Brian Herbert - Navigators of Dune

Admiral Harte straightened, looking pleased. “He’s right below us—we can easily destroy the laboratory domes from orbit.”

“My sister is down there, Admiral. She’s an innocent and always has been. We can’t just carpet bomb the domes. Under the circumstances, I want a surgical strike.”

Harte nodded. “You make it more difficult, Sire, but it can be done. First, though, we need to neutralize his warships in orbit.”

“In that, Admiral, you may proceed with all the resources at your disposal.”

Invasion alarms rang throughout the laboratory domes, but Anna was already running away. She did not care about political problems or space fleets. Her world had fallen apart. Sirens summoned everyone to their posts, and military transmissions from the VenHold fleet in orbit warned of an imminent attack. Denali personnel raced through the corridors in a panic.

But Anna was too absorbed in her own misery. She pressed her hands to her ears, ducked her head, and continued to run, uninterested in the crisis. In her state of mind all the noise sounded like mocking laughter, faceless shouts that seemed to taunt her with a merciless twisting of the knife.

Her heart was not just broken; it was shattered. Her mind was already a fragile construct held together by cobwebs and memories, and now it had curled up to hide from the reality she could not bear to face. She had surrendered her heart, her soul, her deepest self to Erasmus. She had unleashed her passion, shared every feeling with him. And she had been fooled, betrayed.

It was entirely her fault. She was aware that Erasmus was cold and unfeeling, an evil thinking machine, but Anna had cheated herself into believing he had changed. She had saved him from certain destruction during the fall of the Mentat School, and thought he felt something special for her in return. She thought she had repaired the robot’s dark spirit and healed him with love, helping him understand what it meant to be a human being.

But he viewed everything she had done for him and given him as nothing more than an experiment. An experiment ! She felt so violated. He said he was finished with her, had no time for her. Other concerns were more important.

Back when she was a young girl on Salusa, Emperor Jules had forced her to watch brutal public and private executions—“for her own good,” he said—but those horrific experiences had scarred rather than strengthened her. Her brother Salvador had also tormented her, stealing every chance at happiness she might have had; then he’d sent her away to the Sisterhood on Rossak, where she thought she had friends, where Sister Valya had been her companion. But Valya had manipulated her too, tricked her into taking the “agony” poison that destroyed her mind. It was another experiment!

In her own family, Anna had once believed that Roderick, at least, truly loved her, that he was on her side. Yet he hadn’t wanted to deal with her eccentricities either, so he sent her away to the Mentat School.

Too many people had taken Anna’s heart, crushed it in an iron grip, and then abandoned her.

Erasmus was supposed to have been her closest friend of all, her lover, her true love. She had devoted herself entirely to him as the lifeline that kept her damaged mind together. Isolated here on Denali, at least she had him, and for a short while it had been paradise for her. She had been deliriously happy.

But now it was all smashed to bits. Erasmus’s flippant dismissal showed her that, once again, she had been tricked by her soft heart. He was no better than Hirondo, the lover her brothers had sent away from her on Salusa Secundus.

Erasmus had destroyed their relationship, and Anna had no one else. None of the scientists or laboratory workers were her friends. Even old Lady Orenna back on Salusa—the closest person Anna ever had to a mother—was dead. Anna had nothing left … only her despair, hopelessness, and bitter memories.

How many times could she be destroyed before it was enough? If this present crisis wiped out the whole Denali facility, it might be a blessing for her.

As the deafening alarms continued to ring, Anna staggered away with tears streaming down her face. Hot, wrenching sobs tore at her chest, but no one paid the slightest attention to her misery.

Eventually, she stumbled into an empty cymek hangar. Except for a few leftover walkers still patrolling the blasted landscape outside the domes, the cymek army was gone. Manford Torondo and his fanatics had destroyed the machines on Lampadas. Maybe the Butlerians had come to Denali now, and that was what the alarms were all about.

She knew the invaders would want to kill Erasmus, as they had killed so many other thinking machines. After what she’d been put through, she didn’t care if they tore Erasmus apart and dissected his gelcircuitry brain. The thought horrified her for a moment. If she saved him, maybe he would change, maybe he would apologize. A flare of hope shot higher within her, but crashed down again. She had been such a fool. She saw that clearly now. It was no mistake.

He was an evil robot, just as the Butlerians had always claimed, and she felt repulsed to have fallen in love with such a heartless, calculating monster. Erasmus had intentionally jabbed and twisted her feelings in order to create emotions for him to study, as if she were one of the specimens in his laboratory!

Alarms continued to shriek, and VenHold workers scrambled to defend Denali. Anna vowed she would never let anyone hurt her again, and couldn’t think of a pain greater than the raw and jagged ache that was tearing her apart from the inside. She had only one decision to make now, a choice that was hers and no one else’s.

Inside the cymek hangar she looked outside through the broad windows, at the swirling, greenish mists. In the darkness the drifting fog looked so peaceful, so soothing. It would embrace her if she came into contact with it. She would breathe the mist into her lungs and would drown in its lethal embrace.

She went to the airlock and closed herself inside. The cautionary interior alarm was drowned out by the racket in the domes.

Princess Anna Corrino ignored the warnings, opened the outer hatch, and staggered out into the poisonous air of Denali.

AS HE ASSESSED the newly arrived Imperial fleet and calculated their weapons versus the VenHold defenses available on the Navigator-guided ships in orbit, Erasmus realized that this facility was in serious trouble. Alarms continued to shriek. He had hoped for more time to work on developing effective new defenses, but the most interesting concepts were no more than design specs or, at best, untested prototypes.

His computer mind focused on the problem; Directeur Venport would want his assessment as soon as possible. Just like dear Gilbertus, Draigo Roget had helped him understand the overall political situation in the Imperium, explaining that Venport Holdings had more enemies than just Manford Torondo.

Erasmus had taken pleasure in seeing the Mentat’s clean and ordered thoughts—made possible, he knew, by the logic techniques he himself had developed for Gilbertus to share. The people on Denali were natural allies, thrown together to develop ways to fight the Butlerians, but now their enemy was the Emperor himself. And they would all have to fight together in order to survive.

Over the course of his existence, Erasmus had forged a number of unorthodox alliances; some had been effective, while others surprised him in the wrong way. The failures—particularly Serena Butler and the young Vorian Atreides—were usually caused by unpredictable human behavior. Their species frequently disregarded the straightforward statements they called promises. Emperor Roderick Corrino had broken a promise to Josef Venport, and now it looked certain that Denali would fall.