save both of them.

Uxtal heard loud voices and the hum of machinery over the distinct percussive explosions of gunfire and artillery fire. A voice yelled, "We are under attack! Matres and males, defend us!" Further words were drowned out by the sounds of automatic weapons fire, projectile guns, and pulse-stunners. He froze in his tracks, as he heard something else. lngva's voice.

His muscles jerked in response, and Uxtal found his legs carrying him involuntarily toward the sound. Sexually bonded by the hideous woman, he felt an irresistible compulsion to defend her, to protect her from the outside threat. But he had no weapons and no training in combat arts. Grabbing a piece of metal pipe from a debris pile near a collapsed wall, he ran toward the sounds of battle, barely able to think straight. Uxtal saw at least twenty Honored Matres engaged with a larger force of women in black, spiny singlesuits. The invaders fought equally well with bladed weapons, projectile guns, and hare hands. The New Sisterhood's Valkyries! Swinging the pipe, Uxtal scurried into the fray, jumping over the bleeding bodies of Honored Matres.

But the black-clad witches threw him aside, as if they didn't consider him worth killing.

With superior fighting skills, the Valkyries easily overwhelmed the Honored Matres. One of the women shouted, "Cease your fighting. Matre Superior is dead!"

Running behind them from the Palace, an appalled Honored Matre cried, "Hellica was a Face Dancer! We have been deceived!"

Uxtal stumbled to his feet, astonished by the assertion. Khrone had forced him to work in Bandalong, but the Lost Tleilaxu researcher had never understood why the Honored Matres would cooperate with esoteric Face Dancer interests. If the Matre Superior herself had been a shape-shifter in disguise, however—He nearly tripped over a moaning woman on the ground. She had been stabbed, but even so she clawed at him. "Help me!" Her voice was like a plucked string, controlling him. It was Ingva. Her orange eyes flared with anguish. Her scratchy voice carried an insistent anger over her bubbly pain. "Help me!

Now!" Blood oozed from her side, and with each wheezing breath the gash spread open and closed like a gasping mouth.

He pictured her dominating him, raping him with unnatural skills that could draw even a eunuch into her sexual trap. Her grasping hand clung to his leg, but not in a caress. Explosions continued around them in the streets. Ingva tried to curse him, but could articulate no words.

"You are in great pain."

"Yes!" Her agonized glare showed that she thought he was profoundly stupid.

"Hurry!"

It was all he needed to hear. He could not heal her, but he could stop her pain. He could help her that way. Uxtal was not a warrior, had not been trained in fighting techniques; his body was small and easily cast aside by these violent women. But when he drove his heel down hard, stomping with all his might on the throat of the hated Ingva, he discovered he was perfectly capable of crushing her neck.

With the terrible bond broken, he felt a peculiar giddy sensation in his stomach, and realized he now had a certain degree of freedom. More than he'd had in sixteen years.

The Honored Matres of Tleilax were obviously losing this battle—and badly.

Then in the sky he saw two other ships descending toward the laboratory complex, different from the attack vessels brought by the witches. He recognized the Guild cartouche on the sides of the hull. Guildships, surreptitiously landing in the midst of the fray!

They must be coming to rescue him, along with the awakened Waff ghola who remained inside his private chambers. He had to get to where Edrik could find him.

More explosions pummeled the side of the main laboratory building. Then a tower of flames curled upward as an aerial bomb exploded and demolished the warehouse section that held the numerous younger gholas. All of the alternative young candidates went up in a flash of fire and smoke, turned back into smears of cellular material. Uxtal observed the loss with a disappointed frown, then sprinted for shelter. Those extras weren't necessary anyway.

The two Guildships had already landed near the half-destroyed laboratory and sent out furtive searchers. But he could not get to them. Another New Sisterhood ship soared low, looking for targets. He saw a group of witches racing through the streets in their search; he could never get past them.

For the time being, he would simply have to hide and let the battle flow past him. The Lost Tleilaxu man did not care which faction won, or if they all destroyed each other. He was on Tleilax. He belonged here.

With the attention of the combatants diverted, Uxtal slipped away, crawled under a fence, and raced across a churned muddy field to the nearby slig farm.

No one would have the slightest interest in a filthy low-caste farmer like Gaxhar. He could be safe there and demand sanctuary from the old man!

Scrambling for shelter, Uxtal reached a section of pens on the other side of the farm, where the farmer kept his fattest sligs. Looking back toward his now-burning laboratory, he saw a group of black-uniformed Valkyries marching swiftly across the field. It was just his bad luck—they would come here soon, he was sure of it. Why would they bother with a man who raised sligs? Other female fighters searched outlying buildings, intent on rooting out Honored Matres who had gone into hiding to lay an ambush. Had they seen him?

Ducking frantically out of sight, Uxtal slid into an empty, muddy pen on the other side of a gate where the fat sligs were kept. A small feed-storage shed was elevated on stone blocks, leaving a small space beneath. Uxtal squirmed into the cramped space where the dominating women—of either faction—would not see him.

Agitated by his presence, the sligs began to slither around in the mud and squeal in peculiar high-pitched tones on the other side of the gate. Uxtal crawled toward the building. The stench and filth made him want to retch.

"It's almost feeding time," a voice said.

Twisting to look through the gap under the shed, Uxtal saw the elderly slig farmer standing at the fence, peering through the slats at him. The slig farmer began tossing bloody scraps of raw meat—more human body parts—into the empty pen. Some of them landed very close to Uxtal. He pushed them away.

"Stop, you fool! I'm trying to hide. Don't call attention to me!"

"You have blood on you now," Gaxhar said in a frighteningly casual voice.

"That could draw them toward you."

Nonchalantly, the farmer raised the gate and let the hungry sligs through.

Five of them: a most inauspicious number. The creatures were great slabs of flesh, their flopping bodies coated with dense mucous, their flat underbellies lined with grinding mouths that could churn any biological matter into digestible mush.

Uxtal scrambled away. "Get me out of here! I command it!"

The largest slig in the pen shoved into the crawl space where the Lost Tleilaxu was trapped, and fell on him. More sligs charged forward, pushing and colliding to reach the fresh meat. The loud grunting sounds easily drowned out the Lost Tleilaxu man's screams.

"I liked it better when all the Masters were dead," Gaxhar muttered. The slig farmer heard gunfire and explosions in the distance. The city of Bandalong was already a raging inferno, but the battle did not come close to his farm. The lower-caste menial laborers in the nearby hovels were not worthy of notice.

Later, when his sligs had finished feeding, Gaxhar killed the largest and best one, which he had raised with painstaking care. That evening, with the last few sparks of battle rumbling through the city, he invited a few friends from the village to his home for a feast.

"No need to keep such fine meat for unworthy people anymore," he told them. He had fashioned a table and chair from crates and boards. His other guests sat on the floor. In these simple surroundings, the low-caste Tleilaxus ate until their bellies ached, and then they ate even more.

23

Murbella.

He was supposed to be watching the no-ship. He knew that. But her name, her presence, her scent, her addictive control had grown even stronger since he'd started contemplating the possibility of bringing Murbella back as a ghola. It could be done; he knew it.

For him, the heart call had never entirely stopped in the nineteen years since he had broken from her. It was as if she had caught him in her own net, as deadly as the gossamer mesh cast by the old man and woman. Everything was too quiet during his lonely and tedious shift on the navigation bridge, giving him too many opportunities to think and obsess on her.

Now he intended to do something about it, to solve the problem. He pushed aside his rational assessment that it was a poor solution, a dangerous one, and he forged ahead.

Leaving the navigation bridge unattended again, he gathered up her still-fresh garments from nullentropy storage and went to the quarters of Master Scytale.

The grayish Tleilaxu opened his chamber suspiciously, looking at Duncan and his armful of clothing. Behind him, the dimly lit room fuzzed with exotic scents of incense or drugs, and he caught a glimpse of the young Scytale copy.

The boy was wide-eyed, both fearful and fascinated to receive a visitor. The Tleilaxu Master rarely let his ghola see or interact with anyone else aboard the ship.

"Duncan Idaho." Scytale looked him up and down, and Duncan had the distinct feeling that he was being assessed. "How may I be of service?"

Did the Tleilaxu still look on him as one of their creations? He and Scytale had been held prisoner together aboard the no-ship on Chapterhouse, but Duncan had never considered Scytale to be a comrade in arms. Now, though, he needed something from him.

"I require your expertise." He extended the rumpled garments, and Scytale flinched in confusion, as if they were weapons. "I preserved these within days of when we left Chapterhouse. I have found loose hairs, and there may be skin cells, other DNA fragments," Scytale looked at them, frowning. He did not touch the clothing. "For what purpose?"

"To create a ghola."

The Tleilaxu Master already seemed to know the answer. "Of whom?"

"Murbella." He kept finding himself drawn back to the idea as if it were an inescapable black hole and he had already passed the event horizon in his mind. He had dark amber strands of her hair on a pale green towel. "You can grow her again. The axlotl tanks are no longer being used."

The boy Scytale stood close to his elder, who pushed him backward. The older Master appeared intimidated. "The whole program has been halted. Sheeana will not allow any new gholas."

"She will allow this one. I—I will demand it." He lowered his voice, mumbling to himself. "They owe me that much."

Sheeana's possibly prescient dream had forced her to regroup, to reconsider her plans and exercise caution. But now that several years had passed, discussions had already begun about experimenting with another ghola child or two. The fascinating cells from Scytale's nullentropy capsule were just too tempting… "Duncan Idaho, I do not believe this is wise. Murbella is an Honored Matre—"

"A former Honored Matre. And a ghola grown from these cells will… will be different." He didn't know if she would come back with her full memories and knowledge of a Reverend Mother, all the changes the Spice Agony had wrought.

Regardless, she would be here.

"You would not understand, Scytale. Long ago, she tried to enslave me, to bond me with her sexual powers—and I did the same. We were bound together in a mutual noose, and I cannot break it. My performance and concentration has suffered for years, though I use my strength to resist."

"Why, then, would you wish to bring her back?"

Duncan pushed the rumpled clothes forward. "Because then at least I wouldn't suffer from this endless, destructive withdrawal! It will not go away, so I must find a different solution. I have ignored it for too long."

The fact that he was here at all reinforced his knowledge of the hold that she still had. Even the thought of Murbella tied his hands. He should have been on guard, watching from the navigation bridge, waiting to hear the next report from Sheeana or Teg… but the idea of resurrecting Murbella had reopened the festering heartache, making her loss seem fresh and painful all over again.

The Tleilaxu Master seemed to understand much more than Duncan wanted him to see. "You yourself know the danger in your suggestion. If you were as confident as you appear to be, you would not have waited until the others were down on the planet. You would not have come here like a thief, whispering your suggestion to me where no one else can hear." Scytale crossed his arms over his chest.

Duncan stared at him in silence, promising himself that he would not plead.

"Will you do it? Is it possible to bring her back?"

"It is possible. As to your other question—" He could see Scytale calculating, trying to determine what sort of payment or reciprocal action he could pry out of Duncan.

The alarms startled them both. The danger lights, the warning of an imminent attack, the approaching ships—in so many years, the alert systems had been silent, and now the sounds were both startling and terrifying.

Duncan dropped the garments on the deck and ran for the nearest lift. He should have been on the navigation bridge. He should have been watching, not secretly talking with the Tleilaxu Master.

He would have time for guilt later.

The commsystems at the piloting station buzzed with Sheeana's voice. "Duncan!

Duncan, why don't you respond?"

As he threw himself into the chair, he glanced up at the front viewport. A dozen small spacecraft were rising from the planet below, burning streaks through the atmosphere and moving directly toward the no-ship. "I am here," he said. "What's happening? What is your status?" The lighter was coming back at top speed, discarding safety restrictions.

Garimi's voice came over the in-ship channel. "I am already on my way to the receiving bay. Get the ship prepared to receive them. Something has gone terribly wrong down on the planet."

Now Duncan heard a faint emergency message chattering across the commline.

Miles Teg, but his voice sounded weak. "Our maneuverability is severely compromised."

Tracer fire came from the other ships that followed close behind. Teg performed evasions with masterful agility, swooping one way and then another, closing in on the orbiting Ithaca. With the no-field in place, no one should have been able to see the giant ship's location.

Cursing his distraction and the stranglehold Murbella unwittingly still had on him, Duncan dropped the Ithaca's no-field just long enough to let Teg see where to go. He was already warming up the navigation systems and the Holtzman engines.

Garimi had opened the small landing-bay doors on one of the lower decks, no more than a tiny speck on the hull of the great ship. But the Bashar knew where to go. He aimed directly toward the sanctuary, and the Handler ships closed in. Not designed as a fast military craft, the lighter was losing ground as the much swifter pursuers gained on it. More unidentified ships launched from the planet below. It had seemed to be such a bucolic civilization… Sheeana was on the commsystem again. "They're Face Dancers, Duncan. The Handlers are Face Dancers!"

Teg added, "And they are in league with the Enemy! We cannot let them have access to this ship. It's what they've wanted all along."

Sheeana joined in, her voice ragged with exhaustion. "The Handlers are not so primitive as they appeared. They have heavy weaponry that could disable the Ithaca. It was a trap."

On the screen, weapons fire barely missed the lighter, scoring the broad plane of the Ithaca's hull. Teg did not decelerate, or alter course. On the commsystem, he sounded just like the old Bashar. "Duncan, you know what you have to do. If they come too close, just fold space and get away!"

Teg plunged the lighter into the open docking bay as fast as a bullet, only seconds ahead of the Handler ships. The pursuing craft raced forward, not decelerating, fully prepared to crash headlong into the Ithaca. To what purpose? To cripple the vessel so it couldn't leave?

From the landing bay, Garimi yelled, "Now, Duncan! Get us out of here!"

Duncan reactivated the no-field, and as far as the pursuers could see, the Ithaca vanished, leaving only a hole in space. The Handler ships could not land, nor did they pull up, apparently willing to do anything to prevent the Ithaca from escaping. Six of them continued to accelerate toward where the vessel had been—and plowed into the unseen hull of the no-ship like buckshot hitting a broad wall.

The impacts rocked the immense vessel, and the deck beneath Duncan's feet reeled and tilted. Though damage lights winked on all across the control panels, he saw that the foldspace engines were intact, functional, and ready to go.

The Holtzman engines hummed, and the ship began its move between and around the fabric of the universe. Alone on the navigation bridge, he watched the aurora of colors and bending shapes that surrounded the great vessel.

But something was interfering—a shimmering, multicolored grid of energy threads. The net had found them again! Thanks to the Handlers, the Enemy had somehow known exactly where to look.

The colors and shapes began to roil in reverse, unfolding. Now the next wave of pursuing Handler vessels could fire at the aberration in space, hitting the void and disabling the no-ship without actually seeing it.

Duncan plunged back into Mentat mode, seeking a solution, and a new course finally crystallized in his mind, a random path that would let him slip free of the binding strands. He hammered the engine controls, forced the foldspace equations.

This time the fabric of space wrapped around the Ithaca, caressed it, and drew it into the void—away from the planet, away from the Handlers, and away from the Enemy.

24

At the laboratory complex, during the hand-to-hand fighting between Valkyries and Honored Matres, among the explosions and conflagrations and streaking attack ships, no one noticed a small adolescent escaping through a blast hole in the laboratory wall and running away through the smoke.

Concealing himself, the only surviving Waff ghola hunkered down and wondered what to do. The black-uniformed women from the New Sisterhood marched about the city, mopping up. Bandalong had already fallen. The Matre Superior was dead.

Despite significant gaps in his memories and knowledge, Waff could recall difficulties the Bene Gesserit had given his predecessors. After seeing his seven counterparts slaughtered by Honored Matres, he had no desire to be taken prisoner by either group of women. The knowledge in his mind, though fragmented, was far too valuable for that. The witches and whores were both powindah, outsiders and liars.

He ran furtively into the dangerous streets. Because he had memories of being a Master, Waff was stunned and saddened to see this sacred city burning out of control. Once, Bandalong had been full of holy sites, kept pure and clean from outsiders. No longer. He doubted if Tleilax could ever be restored.

But at the moment, that was not Waff's mission. The Guild would want him. That much was certain. The Navigator who had observed his horrific awakening grasped the importance of having an authentic Tleilaxu Master, rather than that Lost fool Uxtal. He couldn't understand why the Navigators hadn't come to rescue him during the initial attack. Maybe they had tried. There had been so much confusion.

As he kept himself hidden, Waff began to consider the first tantalizing sparks of an idea. The Heighliner must still be up there.

AFTER DARKNESS SET in, the ghola found a small, low-orbital shuttle in a repair yard at the edge of the burning city. The shuttle's engine compartment was open, and tools lay about on the pavement. He saw no one as he cautiously approached.

A door in a dilapidated shed slid open, and a low-caste Tleilaxu emerged, wearing greasy coveralls. "What are you doing, kid? You need something to eat?" He wiped his hands on a cloth, which he stuffed in his pocket.

"I am not a child. I am Master Waff."

"All the Masters are dead." The short man had uncharacteristically blond hair and matching eyebrows. "Did you get hit on the head during the attack?"

"I am a ghola, but I have a Master's memories. Master Tylwyth Waff."

The man gave him a second, less skeptical look. "All right, I'll accept the possibility, for the sake of argument. What do you want?"

"I need a spacecraft. Does that shuttle fly?" Waff pointed at the old vessel.

"Just needs a fuel cartridge. And a pilot."

"I can fly it." He had enough of those memories.

The mechanic smiled. "Somehow I believe you, kid." He trudged over to a pile of components. "I confiscated a pallet of fuel cartridges during the battle.

No one will notice, and it doesn't look like the Honored Matres will be around to punish either of us." He put his hands on his hips, regarded the shuttle, then shrugged. "This rig doesn't belong to me anyway, so what do I care?"

Within the hour, Waff flew up to orbit, where the Heighliner waited for the return of the Valkyrie attack force. The immense black vessel, larger than most cities, shimmered with reflected sunlight. Another Guildship, one obviously equipped with a no-field, circled the planet in a lower orbit.

Engaging the shuttle's commline, Waff transmitted a message over the standard Spacing Guild frequency, identifying himself. "I require a meeting with a Guild representative—a Navigator, if possible." He dredged a name from his recent memories, from the bloody day when his seven identical brothers had been slaughtered before his eyes. "Edrik. He knows I have vital information about spice."

Without further argument, a guidance signal locked onto his navigation controls, and Waff found himself drawn toward the Heighliner, directed upward to the elite-level bridges. The craft floated into a small, exclusive landing bay.

A security detail of four Guildsmen in gray uniforms greeted him. Much taller than Waff, the milky-eyed Guildsmen escorted him to the viewing compartment.

High overhead, Waff saw a Navigator in his tank, staring down through the plaz with oversized eyes. With his plan to regain the technique of mass-producing mélange, Edrik would never inform his Bene Gesserit passengers of Waff's presence on board.

A distorted voice spoke through speakers. "Tell us about spice. Tell us what you remember about axlotl tanks, and we will keep you safe."

Waff stared up at him defiantly. "Promise me sanctuary, and I will share the fruits of my knowledge."

"Even Uxtal did not make such demands."

"Uxtal did not know what I know. And he is probably dead. Now that my memories have awakened, you don't need him anymore." Waff was careful not to reveal his dangerous memory gaps.

The Navigator drifted closer to the wall, his huge eyes filled with eagerness.

"Very well. We grant you sanctuary."

Waff had an alternate plan in mind. He remembered every aspect of the Great Belief and his duty to his Prophet. "I can do better than create artificial, inferior mélange using the wombs and chemistry of females. For envisioning safe pathways through space, a Navigator should have real mélange, pure spice created by the processes of a sandworm."

"Rakis is destroyed, and sandworms are extinct, save for those few on the Bene Gesserit planet." The Navigator stared at him. "How will you bring back the worms?"

Grinning, Waff said, "You have more choices than you realize. Wouldn't you rather have your own sandworms? Advanced worms that can create a more potent spice for you Navigators… and only for you: Edrik swam in his tank, alien, incomprehensible, but unquestionably intrigued.

"Continue."

"I am in possession of certain genetic knowledge," Waff said. "Perhaps we can reach a mutually beneficial arrangement."

25

Than a Mentat After six of the suicidal craft had pierced various parts of the Ithaca like spear points, emergency teams and automated systems had rushed to patch the no-ship's hull. Once an atmospheric field was put back into place, Duncan entered the unused bay where one of the Handler ships had crashed through the hull. On five additional decks, other vessels from the planet had also left wreckage and dead pilots.

Probing into the mangled craft, he discovered the burned remnants of a body. A Face Dancer. He looked at the blackened and inhuman corpse, burned beyond recognition. What had they wanted? How were Face Dancers in league with the old man and old woman who tried to capture them?

On his rushed inspection, after receiving reports from other searchers at the five remaining crash sites on different decks, Duncan had found that three of the mangled vessels held a pair of dead Face Dancers in each one, all killed on impact; this craft, however, held only one body, as did two of the other wrecks.

Three empty seats. Was it possible that those ships had each been flown solo? Or that one or more of the Handlers had ejected into space? Or had they somehow survived the crash and slipped away into the Ithaca?

After the frantic plunge through foldspace and away from the planet of the Handlers, while teams responded to the emergency, it had taken almost an hour to find each of the crashed ships on six different unoccupied decks.

Duncan was sure that nothing could have survived those crashes. The vessels were destroyed, the Face Dancer bodies trapped within the cockpits. Nothing could have walked away from the wrecks. And yet… Could there now be as many as three Face Dancers secretly hiding in the corridors of the no-ship? Impossible! Even so, his greatest failing would be to underestimate the Enemy. He looked around the bay, sniffing, smelling the hot metal, caustic smoke, and the gritty residue of fire suppressors. An undertone of roasted flesh hung in the air.

He stared at wreckage for a long time, wrestling with his doubts. Finally he said, "Clean this up. Deliver samples for analysis, but above all, be careful.

Be extremely careful."

THEIR ORDEAL was the closest the Ithaca had come to being captured since the original escape from Chapterhouse. Miles Teg and Sheeana, recovered now, had joined Duncan on the quiet navigation bridge, where they all waited in brooding silence. Unspoken words hung heavily, making the air nearly unbreathable.

The four members of the exploratory party had survived, even though the Handlers and Futars had tried to kill them. During the escape flight in the lighter, the old Rabbi had used his Suk training to check out the three other escapees, declaring them unharmed except for a few scrapes and bruises. He had not, however, been able to explain Teg's deep cellular exhaustion, and the Bashar had offered no answers.

Sheeana looked at the two men, the two Mentats, with her probing Bene Gesserit stare. Duncan knew she wanted explanations—and not just from him. He had suspected that Teg possessed secret, unexplained abilities for many years.

"I intend to understand." Her demand was so sharp and importunate, so impossible to ignore, that Duncan thought she was using Voice. "By hiding things from me, from us, both of you put our survival in jeopardy. Of all our enemies, secrets could be the most dangerous."

Teg's face held a wry expression. "An interesting comment for a person in your position to make, Sheeana. As a Mentat Bashar to the Bene Gesserit, I know that secrets are a valuable coin of the Sisterhood." He had eaten ravenously, gulped several mélange-laden energy drinks, and then slept for fourteen hours.

Even so, he still looked a decade older than he had been.

"That's enough, Miles! I can understand Duncan's burden of the old bonding to Murbella. It's festered in him ever since our escape from Chapterhouse, and I knew he had never succeeded in overcoming his addiction. But your behavior poses a true mystery to me. I saw you move down there with a speed that no human could hope to match."

Teg regarded her calmly. "Are you suggesting I am not human? Afraid that I might be a Kwisatz Haderach?" He knew Duncan had seen the same thing on two previous occasions, and the Honored Matres had spread rumors on Gammu about the old Bashar's inexplicable abilities. But Duncan had chosen not to question it. Who was he to accuse the other man?

"Stop these games." Sheeana crossed her arms over her chest. Her hair was in disarray. Using silence like a blunt hammer, she waited… and waited.

But Miles Teg also had Bene Gesserit training, and he did not submit to her probe. At last, she asked with a sigh, "Were you somehow altered in the axlotl tank? Did the Tleilaxu betray us after all, modifying you in strange ways?"

He finally broke through his icy wall of reservations. "This was an ability even the old Bashar had. If you must blame someone, point your finger at the Honored Matres and their minions." Teg looked from side to side, still clearly reluctant to reveal his secrets. "Under their torture, I developed certain unusual talents that I can use in times of great need."

"Accelerating your metabolism? Moving at superhuman speeds?"

"That, and other things. I also have the ability to see a no-field, though it remains invisible to all known means of detection."

"Why would you keep this secret from us?" Sheeana was genuinely confused; she looked betrayed.

Teg scowled at her. Even Sheeana didn't see it. "Because ever since Muad'Dib and the Tyrant, you Bene Gesserit have shown little tolerance for males with unusual abilities. Eleven Duncan gholas were killed before this one survived—and you can't blame every one of those assassinations on Tleilaxu intrigues. The Sisterhood had plenty of complicity, both passive and active."

He glanced at Duncan, who nodded coolly.

"Sheeana, you have an unusual talent, to control the sandworms. Duncan also has special skills. In addition to his ability to see the Enemy's net, he is genetically designed to be a sexual imprinter more powerful than the Bene Gesserit or the Honored Matres—which is how he ensnared Murbella long ago.

That was why the whores were so desperate to kill him." Teg lifted a finger to emphasize a point. "And as the rest of our ghola children grow older and regain memories of their past lives, I suspect that some, if not all, will exhibit their own valuable skills, which will help us to survive. You will have to accept, and embrace, their anomalous skills, or else their very existence is moot."

Duncan heaved a deep breath. "I agree, Sheeana. Don't censure Miles for hiding his gifts. He saved us, and more than once. My own mistakes, on the other hand, nearly cost us everything." He pondered other times when his obsession with Murbella had distracted him, slowing his reactions during an unexpected crisis. "I can no more break free of Murbella than you or any other Reverend Mother could simply stop using spice. It is an addiction, and admittedly a destructive one. It's been nineteen years since I've seen her or touched her, and the wound still has not healed. Her powers of seduction, and mine, along with my perfect Mentat memories, prevent me from escaping her. Here on the Ithaca there are reminders everywhere."

Sheeana spoke, her voice quiet and cool, without compassion. "If Murbella felt the same way back on Chapterhouse, the whores would have sensed her weakness long ago and killed her. If she is dead—"

"I hope she is alive." Duncan rose to his feet from the pilot's chair, searching for strength. "But the need I still feel for her affects my ability to function, and I must find a way to break free. Our survival depends on it."

"And how will you accomplish that, if you haven't succeeded in all these years?" Teg asked.

"I thought I had a way. I suggested it to Master Scytale. But I know it was wrong. A delusion. Chasing that illusion took me away from the navigation bridge when I was most needed. I could not have known ahead of time, but even so, my obsession almost cost us everything. Again."

Closing his eyes, Duncan went into a Mentat trance, and forced himself back through his memories, digging deep into his sequential lifetimes. He searched for some personal handhold to grasp, and at last he found it: Loyalty.

Loyalty had always been the defining trait of his character. It was at the core of Duncan Idaho's being. Loyalty to House Atreides—to the Old Duke who had made possible his escape from the Harkonnens, to the son Duke Leto, and to the grandson Paul Atreides, for whom Duncan had sacrificed his first life. And loyalty to the great grandson Leto II, first a smart and endearing young boy and then the God Emperor who resurrected Duncan again and again.

But he found it harder to give his loyalty now. Maybe that was why he had lost his way.

"The Tleilaxu wired a ticking time bomb into you, Duncan. You were to ensnare and destroy Bene Gesserit imprinters," Sheeana said. "I was the real target, but Murbella triggered you first, and both of you found yourselves caught in the snare."

Duncan wondered if that innate Tleilaxu programming was at the root of his inability to break free of his obsession. Did they make him that way intentionally? Damn the gods, I am stronger than this!

When he looked over at her, Duncan saw that Sheeana wore a strange, determined expression. "I can help you break those chains, Duncan. Will you trust me?"

"Trust you? An unusual thing for you to ask." Without answering, she turned and left the navigation bridge. Duncan could only wonder what she had in mind.

INSTANTLY ALERT, HE awoke in the darkness of his quarters. He heard the familiar faint tones of the no-ship's security door code activating in his chamber. No one knew that code but him! It was sealed within the memory banks of the vessel.

Duncan slid off the bed, moving like quicksilver, his senses on guard, his eyes absorbing details. Light spilled through the doorway from the corridor, outlining a figure there… female.

"I have come for you, Duncan." Sheeana's voice was soft and husky.

He took a step back. "Why are you here?"

"You know why, and you know I must."

She sealed the door behind her. The glowtabs in the room increased the illumination to just above the darkness threshold. Duncan saw tantalizing shadows, and her silhouette bathed in a soft orange glow. Sheeana wore next to nothing, a wispy gown that swirled around her like windblown spice silk revealing her entire figure.

His Mentat machinery whirled and suggested the obvious answer. "I did not ask—"

"Yes, you did!" Using Voice on me? "This was your demand of me, and it is your obligation. You know we were meant for each other. It is there inside you, down to your very chromosomes." She let the filmy garment fall, and stood before him, her body all curves and shadows with the highlights of her breasts and the honey-warmth of her skin enhanced by the faint illumination.

"I refuse." He stood straight and ready to fight. "Your imprinting will not work on me. I know the tools and techniques as well as you do."

"Yes, that is why we can use our mutual knowledge to break this hold Murbella has on you, shattering it once and for all."

"And make me just as addicted to you? I will fight it."

Her teeth shone in the shadows. "And I will fight back. In some species, that's an important part of the mating dance." Duncan resisted, afraid to face his own weakness. "I can do this myself. I don't need—"

"Yes, you do. For the sake of us all."

She came forward with a languid yet unsettling speed. He reached out to stop her, and she grasped his hand, using it as an anchor to pull herself toward him. She made a humming noise deep in her throat, one of the priming tones that played on a subconscious mind, activating an atavistic nervous system.

Duncan felt himself responding, becoming aroused. It had been so long… But he pushed her away. "The Tleilaxu wanted me to do this to you. They designed it in me so that I could destroy you. It's too dangerous."

"You were meant to destroy an untrained waif from Rakis, one who had no defenses against you. And you were meant to topple a Bene Gesserit Breeding Mistress, far less experienced than I am. Now, if anyone in the universe can stand up against the great Duncan Idaho, it is me."

"You have the vanity of an Honored Matre."

As if lashing out in anger, Sheeana grasped the back of his head, dug her fingers into the wiry black hair, and pulled his face to hers. She kissed him savagely, pressing her soft breasts against his bare chest. Her fingers touched nerve clusters in his neck and back, triggering programmed responses.

Duncan froze for an instant, paralyzed. Her desperate, hungry kiss became more gentle. Helplessly, Duncan responded—perhaps more than Sheeana had bargained for.

He remembered how all this had been triggered in him the first time the Honored Matre Murbella had attempted to enslave him. He had turned the tables on her using his own sexual abilities. That noose had strangled him for so many years. He couldn't let it happen again!

Sensing her danger now, Sheeana tried to push him away. Her hand struck his shoulder a sharp blow, but he caught it and knocked her backward. They both tumbled onto the already rumpled sheets of his bed, fighting, embracing. Their duel turned into aggressive lovemaking. Neither had any hint of a choice once those floodwaters were unleashed.

In numerous clinical training sessions on Chapterhouse, Duncan had instructed Sheeana in these selfsame methods, and she in turn had helped to polish uncounted Bene Gesserit males who were turned loose as sexual land mines against the Honored Matres. The havoc those men wrought had sent the whores into an even greater frenzy.

Duncan found himself using all of his powers to break her, just as she tried to break him. The two professional imprinters collided, using their mutual abilities in a tug-of-war. He fought back in the only way he knew how. A moan escaped his throat, and it formed a word, a name. "Murbella… "

Sheeana's spice-blue eyes flew open, burning into him even in the dimness.

"Not Murbella. Murbella did not love you. You know this."

"Neither… do… you." He wrenched the words out as a counterpoint to his rhythm.

Sheeana caught at him, and he nearly lost himself in the powerful wave of her sexuality. He felt like a drowning man. Even his Mentat focus had faded to a blinding distraction. "If not love, Duncan, then duty. I am saving you. Saving you."

Afterward they lay together, panting and sweating, as exhausted as Miles Teg must have been after he put his body through its incredible acceleration.

Duncan sensed that the razor thread within him had finally broken. His connection to Murbella, as tight and deadly as a strand of shigawire, no longer held his heart. He felt different now, a sensation that was both giddy freedom and lost drifting. Like two enormous Guild Heighliners caroming off of each other, he and Sheeana had intersected with inexorable force, and now they moved away from each other on separate courses.

He lay holding Sheeana, and she didn't speak. She didn't have to. Duncan knew that at last he was drained, and stunned… and cured.

26

They were magnificent ships, thousands upon thousands of them lined up across a wine-dark sea. Overhead, a heavy grayness in the sky set an appropriate mood with brooding clouds of war. The tableau represented a fleet such as had never been gathered in all of history.

"Awe-inspiring, is it not, Daniel?" Smiling, the old woman stood on the weathered boards of the dock and looked across the imaginary waters at the antique-design vessels, sharp-prowed Greek war galleys with angry eyes painted on their prows. The triremes bristled with long oars to be pulled by hordes of slaves.

The old man was not so impressed, however. "I find your pretentious symbols tiresome, my Martyr. As I always have. Are you suggesting you have a face worthy of launching a thousand ships?"

The woman let out a dry chuckle. "I don't consider myself classically beautiful or handsome—or even particularly male or female, for that matter.

But surely you can see how these events now are similar to the start of the epic Trojan War. Let us paint the appropriate picture to commemorate the event."

Of continuing concern to them, the one target they desperately sought—the wandering no-ship—had escaped yet again from the seeming certainty of a carefully laid trap. They still did not have the one thing the predictions said they needed.

With impatience and arrogance—decidedly human traits, though the old man would never admit that—he had decided to launch his great fleet anyway. It would take time to crush all the inhabited worlds of the Scattering and every planet of the Old Empire. By the time Kralizec neared its end, he was confident he would have what he needed. There was no logical reason to delay the expanded campaign.

The old man looked at the symbolic wooden war galleys crowding the faux ocean all the way to the horizon. With their sails furled, the boats rocked and creaked in the gentle swells. "Our fleet is thousands of times greater than the handful of boats used in that old war. And our real battleships are infinitely superior to this primitive technology. We are conquering a universe, not a minor country on a planet that most people have now forgotten."

Transfixed by the spectacle she had created, the old woman bent her bony legs to sit on the dock. "You have always been so maddeningly literal that metaphors are entirely beyond you. The Trojan War stands as one of the defining conflicts in human history. It is still remembered even now, tens of thousands of years later."

"Primarily because I preserved the records," said the old man with a huff.

"This is to be Kralizec, not a skirmish between barbarian armies."

A stone appeared in the old woman's hand, and she tossed it into the water with a clear, loud splash. The spreading ripples vanished quickly in the stirring waves. "Even you want to cement your place in history, don't you?

Paint yourself as a great conqueror. For that, you must pay particular attention to details."

The man stood rigidly beside her, eschewing the informality of sitting on the dock. "After my victory, I shall write all the history I like."

The old woman made an additional mental effort, and the illusory war galleys crystallized to the point that tiny figures appeared on their top decks, acting as crew. "I wish the Handlers had succeeded in capturing the no-ship."

"The Handlers have been punished for their failure," said the old man. "And my confidence remains unshaken. Our recent… discussions with Khrone should have helped clarify his priorities."

"It's a good thing you didn't kill him and scuttle his plans with the Paul Atreides ghola. I have warned you about impetuosity. One shouldn't throw away a possibility until all is said and done."

"You and your inane platitudes."

"Once more unto the breach," the old woman said.

"Why do you bother studying these humans so much if our goal is to destroy them?"

"Not destroy them. Perfect them."

The old man shook his head. "And you say that I embrace impossible tasks."

"It's time to launch."

"At last we agree on something."

She made a slight gesture with her pointed chin. The bare-chested commanders aboard the prows of the triremes shouted orders. Heavy war drums began thumping a resonant beat, completely synchronized across the thousands of Greek war galleys. Three rows of oars stacked on each side of the vessels lifted from the water in unison, dipped down, and pulled.

Behind them, where the edges of the imaginary ocean faded and reality began, the sharp lines of a tall and complex city resisted the softening effects of sea mists. The great living metropolis had spread across the entire planet, and similarly on numerous other worlds.

As the war galleys moved out, each one an icon symbolizing a space battle group, the images shifted. The sea became a black and infinite ocean of stars.

The old man nodded with satisfaction. "The incursion will proceed with greater vigor now. Once we begin to engage in direct battles, I will not allow you to waste time, energy, or imagination on such stage shows."

The old woman flicked her fingers as if to knock away an insect. "My amusements cost little, and I have never lost sight of our overall goal.

Everything we see and do contains an element of illusion, in one form or another. We simply choose which layers to unveil." She shrugged. "But if you continue to nag me about it, I would be happy for us to revert to our original forms whenever you like."

In a blink, all of the realistic images were gone and the two found themselves standing in the midst of the immense kaleidoscopic metropolis.

"We have waited fifteen thousand years for this," the old man said.

"Yes, we have. But that isn't really very long for us, is it?"

27

The Oracle of Time kept herself aloof. She had existed since before the formation of the Spacing Guild, and in the subsequent millennia she had watched the human race grow and change. She witnessed their various struggles and dreams, their commercial ventures, the building of empires and the wars that tore them back down again.

Within her mind, within her artificial chamber, the Oracle had seen the broad canvas of the infinite universe. The wider her temporal horizons grew, the less significant were individual events or people. Some threats, however, were simply too momentous to ignore.

On her tireless search, the Oracle of Time left her Navigator children behind so that she could continue her solitary mission, while other parts of her vast brain considered possible defenses and methods of attack against the great ancient Enemy.

She plunged intentionally into the twisted alternate universe where she had found and rescued the no-ship years ago. In this strange quagmire of physical laws and inside-out sensory input, the Oracle sailed along, though she already knew Duncan Idaho would never have returned here. The no-ship was not inside this universe.

With a thought, she emerged again to normal space. There, she found the incorporeal traceries stitched through the void, a lacework of extended lines and conduits the Enemy had laid down. The strands of the tachyon net branched out farther and farther, questing like the root tendrils of an insidious weed.

For centuries now, she had followed the extensions of the tachyon net in their random windings.

She shot along one such strand from intersection point to intersection point.

If the Oracle followed them long enough and far enough, she would eventually reach the nexus from which they all emanated, but the pieces were not yet in position, and the timing was not right for that battle. Following the tachyon net farther would not serve the Oracle's purposes, nor would it take her to Duncan Idaho and the no-ship. If the net had found the lost vessel, the Enemy would have seized it already; therefore, logically, she needed to look beyond the net.

Soaring at the speed of thought, the Oracle remained amazed by the vessel's uncanny ability to elude her, yet she knew very well the power personified in a Kwisatz Haderach. And this particular one, by his very destiny, was more powerful than any previous one. The prophecies said so. Future history, when looked at from a broad enough perspective, was indeed predetermined.

Trillions of humans over tens of thousands of years had exhibited a latent racial prescient ability. In myths and legends, the same prediction kept cropping up—the End Times, titanic battles that signaled epic changes in history and society. The Butlerian Jihad had been one such battle. She had been there, too, fighting against the terrific antagonist that threatened to obliterate humanity.

Now, that ancient Enemy was returning, an all-powerful foe that the Oracle of Time had sworn to destroy back when she was a mere human named Norma Cenva.

She continued her search across the universe.

28

With Chani's help, Paul easily broke into the no-ship's spice stockpiles.

Because of their personal connection and their burgeoning young romance, he and the Fremen girl frequently went off by themselves. The proctors no longer saw their behavior as unusual. Paul didn't doubt that the no-ship had surveillance imagers monitoring them, that some Bene Gesserits were assigned to watch over the children. But maybe—just maybe—he and Chani could get away with what they needed to do, if they moved quickly enough.

Paul did not falsify his affections for Chani in order to divert attention, however. Though neither of them possessed their previous life's memories, he truly cared for this girl, and he knew it would grow into something much more.

He could rely on her when he did not dare trust anyone else, not even Duncan Idaho.

After pondering the question for weeks—especially after the Ithaca's near capture at the planet of the Handlers—Paul concluded that he had to consume the spice. The ghola children had been created for a specific purpose, and the danger remained close. If he was ever to help the people aboard the no-ship, he had to know what was really inside him.

He had to become the real Paul Atreides again.

The mélange storage chamber was not heavily guarded. Since axlotl tanks now produced more than enough spice, the substance was no longer so rare as to warrant drastic protective measures. The spice was kept in metal cabinets protected only by simple locking mechanisms.

Always wary, like a true Fremen, Chani checked the doorway behind them to make sure no one had been alerted to their presence. Her gaze was intense and concerned, but she harbored no doubts about Paul.

The seals delayed him only for a few seconds. When he swung aside the metal door of the locker, a rich smell swept across him, redolent with the lure of potential memories. In preparation for their later obligations, all the ghola children received mélange in carefully measured doses in their food. They were familiar with the flavor, but never consumed enough to experience any of the effects. Paul was well aware of how dangerous it could be. And how powerful.

Touching the neatly stacked spice, Paul knew it was all chemically identical, regardless of the manufacturing processes. Still, he searched among the wafers and selected several specific ones. He didn't know why, but in his heart he could feel it was right.

"Why those, Usul? Are the others poisoned?"

Then he understood. "Most of this spice came from axlotl tanks. But not these—" He showed her his chosen wafers, though they all looked the same.

"This spice was made by worms. Sheeana harvested it from the sands in the hold. The closest thing to spice from Rakis itself." He took out several wafers of the compressed spice, much more than he had ever before consumed.

Chani's eyes grew wide. "Usul, that is too much!"

"It is what I need." He touched her cheeks. "Chani, spice is the key. I am Paul Atreides. Mélange opened me to my potential before. Mélange made me into what I became. I'm going to explode inside unless I find a way to unlock myself." He closed the storage cabinet again. "I am the oldest of the ghola children. This could be the answer for all of us."

When Chani set her jaw, the muscles in her lean, elfin face stood out. "As you say, Usul. Let us hurry."

They ran through the no-ship corridors, using private passages where few surveillance imagers would be, and opened one of the thousands of empty, unused cabins. They slipped inside together. What would the Sisterhood's watchers think of that?

"I should lie down before I start." He sat on the narrow bed. She brought him water from the wall dispenser, and he drank gratefully. "Watch over me, Chani."

"I will, Usul."

He sniffed the wafers of spice, merely guessing but pretending that he knew how much he had to consume. The smell was maddening, mouthwatering, terrifying.

"Be careful, my beloved." Chani kissed him on the cheek, then hesitantly on the lips, and stood back.

He ate the entire wafer, swallowing the burning mélange before he could lose his nerve, then grabbed some more and ate it as well. Finally, feeling as if he had stepped off a cliff, he lay back and closed his eyes. A tingling numbness was already creeping in from his extremities. His body began breaking down the chemicals inside him, and he could feel the liberated energy surging through once-familiar pathways in this Atreides body.

And he fell into a pit of Time.

As everything grew dark and he dropped deeper into a trance, lost and searching for the road within him, Paul beheld flashes, familiar faces: his father Duke Leto, Gurney Halleck, and the icily beautiful Princess Irulan. At this level, his thoughts were unfocused. He couldn't tell if these were real flickers of memory or just stored data points boiling to the surface from accounts he had read in the Archives. He heard his mother, Jessica, reading words to him, the verse of a ribald song Gurney sang as he played his baliset, Irulan's unsuccessful attempts at seduction. But that was not enough, not what he sought. Paul dug deeper. The spice sharpened the images until the details were too intense, too difficult to discern. The fragments suddenly coalesced, and he saw a true vision, like a snapshot of reality exploding inside his mind: He felt himself lying on a cold floor. He was bleeding, a knife wound deep within him. He felt warm blood pouring onto the floor. His own blood.

With each pulse of his slowing heart, more and more redness drained away.

It was a mortal wound; he knew it as surely as any animal that crawls away to die. Paul's mind spun. He tried to look beyond himself to see where he was, to see who was with him. He was going to fade away and die there… Who had killed him? Where was this place?

At first he thought he was the ancient blind Preacher dying among crowds before the Temple of Alia in hot Arrakeen… but this wasn't Dune. There was no mob, no hot desert sunshine. Paul could discern the outlines of an ornate ceiling above him, a strange fountain nearby. He was in a palace somewhere, a great domed and colonnaded structure. Perhaps it was the Palace of Emperor Muad'Dib, like the model the ghola children had built in the recreation room.

He could not tell.

Then he remembered an event from his library research. Count Fenring had stabbed him… an assassination attempt that would have placed the daughter of Feyd-Rautha and Lady Fenring on the new throne. Paul had very nearly died then.

Was he seeing a flashback of that crucial moment in the first years of his reign, during the bloodiest time of his jihad? It was so vivid!

But why, of all the memories that might be locked within him, would this particular one come to the front of his mind? What was its significance?

Something else didn't seem right. This memory felt uncrystallized and impermanent. Maybe the mélange hadn't triggered his ghola memories at all.

What if it had instead activated the famed Atreides prescience? Perhaps this was a vision of something deadly that was yet to occur.

As he lay writhing on his bed, deep in the spice-induced vision, Paul felt the pain of the wound as if it were unbearably real. How can I prevent this from happening? Is this a true future I am seeing, a new vision of how my ghola body will die?

The scene blurred before him. The dying Paul continued to bleed on the floor, his hands covered with red. Looking up, Paul was shocked to see himself, a young face very much like the one he routinely saw in a mirror. But this version of his face was pure evil, with mocking eyes and the laughter of gloating triumph.

"You knew I would kill you!" his other self shouted. "You could just as well have driven in the dagger with your own hands." Then he greedily consumed more spice, like a victor taking his spoils.

Paul saw himself laughing, and he felt his own life fading… PAUL WAS BEING shaken out of the blackness. His muscles and joints ached terribly, but this was nothing like the searing pain of the deep knife wound.

"He's coming around." Sheeana's voice, grim, almost scolding.

"Usul—Usul! Can you feel me?" Someone was clasping his hand. Chani.

"I don't dare risk another stimulant." It was one of the Bene Gesserit Suk doctors. Paul knew them all, since they had been so maddeningly efficient at checking the gholas for any possible physical flaw.

His eyes flickered open, but his vision was veiled with a blue spice haze. He saw Chani now, looking worried. Her young face was so beautiful, and such a stark contrast to that evil, laughing image of himself.

"Paul Atreides, what have you done?" Sheeana demanded, looming over him. "What were you hoping to accomplish? This was damned foolish."

His voice was dry, barely a croak. "I was… dying. Stabbed. I saw it."

This both alarmed and excited Sheeana. "You remember your first life? Stabbed?

As an old blind man in Arrakeen?"

"No. Different." He searched in his mind, realized the truth. He'd had a vision, but had not triggered the full return of his memories.

Chani gave him water, which he gulped. The Suk doctor hovered over him, still trying to help, but she could accomplish little. Coming out of the spice haze, he said, "It was prescience, I think. But I still don't remember my real life."

Sheeana gave the other Bene Gesserit Sister a sharp, startled look.

"Prescience," he repeated, with more conviction this time.

If he had meant to allay Sheeana's worries, Paul had not succeeded.

29

Now that he was himself again, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen found that his days on Caladan were always full, though not in a way he would have preferred. Since his awakening, he had worked to understand the new situation and how descendants of the Atreides had mucked up the universe since he'd been gone.

Once, House Harkonnen had been among the wealthiest in the Landsraad. Now the great noble house didn't even exist, except in his memory. The Baron had plenty of work to do.

Intellectually and emotionally, he should have been pleased to lord it over the homeworld of his mortal enemies, but Caladan didn't compare to his beloved Giedi Prime. He shuddered to think what that place looked like now, and he longed to return there and restore it to its former glory. But he had no Piter de Vries, no Feyd-Rautha, not even his cloddish but useful nephew Rabban.

Khrone had, however, promised him everything—provided that he helped the Face Dancers with their scheme.

Now that the Baron's ghola memories were back, he was allowed some diversions.

In the dungeons of the castle, the Baron had certain playthings. Humming to himself, he skittered down the stairways to the lowest levels, where he paused to listen to the enchanting whispers and moans. The moment he entered the main chamber, however, everything fell silent.

His toys were arranged all around, according to his precise instructions: Torture racks with settings for pulling, squeezing, and cutting body parts.

Masks on the walls with internal electronics that drove the wearers mad, could even wipe their brains if the Baron so desired. Chairs with electrocution connections and barbs to be installed in intriguing places. It was all so much better than anything Khrone had used.

Two handsome boys—slightly younger than himself—hung from the walls, secured by chains. Eyes filled with terror and a profound sadness watched his every move. Their clothes were ripped where he had torn them away for his own enjoyment.

"Hello, my beauties." They did not respond in words, but he saw them flinch.

"Did you know that both of you have Atreides blood flowing through your veins?

I have the genetic records to prove it."

Whimpering, the pair denied the assertion, though in truth they had no way of knowing. The bloodline had become so watered down after all this time, who could tell without a full genetic workup? Well, it was the sentiment that really mattered, wasn't it?

"You can't blame us for the sins of centuries ago!" one cried pitifully. "We will do whatever you say. We will be your loyal servants."

"My loyal servants? Oh-ho, but you already are." He moved close to the one who had pleaded, caressed his golden hair. The boy trembled and looked away.

The Baron felt aroused. This one was so lovely, his cheeks smooth with only a thin fuzz of undeveloped beard, his features almost feminine. Touching the soft skin of the face, he closed his eyes, and smiled.

When he opened them again, he was shocked to see that the victim's features had changed. Now the beautiful boy was a young woman with dark hair, an oval face, and the deep blue eyes of spice addiction. She was laughing at him. The Baron backed up. "I'm not seeing this!"

"Oh, but you are, Grandfather! Didn't I grow up to be beautiful?" The lips of the chained woman moved, but the voice came from inside his mind. I let you think you got rid of me, but that was just my little game. You like games, don't you?

Muttering nervously, the Baron retreated from the torture chamber and scuttled down the dank hall, but Alia stayed with him. I'm your permanent companion, your lifetime playmate! She laughed, and laughed some more.

When he reached the main floor of the castle, the Baron anxiously scanned the weapons hanging on the walls and in display cases. He would dig Alia out of his brain, even if that required killing himself. Khrone could always bring him back as a ghola. She was like a noxious weed, spreading toxins through his body.

"Why are you here?" he shouted aloud into the ringing silence of the stone-walled banquet room. "How?"

It seemed an impossibility to him. Harkonnen and Atreides bloodlines had crossed in centuries past, and the Atreides were known for their Abominations, their strange prescience, their peculiar way of thinking. But how had this infernal taint of Alia infested his mind? Damn the Atreides!

He marched toward the main entrance, past several bland Face Dancers who looked at him inquisitively. Must not act up in front of them. He smiled at one, then another.

Isn't it fun to relive old glories and vengeance? asked the Alia-within.

"Shut up, shut up!" he hissed under his breath.

Before he could reach a pair of tall wooden doors, they swung open on massive hinges, and Khrone entered the castle accompanied by an entourage of Face Dancers and a young dark-haired boy with oddly familiar features. He was six or seven years old.

The voice of Alia-inside was filled with delight. Go welcome my brother, Grandfather!

Khrone pushed the boy forward, and the Baron's generous lips curved in a hungry smile. "Ah Paolo, at last! You think I do not know Paul Atreides?"

"He will be your ward, your student." Khrone's voice was stern. "He is the reason we have nurtured you, Baron. You are our tool, and he is our treasure."

The Baron's spider-black eyes lit up. He went straight to the child, and studied him closely. Paolo glared back at him, which caused the teenage Baron to chuckle in delight.

"And what, exactly, am I allowed to do with him? What is it you want?"

"Prepare him. Raise him. See that he is primed for his destiny. There is a certain need he must fulfill."

"And what is that?"

"It will be explained to you in due course, when the time is right."

Ah, Paul Atreides in my grasp, so I can ensure that he is raised properly this time, just like my nephew Feyd-Rautha, a lovely boy in his own original lifetime. This will make up for a great many historical wrongs.

"You now have your memories, Baron, so you can understand the true complexities and consequences. If he is harmed, we will find a very special way to see that you regret it." The Face Dancer leader was quite convincing.

The Baron dismissively waved a pudgy hand. "Of course, of course. I was always sorry that I disconnected his axlotl tank back on Tleilax. That was foolish and impulsive of me. I didn't know any better. I have learned restraint since then."

A burst of pain lanced through his head, making him wince. I can help you with your restraint, Grandfather, Alia said inside his skull. He wanted to scream at her.

With a colossal mental push, the Baron drove her away, then chuckled as he bent toward the young ghola. "I've been waiting a long time for this, lovely boy. I have so many plans for the two of us."

30

Tleilax had been conquered, and the rebel Honored Matres were no longer a threat. The Valkyries had flawlessly accomplished their most important mission, and the Mother Commander could not suppress her feelings of pride, both in her daughter and in the whole New Sisterhood.

At last, we can move on.

Under the domed rotunda of the Chapterhouse library, Murbella had little time to rejoice or reflect on the recent victories. She glanced out a small window toward the skeletal orchards and the ravenous desert beyond. The sun was setting on the horizon, outlining the craggy rock escarpments as an artist might. Each time she looked, the desert seemed to loom larger and closer. It never stopped advancing.

Like the Enemy… except that the Bene Gesserit had intentionally put the sands in motion, sacrificing everything else to produce one substance—mélange—for the ultimate victory they hoped to achieve. The war against the Honored Matres had cost humanity dearly for the past several decades, inflicting great harm and destroying many planets. And the whores were by far the lesser threat.

Accadia, the old Archives Mother, stood in the center of the projection field in silent reverence, with a hundred of the New Sisterhood's most intelligent followers. "This shows what you need to know, and the scope of the threat we now face. I've drawn heavily on candid testimonies provided by our former Honored Matres, tracking their initial expansion into unexplored territories… and their recent abrupt withdrawal back into the Old Empire."

Now that Murbella had broken through the black wall in her Other Memories, she understood exactly what the Enemy was and what the Honored Matres had done to provoke them. She knew more about the nature of the Outside Enemy than Odrade, Taraza, or any previous Bene Gesserit leader had ever guessed.

She had lived those lives.

In particular she saw herself as a harsh, ambitious, and successful commander, driving her squadron of ships outward, ever outward. Lenise. That was my name.

In those days she'd had spiky black hair, obsidian eyes, and an array of metal adornments protruding from her cheeks and brow-battle trophies, one for each rival she had killed in her rise to power. But after failing in a bid to assassinate a higher rank, she had taken her loyal squadrons and plunged farther out into uncharted territory. Not as an act of cowardice, Lenise had assured herself. Not to flee. But to conquer new territory of her own.

In their rapacious expansion, she and her Honored Matres had blundered into the fringe of a vast and growing empire—a nonhuman empire—the existence of which had not been previously suspected. Unknown to them, this dangerous Enemy had its genesis more than fifteen thousand years ago, in the last days of the Butlerian Jihad.

The Honored Matres had encountered a strange manufacturing outpost, a bustling interconnected metropolis inhabited entirely by machines. Thinking machines.

The significance of this had been lost on Lenise and her women; they had asked few questions about the origin of what they'd found.

The self-perpetuating, evolving computer evermind had taken root again, building and spreading a vastly networked landscape of machine intelligences.

Lenise had not understood, nor had she cared. She had issued the order—lost in the vision of history now, Murbella mouthed the words again—and the Honored Matres had done what they did best: attacking without provocation, expecting to conquer and dominate.

Never guessing the scale or strength of what she had found, Lenise and her Honored Matres had surprised the machines, stolen shiploads of powerful and exotic weapons, destroyed the outpost… and then left. She had added several metal adornments to her face to celebrate the victory. And then returned to reconquer the other Honored Matres who had initially defeated her.

The machines' response had been swift and terrible. They launched a massive retaliation that swept forward into the settled worlds of the Scattering, exterminating whole Honored Matre planets with deadly new viruses. The Enemy continued to hound them, hunting down and destroying the whores in their hiding places.

Murbella saw various generations in different memories. Never terribly subtle, the Honored Matres began their panicked flight, stampeding across star systems, plundering them before moving on. Setting bonfires and burning bridges behind them. What an embarrassment to them… how resoundingly they had been defeated by their foe!

All the while, they led the Enemy toward the Old Empire.

Murbella knew it all. She saw it vividly in her past, in her history, in her memories. She needed to Share those experiences with other Sisters who had not yet unlocked their generational secrets. The Enemy is Omnius. The Enemy is coming.

Now, under the domed rotunda with the audience hushed, Accadia worked the display with gnarled fingers. A holoprojection of the Known Universe materialized over their heads in the great vaulted room, highlighting key star systems in the Old Empire as well as planets described by those who had returned from the Scattering. A variety of independent federations had formed out there—clustered governments, trade alliances, and isolated religious colonies, all tied together by a thin common thread of humanity.

The Tyrant spoke of this in his Golden Path, Murbella thought. Or is our understanding imperfect, as usual! The old librarian's voice crackled. "Here are the planets the whores already charred, using the terrible Obliterator weapons they stole from the Enemy."

A spangle of red spattered like blood across the star chart. Too much red! So many Bene Gesserit planets, even Rakis, all of the Tleilaxu worlds, and any other planet that happened to be in the way. Lampadas, Qalloway, Andosia, the low-gravity fairyland cities on Oalar… Now graveyards, all of them.

How could she not have seen this blatant horror when she called herself an Honored Matre? We never looked behind us except to find out how close the Enemy was. We knew we had provoked something ferocious, but we still barged into the Old Empire like a hound into a chicken house, wreaking havoc in our attempt to flee.

When the Enemy got here, the stirred-up planets would fight instinctively, and they would be annihilated. The Honored Matres used that as a stalling tactic, throwing obstructions in the path of the oncoming opponent.

"The whores did all that?" breathed Reverend Mother Laera, one of Murbella's administrative advisors.

Accadia seemed intrinsically fascinated by what she could show. "Look—this is far more frightening."

Another swath of the perimeter systems turned a dull, sickly blue. The star charts displayed some as blurry points, indicating unverified coordinates. The number of affected worlds was far greater than the red wound of Honored Matre destruction.

"These are the planets we know have already been destroyed by the Enemy out in the Scattering. Honored Matre worlds wiped out primarily through devastating plagues."

Studying the huge, complex projection, Murbella didn't need a Mentat to draw the obvious conclusions from the patterns she saw. Her Bene Gesserit and Honored Matre advisors muttered uneasily. They had never before seen the outside threat so plainly displayed. Murbella could truly sense the nearness of "Arafel," the cloud-darkness at the end of the universe. With so many dark legends pointing in the same direction, she smelled her human mortality. Even Chapterhouse, marked on the three-dimensional holoprojection as a pristine white ball far from the Guild's main shipping lanes, would become the target of those relentless hunters.

The unified Sisters now had the Spacing Guild to assist them, though Murbella did not fully trust the Navigators or the less-mutated Administrators. She harbored no illusions about a lasting alliance with the Guild or CHOAM, if the war went badly. The Navigator Edrik dealt with her only because she'd bribed him with spice, and he would cease to cooperate if he ever found an alternative source of mélange. If the Guild's administrative faction chose to rely on Ixian mathematical compilers, then she had very little hold over them.

"The Enemy does not seem to be in a particular hurry," Janess said.

"Why should they be?" Kiria said. "They are coming, and nothing seems able to slow them."

Searching, Murbella noted the general mark—a locus in space, poorly defined by only anecdotal coordinates—of the first encounter with the Enemy, where a long-dead Honored Matre named Lenise had stumbled upon the fringe outpost.

And now we are left to clean up the mess.

Maybe her beloved Duncan Idaho would survive far out there. She felt a pang for him in her heart. What if, at the end of fabled Kralizec, the only remnants of humanity were those few with Duncan and Sheeana aboard the no-ship? A life raft in the cosmos. She scanned the grand projection that filled the library. She had no idea where the vessel might be.

31

Duncan looked in on the ghola children as they engaged in a role-playing game inside one of the activity chambers. They had grown old enough now to show distinct personalities, to think and interact not only with each other but with the crew members. They understood their prior relationships and tried to deal with the oddities of their existence.

Genetically a grandmother to little Leto II, Jessica had bonded closely with him, but she acted more like his big sister. Stilgar and Liet-Kynes were close, as usual; Yueh tried to be friends with them, but he remained a perpetual outsider, though Garimi studied him very closely. Thufir Hawat seemed to have changed, matured, since his experiences on the planet of the Handlers; soon, Duncan expected the young warrior-Mentat to be very useful to their planning. Paul and Chani always stayed close to each other, though she seemed a veritable stranger to Liet, her "father."

So many living reminders of Duncan's pasts.

In her last assessment the Proctor Superior had offered her analysis that the Bene Gesserits should begin to awaken their memories. At least some of the ghola children were ready. Duncan felt a twinge of anxiety and anticipation.

As he turned to walk away, he saw Sheeana standing in the empty corridor, watching him with an enigmatic smile. He felt an involuntary flush of desire, followed by embarrassment. She had bonded him, broken him… saved him. But he would not let himself become trapped by her the way he had been bound to Murbella. He forced out the words. "It is best if we keep our distance from each other. At least for now."

"We're on the same ship, Duncan. We can't just hide."

"But we can be careful."

He felt burned by the sexual cauterization that had cured him of Murbella, but knew it had been necessary. His own weakness had made it necessary. He dared not let it happen again, and Sheeana had the power to ensnare him—if he let her. "Love is too dangerous to play with, Sheeana. It is not a tool to be used."

ONE LAST THING remained for him to do, and he couldn't avoid it any longer.

Duncan had retrieved all of Murbella's belongings. Master Scytale had carefully picked over them after Duncan had unceremoniously dropped them on the deck when the alarms rang. Duncan had demanded them back, then turned a deaf ear as the Tleilaxu Master insisted that most of the cells were too old, too long out of nullentropy storage, but the possibility of usable DNA fragments—Duncan had cut him off, walked away with the garments. He didn't want to hear any more, didn't want to know about the possibilities. All such possibilities were unwise ones.

He had tried to fool himself that he could just ignore the idea, make up his mind not to think about her anymore. Sheeana had freed him of his chains to Murbella… but, oh, the temptation! He felt like an alcoholic staring at an open bottle.

Enough. Duncan himself had to do the last of it.

He stared at the rumpled garments, the keepsakes, the few stray strands of amber hair. When he gathered everything in his arms, it was as if he held her—at least the essence of her, without the weight of her body.

His eyes misted over.

Murbella hadn't left much of herself behind. Despite all the time she'd spent on the no-ship with Duncan, she'd kept only a few temporary possessions here, never really calling it her home.

Remove the threat. Remove the temptation. Remove the possibility. Only then could he finally be free.

Marching down the corridors with intense concentration, he made his way to one of the small maintenance airlocks. Years ago, this was how they had ejected the mummified remains of Bene Gesserit Sisters into space during the memorial service. Now Duncan would perform another sort of funeral service.

He dumped the paraphernalia into the airlock booth and considered the rumpled debris of a past life. It seemed like so little, but with such great portent.

He stepped back and reached for the controls.

From the corner of his eye, he noticed a strand of hair still clinging to his sleeve. One of Murbella's hairs had come loose from her garments, a single amber strand… as if she still wanted to cling to Duncan.

He plucked the hair with his fingertips, looked at it for a long, painful moment, and finally let it drift down among the other items. He sealed the airlock door and, before he could think, cycled the systems. The last breaths of air were evacuated, and the material was swept out into space.

Irretrievable.

He stared out into the emptiness, where the objects quickly disappeared from view. He felt immeasurably lighter… or perhaps that was just emptiness.

From now on, Duncan Idaho would rise above any temptations that were thrust in front of him. He would be his own man, no longer a piece to be moved around on someone else's game board.

32

The Enemy ships cruised toward the Old Empire, thousands upon thousands of enormous vessels, each carrying weapons sufficient to sterilize a planet, plagues that could eradicate entire populations. Everything was going extremely well after so many millennia of planning.

Back on the central machine world, the old man had dropped his illusions. No more games or facades, only rigid preparations for the final conflict foretold both by human prophecy and extensive machine calculations: Kralizec.

"I assume you're quite pleased that you have already destroyed sixteen additional human planets on your march to victory." The old woman had not yet dispensed with her guise.

"So far," said the booming old man's voice that echoed from all buildings and all screens everywhere.

The structures in the endless machine city were alive and moving like an immense engine, tall towers and spires of flowmetal, enormous blocky constructions built to house substations and command nodes. With each new conquest, cities just like Synchrony would be built on planet after planet.

The old woman looked at her hands, brushed the front of her dress. "Even these forms seem primitive to me, but I have grown rather fond of them. Perhaps accustomed is a more precise word." At last, her voice faded, changed, and settled on an old familiar timbre. In her place stood the independent robot Erasmus, intellectual foil and counterpoint to Omnius. He had retained his platinum, flowmetal body, draped in the plush robes to which he had grown accustomed so long ago.

Having discarded his physical form, Omnius spoke through millions of speakers in the great city. "Our forces have pushed to the fringes of the human Scattering. Nothing can stop us." The computer evermind always had such grandiose dreams and aspirations.

Erasmus had hoped that by constraining the evermind within the guise of an old man, Omnius might begin to understand humans and learn to steer clear of these extreme gestures. That had worked for a few thousand years, but when the violent Honored Mattes careened into the carefully reconstituted Synchronized Empire, Omnius had been forced to respond. In truth, the anxious evermind had simply been looking for an excuse.

Now he said, "We will prove that the Butlerian Jihad was merely a setback, not a defeat."

Erasmus stood in the middle of the vast, vaulted chamber of the central machine cathedral. All around them, the buildings themselves stepped back, shifting aside like sycophants. "This is an event we should commemorate.

Behold!"

Though the evermind thought he controlled everything himself, Erasmus made a gesture, and the floor of the chamber cooperated. The smooth metal plates spread apart, pulling away to reveal a crystal-lined gullet, a wide pit whose floor rose up, lifting a preserved object.

A small and innocuous-looking probe.

"Even seemingly insignificant things have great import. As this device proves."

Centuries before the Battle of Corrin, the last great defeat of the thinking machines, one of the evermind copies had dispatched probes out to the unexplored reaches of the galaxy with the intent of setting up receiving stations, planting seeds for the later expansion of the machine empire. Most of the probes had been lost or destroyed, never reaching a solid world.

Erasmus looked down at the small device, marvelously engineered, pitted and discolored from its many centuries of unguided flight. This probe had found a distant planet, landed, and begun its work, waiting… and listening.

"During the Battle of Corrin, fanatical humans almost—almost—annihilated the last Omnius," the robot said. "That evermind contained a complete and isolated copy of me inside itself, a data packet from the time when you once tried to destroy me. You showed great foresight."

"I always had secondary plans for survival," the voice boomed. Watcheyes came closer, flitting over the probe like curious tourists.

"Come now, Omnius, you never imagined such a dramatic defeat," Erasmus said, not scolding but merely stating a fact. "You transmitted a complete copy of yourself off into nothingness. A last-gasp attempt at survival. A desperate hope—something a human might feel."

"Do not insult me."

That transmission had traveled for thousands of years, degrading along the way, deteriorating into something else. Erasmus had no memory of that endless, silent journey at the speed of light. After their incalculable trek through static and interstellar waste, the Omnius signal had encountered one of the long-dispatched probes and seized upon it as a beachhead. Far, far from any taint of human civilization, the restored Omnius began to re-create itself.

Over millennia it had regenerated, building a new Synchronized Empire—and Omnius had begun making plans to return, this time with a far superior machine force.

"Nothing can match the patience of machines," the evermind said.

Fully restored from his backup copy while the new civilization built itself, Erasmus had pondered the fate of humans, a species he had studied in painstaking detail. The creatures had always been infuriating, yet intriguing.

He was curious as to how they would fare without the guidance of efficient machines.

He looked down at the small probe on its altarlike stand. If that receiver hadn't been in the right place, the Omnius signal might still be drifting, attenuating. Quite an ignominious end…

Meanwhile, believing themselves victorious, the human race had gone through their own struggles. They continued to push their boundaries; they clashed with each other. Ten thousand years after the Battle of Corrin, a Tleilaxu Master named Hidar Fen Ajidica improved and dispatched a new breed of Face Dancers as colonists bound for far-flung wastelands.

As his empire regrew, Omnius had intercepted those first Face Dancer ambassadors—beings based on humans but with some attributes of the best machines. Erasmus, fascinated with the possibilities, had quickly converted them to appropriate goals, then bred more of the shape-shifters.

In fact, the independent robot still had some of those first Face Dancer specimens preserved in long-term storage. Occasionally he took them out for inspection, just to remind himself of how far he had come. Long ago on Corrin, Erasmus had dabbled with similar biomechanics, trying to create biological machines that could mimic the flowmetal capabilities of his own face and body.

His new breed of Face Dancers did that, and more.

Erasmus could replay all of the memories in his head. He wished he had a few more of those Face Dancers here, to experiment on because they were so fascinating, but he had already sent them back into the human-settled star systems, to pave the way for the great machine conquest. He had already absorbed the lives and experiences of thousands of these Face Dancer "ambassadors." Or were they better called spies? Erasmus had so many of them ringing through his head that he was no longer entirely himself.

Knowing the strength and capabilities of human civilization and understanding the extent of his enemy's capabilities, Omnius had reassembled his forces.

Large asteroids were broken down and converted into raw materials.

Construction robots assembled weapons and battleships; new designs were tested, improved, tested again, and then produced in great numbers. The buildup lasted for thousands of years.

The result was indisputable. Kralizec.

When he could tell that Omnius was not impressed with history or nostalgia, Erasmus caused the floor to swallow the enshrined probe again and fill the crystal-walled gullet.

Leaving the vaulted cathedral, the robot strode through the streets of the synchronized city. The structures moved around him, pumping and sliding smoothly, always leaving openings for him. He pondered the buildings, all of which were mere manifestations of the evermind's spreading body. He and Omnius had both evolved greatly over fifteen millennia, but their goals remained the same. Soon every planet would be exactly like this one.

"No more games or illusions," said the booming voice of Omnius. "We must focus on the greater battle. We are what we are." As he listened, Erasmus wondered why the evermind liked to hear himself talk so much. "We have gathered our strength, measured our enemy, and improved our odds of success."

"Remember, we still need the Kwisatz Haderach, according to our mathematical projections," Erasmus cautioned.

Omnius sounded miffed. "If we get a human superman, so much the better. But even if we do not, the conclusion of this conflict is still clear."

The independent robot linked himself to the computer evermind, accessing everything that Omnius could see and experience. A part of the extravagant computer was aboard each one of the numerous machine war vessels. Through the connection Erasmus could see the vessel swarms plunging ahead, spreading plagues, launching waves of destruction. They were expanding the boundaries of the machine empire, and soon they would swallow all human territories.

Efficiency required it. Omnius required it. The great battleships moved onward.

BRIEF TIMELINE OF THE DUNE UNIVERSE

Approx 1287 b.g. (Before Guild)

Time of Titans begins, led by Agamemnon and "Twenty Titans," all of whom eventually convert to cymeks, "machines with human minds."

1182 b.g.

The overly independent and aggressive computer network of the Titan Xerxes seizes control over several planets. Naming itself Omnius, the "evermind" takes over all Titan-ruled planets in a short time and establishes the Synchronized Worlds. The surviving Titans are made servants of Omnius.

Unconquered human planets form the "League of Nobles" to stand against the spreading Synchronized Empire.

203 b.g.

Tio Holtzman, taking work from his assistant Norma Cenva, develops his scrambler shield and lays the basis for his famed equations. Beginning of Butlerian Jihad, after centuries of thinking-machine oppression. The independent robot Erasmus kills the baby of Serena Butler, inadvertently triggering a widespread revolt.

200 b.g.

Using atomics, the League of Nobles wipes out the thinking machines of Earth.

108 b.g.

End of Butlerian Jihad. Massive and widespread atomic strikes led by Vorian Atreides and Abulurd Harkonnen destroy all thinking machine infestations except for one last stronghold on Corrin.

88 b.g.

The Battle of Corrin destroys the last evermind, Omnius. Abulurd Harkonnen banished for cowardice, beginning the age-long rift between House Atreides and House Harkonnen.

Later, formation of Bene Gesserit, Suk doctors, Mentats, Swordmasters.

1 a.g. (approx a.d. 13,000)

Foldspace Shipping Company takes the name Spacing Guild and monopolizes space commerce, transport, and interplanetary banking.

After the horrors of the Butlerian Jihad, the Great Convention forbids all further use of atomics or biological agents against human populations.

Council of Ecumenical Translators releases the Orange Catholic Bible, meant to quell all religious divisions.

10,175 a.g.

Birth of Paul Atreides House Atreides leaves Caladan to take over spice operations on Arrakis, triggering the chain of events that leads to Muad'Dib becoming emperor.

10,207 a.g.

Birth of twins Leto II and Ghanima

10,217 a.g.

Leto II begins symbiosis with sandtrout, overthrows Alia, begins his 3,500-year reign as God Emperor of Dune.

13,725 a.g.

Assassination of God Emperor by Duncan Idaho. Sandworms return to Rakis.

Later, Famine Times

The Scattering

14,929 a.g.

Birth of Miles Teg, who will become the great Bashar, a military hero for the Bene Gesserit.

15,213 a.g.

The twelfth (current) Duncan Idaho ghola of the Bene Gesserit project is born.

Honored Matres begin to return from the Scattering, wreaking havoc and destroying anyone in their way. They are apparently fleeing from something even worse, a mysterious Outside Enemy.

15,229 a.g.

Honored Matres destroy Rakis with devastating weapons stolen from the Enemy.

Only one sandworm survives, brought to Chapterhouse by Sheeana.

15,240 a.g.

Battle of Junction destroys most Honored Matre leadership, beginning of great unification of Bene Gesserits and Honored Matres under Murbella. Duncan Idaho, Sheeana, and others flee in no-ship to escape the Enemy and avoid the dangers of unification. (compiled with the assistance of Dr. Attila Torkos)