Brian Herbert - Navigators of Dune

“No, it won’t,” Tula retorted. “You’ve said yourself it will never be like the old days. We Harkonnens have lost too much.”

“But we have not lost our honor. We will destroy these bastards—mark my words, Tula. We will win.”

The younger woman looked pale. “Do we still have our honor if we win like this—by sneaking in to kill men who are only trying to stay away from us?”

Valya nodded somberly. “If we do nothing, we will have lost our honor. You must understand that.”

“Part of me does, and part doesn’t.” Tula looked away, then back at Valya. “You’ve wanted this for such a long time.”

“Since I was a small child, years before Vorian murdered Griffin.” Valya was disturbed by her sister’s lack of enthusiasm. Even so, she knew she and her fellow commandos could defeat their enemy. When they got back to Wallach IX, she would make sure Tula underwent rigorous guilt-erasure training. The girl had to be cured of this nonsense.

As they landed outside the dark ruins of the former machine capital, the shuttle sensors mapped out the main scavenger settlement, the largest concentration of inhabitants on the surface. According to the trader and his sketches, that was where Vorian had gone to hide. Valya stared intently through the green-tinted gloom of her light-enhancement lenses.

The three squads of women emerged at separate staging points outside the scavenger settlement, so they could move across the landscape and converge with no warning. As soon as they disembarked, the teams moved through the night, closing in on the ruined city. Fifteen deadly fighters in three teams against a pair of victims: redundancy to make absolutely certain they were successful. Valya carried a dagger at her waist, for the finishing touches.

Leading her own squad, she slipped a protective mask over her face, as did the others, completing the seal of their slick black suits. Tula was behind her, silent and ready, as well as Sister Ninke, the Truthsayer Cindel, and a tough and spunky young Sister Gabi. Valya confirmed her connection with the two other five-woman teams on her private comm, and they streamed forward with hardly a sound, like deadly shadows.

Approaching where they knew Vor had taken shelter, according to the intelligence from the bribed Corrin trader, Valya and her team came upon a landed ship, a small personal vessel of a vintage design. Valya called up the information that the trader had given them, and confirmed that this ship belonged to Vorian Atreides. His personal craft.

Motioning her Sisters to a halt, they circled the ship warily, scanning it. She didn’t think the man would sleep inside, but still felt a chill to know it was his, that he had been here. “This is what Vorian Atreides will use to escape from us if we don’t kill him in the tunnels. He’ll try to get away.” She paused, ran her dark eyes over the outside of the craft, staring at the engines, and then directed her Sisters to open the cabin, easily bypassing the minimal interlocks of the access hatch.

“We have to make sure he does not survive if he tries to slip away from us,” Valya said. She nodded to Ninke and Gabi. “I assume you know how to rig the engines? Sabotage them? It is one of the skills I believe both of you have learned.”

The two women went to work—it was done easily enough.

Later, as they glided through the ruddy night toward the entrance to the underground settlement, the ruined machine city gently shifted and rumbled. “Be careful,” Valya said in a hushed voice. “The ruins seem unstable.”

“We need to find the warrens where they are hiding,” Ninke said in an edgy voice. “We’ll dig them out and stab them through their hearts.”

Valya appreciated her intensity and dedication. She and the other commando Sisters did not know—nor did they need to—the details of the Harkonnen-Atreides blood feud. As far as the Sisters were concerned, their Mother Superior had issued instructions, and they would follow.

As they glided among the mounds of rubble and jagged silhouettes of once-towering structures, Sister Gabi suddenly slipped and flailed. The base structure shifted, rose up, and seized the young woman. A pool of flowmetal swirled in the slag at Gabi’s feet, and a swell of silver gushed up like the arterial blood of a machine. The well-trained Sister remained silent as she struggled to get free, using her bodily training to control her screams as the mobile, quicksilver substance pulled her down to her waist. The other commandos rushed to help her.

Fighting hard, Gabi grabbed on to an extrusion of black metal in the rubble. Ninke seized hold of her arm and pulled, trying to extract her.

None of them made any sound that might draw attention. Even Gabi, despite facing the prospect of death, did not cry out as the flowmetal tightened around her hips, crushing her body. A starburst of blood came out of her open mouth, and her expression sagged into agony and horror—still silent—before the flowmetal lurched again, pulling hard, and sucked her under.

After Gabi was gone, the quicksilver pool became placid, hardening into nondescript slag that did not show even a ripple of movement.

The survivors stared, and Tula looked sickened. Truthsayer Cindel and Sister Ninke were both troubled and hyperalert. Valya gave them a moment, then turned her back and impatiently urged the group forward. “There are still four of us, and two other teams. Do not let down your guard,” she said. “Vorian Atreides is dangerous too.”

Following Roderick’s command that the fugitive Directeur Venport be found at all costs, Imperial experts combed over the wreckage of the VenHold ships, hoping to find clues. In the days since the space battle over Lampadas, Admiral Harte’s troops had rounded up any surviving VenHold crewmembers, and seized some Navigators that remained alive but weakened in their damaged tanks. The captive Navigators died soon afterward, without revealing any information.

The sophisticated logs in the ships’ navigation files contained a wealth of foldspace data, but the databases self-destructed upon inspection, killing more than twenty of Harte’s best forensic technicians. One of the wrecked vessels was damaged sufficiently, though, that the purge routines failed when they were triggered, which left some information for the investigators to dig into, study, and dig into some more. From this, they were able to infer a set of mysterious coordinates for an unremarkable system that contained no known habitable planets. The Denali system.

But Roderick needed to be certain.

The captive VenHold crewmembers seemed a more likely source of viable information. Salvador had enjoyed the game of torture, using his adept practitioners to ferret out unwilling revelations, but Roderick had been loathe to use the same tactics. Now, however, he decided to do whatever was necessary for the sake of the Imperium. And for his sister.

First, he sent Fielle to interrogate the prisoners, hoping the Truthsayer could learn something important. On Admiral Harte’s flagship, only an hour ago, she had finished questioning all of the captives. Venport’s employees refused to speak, and even the best Truthsayer could not determine the truth or lie of silence.

When Fielle proved unsuccessful, Roderick agreed to send in the team of Scalpel interrogators led by Robér Cecilio. In a chamber below decks on Harte’s flagship, Cecilio and his team busily worked on the employees. The pain expert seemed to want to make up for his failure to learn anything from the captive Navigator he had probed in Zimia.

Roderick stayed aboard his plush barge, not wanting to watch what they were doing, but his imagination disturbed him too much. Unable to wait any longer, he shuttled over to Harte’s ship, where he was led down to the secure decks. Escorted by Admiral Harte himself, he walked reluctantly toward a closed door at the end of a corridor. He heard muffled screams, but took a deep breath and kept going. He needed to know.