Brian Herbert - Navigators of Dune

“Josef, our spice!” Norma cried from inside her tank. “We have to protect it!”

“Yes, Grandmother!” He didn’t know what she wanted him to do. “We’ll take care of the spice.”

In the heat of the battle, he tried once again to appeal to reason, transmitting to the Emperor in his sheltered bunker. “Roderick Corrino, you know the Butlerians are our mutual enemy! They are the savages who bullied your brother into bad decisions. They are the monsters who killed your daughter. You know Manford Torondo is an evil man. We should be fighting him together. I implore you, Sire, let us make peace between us.”

Norma spoke more loudly through the speakerpatch. “Josef, we will go. Now.”

Incensed, the Butlerians swept on toward the VenHold ships, and Josef’s fleet continued to bombard them. Another Butlerian vessel exploded, but one of the smaller VenHold ships also erupted in a bright flare as their shields failed and reactors detonated.

Josef was on edge, but excited. He didn’t want to be overconfident. He knew the half-Manford’s barbarians were mad and chaotic, accepting no rules of engagement, giving no thought to their own survival. “Choose your targets and open fire. We have to save ourselves”—he lifted his chin and added something he truly believed—“and the Imperium.”

Norma took him completely by surprise. “We go now , Josef.” As weapons fire built up and the VenHold ships closed in, ready to slaughter the barbarians, she spoke with a strange, determined tone. “My Navigators are required elsewhere. This battle is no longer relevant.”

At first, Josef didn’t comprehend what she said. Then he felt the foldspace engines power up in a rushed preparation for departure. Across the board he watched the same thing occur on the rest of his vessels, even in the thick of battle against Manford’s forces. “What the hell is happening?”

Agitated, Norma thrashed her webbed hands. “Draigo’s ship will remain here to retrieve the cymek Navigator brains. I have already dispatched orders. All other VenHold vessels will depart now.”

Victory was only moments away, but Josef watched the first three ships of his fleet fold space and vanish from the combat zone.

Josef’s jaw dropped. “No, Grandmother! We’re in the middle of a critical battle—we can’t leave!”

“My crisis supersedes political squabbles. It may already be too late.”

Josef rushed over to Norma’s tank. “What is it? We can’t—”

She cut him off. “Our spice bank on Arrakis is being destroyed. It is under attack!” His flagship twisted, jumped, and vanished into folded space.

NORMA’S MIND WAS the universe, wrapped in the fabric of folded space. When necessary, she could tighten her thoughts, focus and simplify concepts in order to converse with mere humans, such as Josef. But her Navigators were her children, her companions … a new enhanced species. They were the only ones who could truly understand and share with her.

The universe is ours. That had become her motto, and all Navigators shared that hope with her. She had to create more of them.

With the resources of Venport Holdings, Josef had been supporting her aspirations in the same way that she’d been assisting in his political ambitions whenever she could. Yet Norma’s priorities were her own. Her murky window of prescience showed a much larger picture, a future that he might not entirely endorse. No matter.

Right now, Norma’s choice was clear. Josef could return to Salusa Secundus and butt heads with Emperor Roderick later, but she refused to ignore the urgent, sundering alarm that yanked at her strings of prescience, a dissonant clamor from the minds of the failed-Navigator assistants who were stationed on Arrakis at the secret spice bank. That stockpile was in great danger!

She whisked all the VenHold spacefolders to Arrakis.

FROM HIS FLAGSHIP Manford was astounded to see the VenHold fleet move about in confusion briefly until, in rapid succession, all of their warships vanished—folding space and retreating! Josef Venport transmitted no defiant words, issued no challenges, made no vows that he would return to finish the battle.

The entire VenHold fleet simply and inexplicably fled into space!

Manford’s bridge crew cheered and stomped their feet. Anari just stared. “We defeated them in a matter of minutes! They ran like dogs with their tails between their legs!”

Before long, heavily armored pods containing the cymek walkers rose from the Salusan surface and docked with the lone remaining VenHold ship. Then even that vessel spun away and folded space, as well.

“God has granted us a perfect victory,” Manford whispered, awed at what he had just seen.

Unable to contain his delight, he shouted for his communications officer to open a channel to the surface. He wanted to address Emperor Roderick, along with all the people he had just saved. Manford intended to take credit for this astonishing victory, even if he didn’t understand it himself.

Sitting in her austere chambers, Mother Superior Valya reviewed plans in her mind, going over the way she had been constructing the perfect Sisterhood she envisioned, training a growing number of elite, highly capable women with little reliance on males.

Young and healthy, Valya had the biological urgings of any person. She had taken a few casual lovers over the years, four on Lankiveil in her youth and perhaps a dozen more since beginning her training with the Sisterhood, men who had worked for the Rossak School or in the facilities on Wallach IX. Some had been inept and clumsy in their attempts to pleasure her, while others were quite skilled.

Back on Lankiveil, one starstruck, fumbling young man had accused her of being too intense, asserting that Valya was overly preoccupied with thoughts and concerns that she refused to share with him. The observation was valid but pointless, and she had not bothered to see him again.

She recalled the naïve young man’s boyish features illuminated in memory, his sea-blue eyes and sheepish grin: Benaro Zimbal, son of a whale-boat captain. She’d liked him a little, she supposed, but even in her teens she had concentrated on the future of House Harkonnen. As a lover, Benaro was adequate, but she had not been able to picture him as a husband; he could never have advanced the position and wealth of her family beyond Lankiveil, and thus Valya could never allow herself any sort of permanent relationship with him.

Her brother Griffin had been more of a romantic, and had dreamed of true love and a lasting marriage, which she thought was a waste of time. They had to rebuild a dynasty, recapture the Harkonnen place in the Landsraad League … and eliminate the Atreides.

Valya was a powerful woman now, with great influence and unlimited potential. Considering the political, psychological, and physical training that all of her Sisters underwent, they could accomplish most anything she requested. Gradually, she would turn them loose in much greater numbers, placing Sisters throughout the Imperium, insinuating them into important positions in which they could observe and guide.

Many of the most beautiful and adept Sisters could use sex for another purpose—the primary biological purpose of reproduction, used for the furtherance of the Sisterhood and its breeding program.

“Not for the Sisterhood, for your own selfish purposes,” said a voice in her mind, a resounding condemnation that rose up from the low, often imperceptible hum of Other Memory. In that mysterious realm, an endless procession of long-dead memories was carried forward in the genetics of living Sisters, but only those who had survived the agonizing transformation into Reverend Mothers could tap into such wisdom, and never at will—only when the collective memories chose to surface in her consciousness. Within those memories crowded inside her DNA were countless experiences that saturated Valya, hundreds upon hundreds of generations going far back into ancient times. She might be physically young, but she carried the weight of millennia in her mind.