Tales of Dune
Author: Brian Herbert
Date: 2011-06-02 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Fiction; Short Stories; Anthologies; Space Opera; Novels; Speculative Fiction; Science Fiction Fantasy; Classics
Description: Three previously uncollected stories set in the Dune universe by Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson, includes the all-new tale “Wedding Silk,” a story of young Paul Atreides, as well as “Sea Child” and “Treasure in the Sand.” Bonus material includes “Dune: Blood and Water” and “Dune: Fremen Justice.”
Publisher: WordFire Press

Table of Contents

Book Description

Title Page

WEDDING SILK

SEA CHILD

TREASURE IN THE SAND

BONUS MATERIAL

DUNE: BLOOD AND WATER

DUNE: FREMEN JUSTICE

Look for These & Other Digital Works from WordFire Press

Book Description

Three previously uncollected stories set in the Dune universe by Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson, includes the all-new tale “Wedding Silk,” a story of young Paul Atreides, as well as “Sea Child” and “Treasure in the Sand.” Bonus material includes “Dune: Blood and Water” and “Dune: Fremen Justice.”

Tales of Dune

Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson

Kobo Edition 2013
WordFire Press
www.wordfire.com
eBook ISBN 978-1-61475-007-9

Copyright 2011 Herbert Partnership LLC

WEDDING SILK

First publication 2011

SEA CHILD

Originally published in Elemental: The Tsunami Relief Anthology, Steven Savile & Alethea Kontis eds., Tor Books
Copyright © 2006.

TREASURE IN THE SAND

Originally appeared in Jim Baen’s Universe online magazine
Copyright © 2006.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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WEDDING SILK

A Tale of Paul Atreides

Part of our novel Paul of Dune details the early years of Paul Atreides and his training under Duncan Idaho and two other Swordmasters, Rivvy Dinari and Whitmore Bludd.

Even though Duke Leto loves his concubine Jessica, Paul’s mother, he has to forge a marriage alliance with the daughter of Archduke Armand Ecaz in order to protect House Atreides from the complex political forces arrayed against them. To finalize the betrothal, Duke Leto brings Paul and Jessica, along with Duncan Idaho, to the Archduke’s court on the jungled planet of Ecaz.

We originally wrote this story as part of Paul of Dune, but during the final edits of the manuscript we decided the events were not essential to the main plot, and so we edited it from the final published version of the novel.

“Wedding Silk” is presented here for the first time in print.

Paul watched his mother in the withdrawing room of the Ecaz palace, Jessica seemed stoic and unruffled, not at all troubled about being left alone, and showing no sign that the situation bothered her. She accepted the reason for which she, the Duke, and their son had come to this rich and verdant planet. She treated Duke Leto’s upcoming wedding as if it were merely a commercial transaction, like shipping salted fish or investing in pharmaceutical commodities.

Jessica’s ability to play a role was masterful, her demeanor perfect. To anyone else, her mask was a flawless disguise, but Paul noticed subtle indicators, hidden reactions, the tiniest flutter of an eyelid. His mother had taught him well—she didn’t fool him for a moment.

The Lady Jessica was Duke Leto’s concubine and companion, but not a wife. “I have always known and accepted this, Paul. I’m not a giddy schoolgirl who reads too many romantic poems.” She wanted him to believe her aloof expression. “Marriage is a business alliance, a political weapon to be used for the advancement of House Atreides in the Landsraad. Love is … its own thing.” Her reassuring smile would have convinced anyone else. “Our hearts may confuse the two, but our minds must not. And a human makes life choices with the mind, not based on the chemical tug-of-war of emotions.”

Paul’s sympathy went out to his mother, and he stayed with her in this lonely room, though he longed to explore the crowded, whispering jungles of Ecaz, which were so unlike even the tropical areas of Caladan. Through the palace’s open windows the scent of pollens wafted in the air, along with the lush humidity wafting from the riot of vegetation. He put aside the temptations of this exotic place.

As the Atreides heir, he would have to join the wedding party and participate in the ceremony. Knowing that his mother wanted him to understand, and determined to play his role as convincingly as she did, Paul said, “Lady Ilesa Ecaz seems an acceptable match for my father. Joining our families will benefit House Atreides greatly.”

Paul’s mother could see through him, as well, and she shooed him out of her chamber. “You are still the Duke’s firstborn son, Paul. Learn and experience everything you can—it will make you a more balanced leader. Speak with Duncan. He and the Archduke’s Swordmasters can show you Ecaz. This is an opportunity for you. Take advantage of it.”

Paul hesitated at the doorway. Outside, he heard a bird call, an eerie melodic keening, like an avian siren song; he wondered what it was. “You’ll be all right?”

Jessica busied herself with a sheaf of accounting records, which had seemed unimportant only moments before. “Go. I have plenty to keep me occupied.”

Duncan Idaho regarded the two Swordmasters: the foppish Whitmore Bludd and the enormously fat but agile Rivvy Dinari. “It is Duke Leto’s wish that Paul see more of this planet than the Archduke’s residence.”

Dressed in elegant clothes, Bludd raised his eyebrows at the suggestion. “If this is the boy’s first time on Ecaz, we must take him out to the fogtree forests. It’s an experience he’ll never forget.”

Though Paul stood with the three men, they discussed him as if he didn’t exist. He wanted to make them pay attention. “It is my wish as well. I’ve read about Ecazi fogtrees in filmbooks, and I found the images very interesting.”

“Pah!” Dinari chuckled. “Images are nothing. You must see the fogtrees with your own eyes. I’ll go requisition an ornithopter, so we can fly out immediately. There’s a whole planet to see, and we’d better get started.”

Duncan was somewhat cautious. “This is the Duke’s son. We will have to guarantee his safety.”

Bludd rolled his eyes in disbelief. “Are we not three Swordmasters from Ginaz?”

The ornithopter fluttered away from the Archduke’s ethereal palace, rising into the clouds and heading west over forested hills that rapidly gave way to steep mountains and sheltered valleys. Overarching trees formed a thick canopy that enclosed a shadowy and mysterious underworld. Paul leaned close to the ‘thopter’s curved windowplaz, drinking in the amazing sight, although he tried not to seem too overawed; he doubted he fooled the three Swordmasters.

Kite-sized butterflies drifted languidly along beside the aircraft. As the ‘thopter dipped toward a broad artificial platform built into the upthrust crown of a tree, a clump of the supposed leaves took flight, revealing themselves to be green-camouflaged moths. Paul let out a laugh, while Bludd, at the piloting controls, merely complained and dodged around the dispersing insects.

The ornithopter settled down in a vacant spot on the landing platform. Several vehicles were parked there in the sunlight—exploration or harvesting crews working in the underforest—but Paul saw no one else around. He climbed out of the ‘thopter and went to the edge of the platform, where thin metal cables extended from the platform’s edge like the spokes of a wheel, plunging through the canopy to connect with lower platforms that were mounted to the trunks of other trees.

Next to Paul, Bludd peered down to where dense leaves swallowed the cables. He pointed. “Pharmaceutical prospectors have a cargo lifter at the base of this main tree, which they use to load their harvest and haul it up from the underbrush. But we’ll take a faster route down to the forest floor.”

The Swordmasters rummaged through a strongbox near the landed ‘thopter and withdrew harnesses and hooks. Bludd took great care to demonstrate the techniques, showing both Duncan and Paul how to fit the harness properly about their bodies. Duncan approved Paul’s equipment before he checked his own, satisfying himself that the young man had made no mistakes.

As he strapped on his equipment, Rivvy Dinari looked like whale wrestling with a fishing net. Finished, Dinari walked to the edge of the platform and clipped his harness to a trolley mechanism on the cable. “Watch me.” Paul could hear the platform planks groan under the big man’s weight as he leaned back into his sturdy harness. “These ziplines are fast, but perfectly safe.”

“We had to specially reinforce that cable to carry Dinari’s weight,” Bludd quipped.

“My weight allows me to achieve greater velocity. It’s an advantage.”

“Only if the tree itself doesn’t break,” Bludd said.

With a snort, Dinari lifted his feet, swung out over the gulf, and released himself. He streaked down the zipline and plunged into the leafy depths of the canopy, swallowed up by a tunnel carved through the foliage.

“It’s quite simple, actually.” Bludd hooked his own gear onto the line and glanced over his shoulder at Duncan. “The hard part is stopping yourself in time. If you strike a tree trunk, you’ll most assuredly stop, but that’s not the recommended technique.” In a moment he whisked away down the zipline.

Without waiting for Duncan’s approval, Paul said, “I’m next.” He followed the lead of the other two and found himself soaring along the descending cable, his legs suspended. As he raced through the thick leaves, picking up speed, the wind whistled past; above his head, the trolley sang on the cable.

Ahead, the terminal platform came up fast, but two Swordmasters waited for him with outstretched arms. Dinari caught Paul like an enormous mattress, stopping him, and Bludd swung him onto the platform and disengaged the harness hook in a swift motion, moving him off of the cable. Paul laughed breathlessly with exhilaration. Duncan arrived a few moments later.

Using three successive ziplines, they worked their way downward to the lush and entirely foreign underworld on the forest floor.

In the undergrowth at the base of the fogtrees, a constant rustle moved through the rotted soil and tangle of fallen branches. The dense brush was alive with hidden creatures, buzzing insects, spiky fungi, and golden ferns that unfurled and furled.

Bludd tagged the coordinates of the massive tree that supported the landing platform high above, and kept a small locator device at his hip. Duncan scouted the green shadows, narrowing his eyes. “Turn on your body shield for protection, Paul.”

The boy did as he was told, and Duncan followed suit. The other two Swordmasters nodded at the precaution. Dinari reached around his belt and activated the humming field that extended across his girth. “Things can get unpredictable down here.”

“At least it’ll hinder these incessant insects.” Bludd swatted at the air for good measure, though he didn’t seem to be targeting any particular bug. “If we encounter any danger, three of us can hide in a protective little cranny and use Rivvy, here, as a blockade.”

The fat Swordmaster, taking no offense at the constant ribbing, responded in kind. “I am honored to serve in any capacity, even if it’s only to prevent your fine garments from getting soiled—unless, of course, you happen to soil yourself. In that event, I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

Bludd took the lead, and they trotted along, exploring interesting foliage. Cocking his head to hear a crunching rustle, Dinari lifted fallen sheets of bark to show Paul a nest of scuttling emerald beetles that were the size of his hand. Puffball mushrooms exploded nearby, and Bludd quickly knocked his companions in the other direction. “Don’t inhale! Those are hallucinogenic spores.”

Paul held his breath until they were at a safe distance.

Ahead of them, he heard a buzzing rustle of sound that swelled like a roaring fire, and Duncan glanced around warily. “What is that?”

“That is exactly what we wanted to hear,” Bludd said. “Since your Duke announced his upcoming wedding to Lady Ilesa, I thought you and the young lad would like to obtain a betrothal present unlike anything else the Duke is bound to receive.”

“Bludd has a fine eye for gifts,” Dinari said. “I think he would prefer shopping to fighting.”

Leading their guests, the two Swordmasters parted the fronds of two-meter-high ferns to reveal a clearing. The swell of sound—like an armful of crackling paper—grew louder, and Paul saw that it came from a tangled mass of branches, leaves, and silvery webs. The silky webs enclosed twigs and thick boughs in a mummy-wrapped cocoon that filled the glade.

“Ever see anything like that on Caladan, boy?” Dinari asked.

Duncan put an arm out to stop Paul when he tried to press forward for a better view. “No, sir,” Paul answered in a quiet voice.

“Don’t worry—they’re still enclosed,” Bludd announced. “We should be safe. The caterpillars won’t range about until the food inside the tent is all gone—another few weeks yet.”

They all stepped forward in wonder. Thick ropes of silk hung, glued to fallen trees and rocks, stretching out as awnings to hold the translucent gossamer sheets.

“We’ve been watching this nest for some time, and it’s about as ready as it could be,” the foppish Swordmaster continued. “The silk is truly remarkable.”

“You’ve been watching it.” Dinari laughed. “I couldn’t give a fig for silk.”

“Because you have no taste in clothing.” Bludd turned to Paul and Duncan, ignoring the fat Swordmaster. “This webbing has the perfect sheen and a soft, comfortable hand. Lady Ilesa could want nothing better for wedding silk.”

Hearing this, Paul wished instead that he could give it to his mother, but she would turn it down. Jessica played her role, and the Bene Gesserit had taught her to control every aspect of her heart and mind. And Paul had his role to play as well. “Yes, it would make a fine gift for my father’s new wife. Thank you for thinking of it for me.”

Bludd drew his dagger and motioned for Duncan and Paul to follow him, while Dinari trudged into the clearing under the tent-like structure. Within the folds of spun fabric, Paul could see shadowy cylindrical forms. The shadows of the ominous vermiform creatures shifted behind the gauze, raising a chill in him. They loomed up, then faded from view, seen and unseen.

Paul had dreamed of huge worms several times, creatures much larger than these—behemoths that lived beneath a shifting surface … majestic and also mysterious. He remembered being terrified, yet awestruck, waking without understanding. He had described the dreams to his mother, but she had no explanation for what the images might mean. The metaphors delivered by his subconscious could be interpreted many ways; the serpentine leviathans in his dreams might be a symbol of strength, or a shapeless threat.

These occasional vivid dreams confused Paul. Were they were premonitions or merely nightmares.? Either way, he did not understand them.

“Falcon-moths are responsible for the nests, boy,” Dinari explained. “Isn’t your Atreides house crest a falcon?”

“No, it’s a hawk.” Paul said it with enough conviction to imply a vast metaphorical distinction between the two raptors, though he would have been hard-pressed to explain it.

The fat Swordmaster didn’t seem to care about the subtleties. “When the caterpillars hatch, they eat their egg casings and devour all the nearby foliage as they spin a larger and larger tent complex. Then they eat the branches and the heartwood, and when the supporting trees are dead, the caterpillars eat one another. Only the strongest ones tear their way out of the tent-cocoon. By then, they are near starving, and they go on a rampage through the underbrush. You can find large dead areas and clearings where the worms have hatched.”

“That’s why you have to be careful.” Bludd slashed one of the anchor strands with the tip of his dagger. “Don’t break through the main containment wall when harvesting the silk.”

“We won’t,” Duncan said pointedly.

With great care, Bludd peeled away the flat filmy sheet of tent-silk and wrapped it like a large bolt of cloth on his arm. Paul was reminded of a vendor in the Caladan market who spun sweet sugar into clouds of candy on a stick.

With his body shield still on, Paul took up his dagger and found another anchor point, imitating Bludd’s technique. The raw tent-silk had a slick, airy feel. From the nest came the sounds of squirming, twitching. He guessed there must be more than a thousand large caterpillars crowded together, all famished by now.

Bludd finished wrapping up a large roll of the silk, set it aside, and began to extract more. Dinari, with a put-upon air, also began to cut some of the silk free. While Paul worked with the other two men to gather his unique wedding gift, Duncan kept watch for danger in the thriving underbrush.

Duncan suddenly ducked, craned his neck as a shadow flitted through the leaves overhead. “Careful!” He held up his sword.

With a fluttering buzz, two large shapes streaked just above them, circled the matted silky mess, then darted back up above the canopy. Paul jerked his head upward, following them.

“Those were falcon-moths,” Dinari said. “Sometimes they guard their nests.”

“We are being very careful,” Bludd said in a whisper, apparently talking to himself. “Gentle … gentle …”

With a twang, he severed another anchor-cord, but this one snapped and recoiled from the tension. As Bludd scrambled out of the way, numerous layers of interlinked fabric started to unravel and split apart. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“Duncan!” Paul yelled. “Trouble!”

And then, as the sheet of fabric tore open, widening the rift, caterpillars roiled out of the nest like armloads of giant maggots. The segmented creatures were a sickly, pale green, their bodies adorned with yellow spots. The shortest worms were as long as his arm; others were as thick as his thigh and nearly a meter-and-a-half in length.

The caterpillar heads were like smooth eyeless helmets sporting a set of clacking mandibles made for chewing wood. From each thorax sprouted six pointed legs that opened and closed, reaching for something to grasp. Paul saw that many tentworms were scarred and scratched from doing combat in the confines of the tent; some worms oozed gelatinous green ichor from tears in their skin. Now freed, the caterpillars lunged toward anything that moved—including Paul and the three Swordmasters.

Bludd sheathed his cutting knife and instead whipped out his thin rapier. With a flourish, he lunged forward, skewering a caterpillar and flinging it aside so he could stab the next.

“Stay out of this, Paul,” Duncan yelled. He sliced open the side of a worm with the tip of the Old Duke’s sword. “Get out of the clearing—I don’t want you hurt.”

“You trained me yourself.” Paul brandished his knife. “There are plenty of worms for all of us to kill.”

“Lad, you’ve got that right!” Dinari began slashing and chopping, butchering a dozen of the squirming bugs in only a few seconds as they tumbled toward the four intruders.

Bludd scowled at a splurt of ichor across his chest. “Bloody Hell, Rivvy! You’re a Swordmaster of Ginaz—use a bit of finesse! People will think you grew up in a slaughterhouse.”

Two caterpillars turned their spinnerets toward the wiry Swordmaster and sprayed fresh webbing on his tunic and trousers. While Bludd clawed the sticky strands away, Dinari gave him a wry look. “You’re right, Bludd—the silk does look good on you.”

When one of the tentworms reared up in front of Paul, he stabbed the smooth head with his dagger, but the knife glanced off the chitin. Turning the dagger, he thrust again, this time jamming the point between the worm’s mandibles, then twisting. He kicked the heavy carcass aside.

The other men did not pause in their mayhem. Bludd taunted from the side, “That’s fifteen for me so far, Rivvy. What’s your count?”

“Pah. I don’t have time to count!

A squirt of slime splashed onto Bludd’s face and across his ruffled tunic. Scowling, he skewered the offending worm twice for good measure. Worms still spilled from the tent, but many more carcasses lay inside, their flaccid empty bodies gnawed by their stronger brothers.

Soon dead caterpillars lay everywhere. Their squirming and squeaking sounds filled the glade, along with the slash-and-squish of hard fighting. Paul killed three more. Fighting at Duncan’s side, he waited for a group of four to lunge at them, then together they slashed and cut.

“I was hoping for the chance to train you under practical conditions, Master Paul,” Duncan said.

Paul grinned. “And how am I doing so far?”

From the corner of his eye, a flash of motion alerted him. He spun and ducked simultaneously, but not fast enough. A falcon-moth came at him like a dive-bomber, its long narrow wings like an ornithopter’s, its head torpedo-shaped. The moth slammed into Paul, moving too fast to pass through the shimmering body shield. The impact sent the moth reeling, and a dusty cloud of dislodged scales from its wings blew everywhere.

The falcon-moth’s antennae waved like feathers, each as wide as Paul’s outstretched hand. Its wings drummed against the shield as it tried to orient itself and dive in again, but Duncan slashed its abdomen. Yellowish guts spilled out.

As the dying moth wheeled away, then came back, Paul’s dagger caught the antennae. The creature flew away drunkenly and one wing caught in the loose fabric of the cocoon tent. After struggling like a fly in a spiderweb, the gutted moth crashed to the ground amid the dead caterpillars.

“Oho, a trophy for Duncan Idaho and his young companion!” Dinari bellowed. “Even I’ve never managed to kill a falcon-moth on the wing.”

“Dirty things,” Bludd spat.

Catching their breath, the Swordmasters strode about like scavengers in the aftermath on a battlefield, stabbing the few remaining worms and then wiping the slime from their blades.

“You did well, Paul,” Duncan said, wiping ichor from his face.

“Now there’s a battle to remember,” Dinari added.

Bludd said in a sing-song voice, “Young Paul Atreides, Conqueror of Caterpillars and Slayer of Squirmers! You have earned this wedding silk for your father’s bride.”

The boy walked over to the still-twitching, somehow sad form of the huge falcon-moth. “It was only trying to protect its nest. The silk didn’t mean that much to me.”

A shadowy, uneasy feeling came over him. A falcon and a hawk … how much difference was there? At the thought of what this moth had done, he felt a shudder of realization: Duke Leto would have done a similar thing, throwing himself into certain destruction if it was his only chance to save his family.

His family, Jessica and Paul … and now Ilesa Ecaz. And whatever children they might have. And how many others?

“On the bright side, we don’t have to be careful any longer,” Bludd said cheerfully. “We can retrieve all the tent-silk for ourselves. I’ve never had such an extravagant haul.”

“It’s going to be a very large wedding for Duke Leto.” Duncan smiled at Paul, sure his young ward must be excited about the upcoming celebration.

But Paul could only see all the strands of silk, the tangled webs, and the dead falcon-moth that lay among its slaughtered young.

The End

SEA CHILD

A Tale of Dune

Originally published in Elemental: The Tsunami Relief Anthology, Steven Savile & Alethea Kontis eds., Tor Books

Copyright © 2006

“Sea Child” takes place during the events of Frank Herbert’s last Dune novel, Chapterhouse Dune. The beleaguered Bene Gesserit Sisterhood face their destructive dark counterparts, the Honored Matres, who have destroyed the planet Dune.

Bene Gesserit punishments must carry an inescapable lesson, one which extends far beyond the pain.

—Mother Superior Taraza, Chapterhouse Archives

As she had done since the brutal Honored Matres conquered Buzzell, Sister Corysta struggled to get through the day without attracting undue notice. Most of the Bene Gesserit like herself had already been slaughtered, and passive cooperation was the only way she could survive.

Even for a disgraced Reverend Mother such as herself, submission to a powerful though morally inferior adversary galled her. But the handful of surviving Sisters here on the isolated ocean world—all of whom had been sent here to face years of penance—could not hope to resist the “whores” that arrived unexpectedly, in such overwhelming force.

At first, the Honored Matre conquerors had resorted to primal techniques of coercion and manipulation. They killed most of the Reverend Mothers during interrogation, trying unsuccessfully to learn the location of Chapterhouse, the hidden homeworld of the Bene Gesserits. Thus far, Corysta was one of twenty Sisters who had avoided death, but she knew their odds of continued survival were not good.

Back in the terrible Famine Times after the death of Leto II, the God Emperor of Dune, much of humanity had scattered into the wilderness of star systems and struggled to survive. Left behind in the core of the old Imperium, only a few remnants had clung to the tattered civilization and rebuilt it under Bene Gesserit rule. Now, after fifteen hundred years, many of the Scattered Ones were coming back, bringing destruction with them. At the head of the unruly hordes, Honored Matres swept across planets like a raging spacestorm, returning with stolen technology and grossly altered attitudes. In appearance, the whores bore superficial similarities to the black-robed Bene Gesserits, but in reality they were unimaginably different, with different fighting skills and no apparent moral code—as they had proved many times with their captives on Buzzell.

As dawn gathered light across the water, Corysta went barefoot to a jagged inlet, finding precarious balance on slippery rocks as she made her way down to the ocean’s edge. The Honored Matres kept the bulk of the food supplies for themselves, offering little to the surviving inhabitants of Buzzell. Thus, if Corysta failed to find her own food, she would starve. It would amuse the whores to find out that one of the hated Bene Gesserits could not care for herself; the Sisterhood had always taught the importance of human adaptation for survival in challenging environments.

The young Sister had a knot in her stomach, pangs of hunger similar to the pains of grief and emptiness. Corysta could never forget the crime that had sent her to Buzzell, a foolish and failed effort to keep her baby secret from the Sisterhood and their interminable breeding program.

In moments of despair, Corysta felt she had two sets of enemies, her own Sisters and the Honored Matres who sought supremacy over everything in the old Imperium. If the Bene Gesserits did not find a way to fight back—here and on other planets—their days would be numbered. With superior weaponry and vast armies, the Honored Matres would exterminate the Sisterhood. From her own position of disadvantage, Corysta could only hope her Mother Superior was developing a plan on Chapterhouse that would enable the ancient organization to survive. The Sisterhood faced an immense challenge against an irrational enemy.

In a fit of violence, the Honored Matres had been provoked into unleashing incredible weapons from the Scattering against Rakis, the desert world better known as Dune. Now, that planet was nothing more than a charred ball, with all sandworms dead and the source of spice obliterated. Only the Bene Gesserits, on faraway Chapterhouse, had any stockpiles left. The whores from the Scattering had destroyed tremendous wealth simply to vent their rage. It made no sense. Or did it?

Soostones were also a source of wealth in the Known Universe, and they were found only on Buzzell. Therefore, the Honored Matres had conquered this planet with its handful of punished Bene Gesserit Sisters. And now they meant to exploit it …

At the water’s edge, Corysta reached into the lapping surf, withdrawing her hand-woven traps that gathered night-scurrying crustaceans. Lifting her skirt, she waded deeper to retrieve the nets. Her special little cove had always provided a bounty of food that she shared with her few remaining Sisters.

She found footing on the slick surface of a submerged rock. The moving currents stirred up silt, making the water murky. The sky was steel gray with clouds, but she hardly noticed them. Since the arrival of the Honored Matres, Corysta spent most of her time with her gaze lowered, seeing only the ground. She’d had enough punishment from the Bene Gesserit. As unfair as it was in the first place, her suffering had been exacerbated by the whores.

As she pulled in the net she had laid at sunset, Corysta was pleased to feel its heaviness, which indicated a good catch. Another day without starvation. With difficulty she dragged the net to closer to the rocks—and discovered that its tangled strands held not a clatter of shellfish but, instead, a weak and greenish creature. A small humanoid baby with smooth skin, large round eyes, a wide mouth, and gill slits. She recognized the creature as one of the genetically modified “phibian” slaves the whores had brought to Buzzell for harvesting soostones. It was just an infant, floating alone and helpless.

Catching her breath, Corysta splashed back to the shore rocks behind her. Phibians were cruel and monstrous—no surprise, considering the vicious whores who had created them—and she was afraid she would be beaten for interfering with this abandoned child. Adult phibians would accuse her of catching the infant in her nets, claim that she had killed it. She had to be very careful.

Then Corysta saw the baby’s eyes flutter open, its gills and mouth gasping for oxygen. A bloody gash marred the infant’s forehead; it looked like an intentional mark drawn by the single claw of a larger phibian. This child was weak and sickly, with a large discoloration on its back and side, a glaring birthmark like ink spilled on its small body.

An outcast.

She had heard of this before. Among the phibians, the claw wound was a mark of rejection. Some aquatic parent had scarred its own frail child in disgust because of the birthmark, and then cast the baby away to perish in the seas. Stray currents had brought it to Corysta’s nets.

Gently, she untangled the creature and washed the small, weak body in the pool. It was male. Responding to her ministrations, the sickly phibian stirred and opened its alien, membranous eyes to look at her. Despite the monstrous appearance, Corysta thought she saw humanity behind the strange eyes, a child from the sea who had done nothing to deserve the punishment inflicted upon it.

She gathered the baby in her arms, folding him in her black robe to hide him from view. Looking around, Corysta quickly ran home.

Buzzell’s deep, plankton-rich oceans swallowed all but a few patches of rough land. It was as if the cosmic creator had accidentally left a water tap running and filled the planet to overflowing.

On the only patch of dry land suitable for use as a spaceport, Corysta worked with several other beaten Bene Gesserit Sisters. The women carried heavy sealed boxes of the milky soostones. After all their specialized training, including a remarkable ability to control their bodily chemistry, Corysta and these defeated Sisters were nothing more than menial laborers forced to work while the brutal Honored Matres flaunted their dominance.

Two Bene Gesserit women walked beside Corysta with their eyes cast down, each one carrying a heavy satchel full of the harvested gems. The Honored Matres enjoyed grinding the disgraced Reverend Mothers under their heels. During their exile here, Corysta and her fellow Sisters had all known everyone’s crimes and supported one another regardless. But in their current situation, such minor infractions and the irrelevant penance and retribution meant nothing. She and her companions knew the impatient whores were sure to kill them soon, rendering their life histories meaningless. Now that the phibians had arrived as a specialized workforce, the Sisters were no longer necessary for the economic processes of Buzzell.

On Corysta’s left, five adult phibians rose out of the water, lean and powerful forms with frightening countenances. Their unscaled skins shone with oily iridescence; their heads were bullet-shaped, streamlined for swimming. The Honored Matres had apparently bred the creatures using technology and knowledge brought by Tleilaxu gene masters who had also fled in the Scattering. Experimenting with human raw materials, had those Tleilaxu outcasts cooperated willingly, or had they been forced by the whores? The sleek and glistening phibians had been well designed for their underwater work.

The humanoids stood dripping on the land, carrying nets full of gleaming soostones. Corysta no longer found the jewels appealing. To her, they had the look and smell of the blood that had been spilled to get them. Thousands of Buzzell inhabitants—exiled Sisters, support personnel, even smugglers and traders—had been slaughtered by the Honored Matres in their takeover.

The whores in charge of the work crew snapped orders, and Corysta took a webbed net from the first phibian. On the creature she smelled salty moisture, an iodine-laced body odor, and an undertone of fish. The slitted eyes were covered by a moist nictitating membrane.

Looking at the repugnant face, she sensed coldness, and wondered if this might be the father of her sea child, who was now secretly recovering in her hut. As that thought crossed her mind, the adult phibian struck a blow that knocked her backward. In a bubbly voice, the creature said, “Too slow. Go work.”

She grabbed the satchel of soostones and scurried away. She did not want the Honored Matres to focus on her. Her instinct for survival was ever-present.

No one would be coming to rescue them. Since the devastation of Rakis, the Bene Gesserit leadership had holed up on Chapterhouse to hide from the unrelenting hunters. She wondered if Taraza was still Mother Superior of the order, or if—as rumor suggested—the Honored Matres had killed her on Rakis.

On this backwater world, Corysta and her companions would never know.

That evening, in her hut lit by a glowing fish-oil lamp, Corysta cradled the phibian baby in her arms and fed it broth with a spoon. How ironic that her own child had been taken from her by the Breeding Mistresses, and now in a strange cosmic turnabout she had been given this … creature. It seemed a cruel joke played by Fate, a monster in exchange for her beautiful baby.

Immediately she chastised herself for thinking that way. This poor subhuman child had no control over its surroundings, its parentage, or the fate that had befallen it.

She held the moist, cool baby close in the dim light and could feel the strange humming energy of its body next to hers, almost a purring sensation that made no detectable sound. At first the baby had fussed about the spoon, refusing to eat from it, but gradually, patiently, Corysta coaxed it to accept the thin broth boiled with crustaceans and seaweed. The baby hardly ever whimpered, though it looked at her with the saddest expression she’d ever seen.

Life was so unpredictable, moment by moment and year by year, and so chaotic within the much larger chaos of the entire universe. People were anxious to do this and that, to go in directions they imagined were important.

As Corysta gazed down at the phibian and made gentle eye contact with it, she had the sensation of supreme balance, that the time they were spending together had a healing influence on the frenzied cosmos … that all of the chaos wasn’t really what it appeared to be, that her actions and experiences had a larger, significant purpose. Each mother and child extended far beyond their own parochial circumstances, far beyond the horizons they could see or even begin to imagine.

In the distant past, the Bene Gesserit breeding program had focused on creating a genetic foundation that would result in the Kwisatz Haderach, supposedly a powerful unifying force. For thousands of years the Sisterhood had sought that goal, and there had been many failures, many disappointments. Worse, when they finally achieved success with Paul Atreides, Muad’dib, the Kwisatz Haderach had turned against them and torn apart their plan. And then his son, Leto II, the Tyrant—

“Never again!” the Bene Gesserit had vowed. They would never try to breed another Kwisatz Haderach, and yet their careful sifting and twining of bloodlines had continued for millennia. They must be trying for something. There must have been some reason her own baby had been torn from her.

Corysta had been ordered by Breeding Mistress Monaya to obtain specific genetic lines that the Sisterhood claimed it needed. She had not been told where she fit into the larger picture; that was an unnecessary complication in the eyes of her superiors. Complete information was known only to a select few, and orders were passed on down the ranks to the front-line soldiers.

I was one of those soldiers. Corysta had been commanded to seduce a nobleman and bear his child; she was instructed to feel no love for him or for the baby. Against her natural, inborn instincts she was supposed to shut off her emotions and perform the task. She was no more than a vessel carrying genetic material forward, eventually turning over the contents to the Sisterhood. Just a container of sperm and ovum, germinating something her superiors needed.

Inadvertently she had won half the battle; she hadn’t cared at all about the man. Oh, he’d been handsome enough, but his spoiled and petulant personality had soured her even as she seduced him. She had gone away without ever telling him that she carried his child.

But the other half of the battle that came later was far more difficult. After carrying the baby for nine months, nourishing it from her own body, Corysta knew she would be unable to turn it over to Monaya. Shortly before her due date, she had sneaked away into seclusion, where all alone she gave birth to a daughter.

Only hours into the baby’s life, before Corysta had time to know her own child, Sisters stormed in like a flock of angry black crows. Stern-faced Monaya took the newborn herself and spirited her away to be used for their secret purposes. Still weak from giving birth, Corysta knew she would never see her daughter again, that she could never call it her own. Despite all she tried to feel for the girl child, the baby daughter had never belonged to her, and she’d only been able to steal moments with it. Even her womb was not her own.

Of course Corysta had been foolish in running, in trying to keep the baby for herself. Her punishment, as expected, had been severe. She’d been exiled to Buzzell, where other Sisters in her situation were sent, all of them guilty of crimes of love that the Sisterhood could not tolerate …”crimes of humanity.”

How peculiar to label love a crime. The universe would have disintegrated long ago without love, shattered by immense wars. To Corysta, it seemed inhuman for Bene Gesserit leadership to take such a position. The Sisters were, in their own way, compassionate, caring people, but Reverend Mothers and Breeding Mistresses spoke of “love” only in derogatory or clinical terms.

The Sisterhood reveled in defying compartmentalization, in espousing an odd juxtaposition of beliefs. Despite their apparent inhumanity in running roughshod over desires of the heart, the Sisters considered themselves expert at key aspects of being human. Similarly, the indoctrinated women professed to have no religion, but behaved as if they did anyways, adopting a strong moral and ethical base and rituals that could only be classified as religious.

Thus the complex, enigmatic Sisters were simultaneously human and inhuman, loving and unloving, secular and religious … an ancient society that operated within its narrow rules and belief systems, walking tightropes they had suspended over deep chasms.

To her misfortune, Corysta had fallen off one of the tightropes, plunging her into darkness.

And in her punishment, she had been sent here to Buzzell. To this strange sea child …

As a storm whipped across the waters, ruffling the sea into whitecaps, Honored Matres dragged the surviving Bene Gesserits in front of the commandeered administrative buildings. The damp wind felt bitter on Corysta’s face as she stood on an expanse of grass that was growing too long, since no one tended it. She dared to lift her chin, her own small act of defiance.

The Honored Matres were lean and wolfish, their faces sharp, their eyes feral orange from the adrenaline-based spice substitute they consumed. Their bodies were all sinew and reflexes, their hands and feet edged with hard calluses that could be as deadly as any weapon. The whores wore clinging garments over their figures, bright leotards and capes adorned with fine stitching. The flaunted themselves like peacocks, used sex to dominate and enslave the male populations on worlds they conquered.

“So few of you witches remain,” said Matre Skira as she stood before the assembled Sisters. “So few …” The sharp-featured leader of the whores of Buzzell, she had long nails, compact breasts like clenched fists, and knotted limbs with all the softness of petrified wood. She was of an indeterminate age; Corysta detected subtle behavioral hints that Skira believed that everyone thought she was much younger than she actually was. “How many more of you must we torture before someone reveals what we need to know?” Her voice carried an artificial undertone of honey, yet it burned like acid.

Jaena, the Sister standing next to Corysta, blurted, “All of us. No Bene Gesserit will ever tell you where Chapterhouse is.”

Without warning, the Honored Matre struck out with a powerful kick of her leg, flashing like a whip. Before Jaena could even draw back, the hard side of Skira’s bare foot danced across the outspoken Sister’s forehead with a blur of speed.

“Trying to provoke me into killing you?” Skira asked in a surprising calm voice, after she landed back with the perfect balance and grace of a ballerina.

Skira had displayed precise control, delivering a blow just sufficient to cut the skin on Jaena’s forehead. She left a bloody gash that looked remarkably similar to the mark of rejection on Corysta’s sea child.

The injured Sister dropped, clutching her forehead. Blood streamed between her fingers, while her attacker chuckled. “Your stubbornness amuses us. Even if you don’t provide us with the information we desire, you are at least a source of entertainment.” Other Honored Matres laughed with her.

After returning from the Scattering, legions of whores used economics, military weapons, and sexual bondage against the human populations they encountered. They hunted the Bene Gesserits like prey, taking advantage of the Sisterhood’s lack of strong political leadership or effective military forces. But still the Honored Matres feared them, knowing the Bene Gesserits remained capable of real resistance as long as their leadership remained in hiding.

As the storm continued to build out on the ocean, whipping wind and rain across the strip of land where the women stood, Matre Skira proceeded to question Jaena and two other Sisters, screaming at them and beating them …but keeping them alive.

Thus far, Corysta—ever quiet and alert as she shivered in the cold—had avoided the brunt of her captors’ anger. In the past she’d been interrogated like the others, but not with the severity she had feared. Now the regular proceedings had evolved into light entertainment for the whores, who conducted them more out of habit than from any realistic hope of acquiring vital knowledge. But violence always simmered just beneath the surface, and the young Sister knew a massacre could occur at any moment.

The rain let up, and Corysta wiped moisture from her face. Despite the punishment and exile the Bene Gesserit had imposed, they remained loyal to the Sisterhood. She would kill herself before revealing the location of Chapterhouse.

Finally Skira and the other Honored Matres returned to the comfort and warmth of their administrative buildings. With a swirl of patterned capes over damp leotards, the whores left Corysta and her companions to make their way back through the rain to their squalid daily lives, supporting their wounded Sisters.

Hurrying along a cliffside trail that led to her hut after she had left the others, Corysta watched the surf crashing against rocks below and wondered if the phibians were looking up at her through the stippled waves. Did the amphibious creatures even think about the child they had marked and then abandoned to the sea? They must assume it to be dead.

Glad to have survived another interrogation, she ran home and slipped into her primitive dwelling where the baby waited, now healthier and stronger.

Corysta knew she could not keep the phibian child forever.

Her moments of happiness were often ephemeral, like fleeting flashes of light in the gloom of a dark chamber. She had learned to accept the precious moments for what they were—just moments.

Though she wanted to clutch the sea child to her breast and keep it safe, she knew that was not possible. Corysta wasn’t safe herself—how could she hope to keep a child safe? She could only protect the baby temporarily, giving him shelter until he grew strong enough to go off on his own. She would have to release him back into the sea. From the phibian child’s rapid rate of growth, she felt certain that he would become self-sufficient faster than a human could.

One evening, Corysta did something she had dreaded. As darkness set in, she made her way down to her hidden cove along the familiar path, taking the child with her. Though she could not always see the way in the gloom, she was surprised at how surefooted she was.

Wading out into the cold water, she cradled the child securely in her arms, and heard him whimper as the water touched his legs and lower body. She’d hidden and cared for her sea child for almost two months now, and already he was the size of a human toddler. His blotchy, prominent birthmark bothered her not at all, whether or not his own people had cast him out because of it. The terrifying prospect of this evening had been on her mind for weeks, and she’d feared that the phibian would just swim away and never look back at her. Corysta knew his connection with the ocean was inevitable.

“I’m here,” she said in a gentle voice. “Do not be afraid.”

With his webbed hands, the child clung to her arms, refusing to let go. The rapidly humming pulse of his skin against hers revealed the baby’s silent terror.

Corysta waded back to the shallows, where the water was only a few inches deep, and sat there on the sand, letting the waves wash over her legs and the baby’s. The water was warmer than the cool evening air, and felt good as it touched her. Out to sea, the water glowed faintly phosphorescent, so that the bullet-shaped head was profiled against the horizon. The darkness of the small shape reminded her of the mysteries contained within him, and in the ocean beyond …

Each evening thereafter, Corysta developed a routine. As darkness set in, she would go to her hidden cove and dip into the water, taking the tiny phibian along. Soon the creature she called Sea Child was walking alongside her and swimming in shallow water on his own.

Corysta wished she could be a phibian herself and swim out there, to the farthest reaches of this ocean world, escaping the brutal Honored Matres and taking her sea child with her. She wondered what it would be like to dive deep into the ocean, even if she did so on an unseen tether. At least there she might experience a familial hold that was stronger than anything she felt toward her Bene Gesserit Sisters.

Corysta prodded Sea Child to speak, but the phibian succeeded only in making primitive sounds from an undeveloped larynx.

“I’m sorry I can’t teach you properly,” she said, looking down at the toddler as he played on the stone floor of her hut, moving on his webbed hands and feet. She was about to prepare breakfast, combining crustaceans with native herbs she had collected from between the rocks.

The child looked at her without apparent comprehension. He was surrounded by crude toys she had made for him, shells and woody kelp knobs on which she had marked smiling faces. Some of the faces were human, while others she’d made to look like Sea Child’s own people. Curiously, he showed more interest in the ones that least resembled him.

The toddler stared into the carved human face on the largest piece of wood, picking it up with clumsy fingers. Then he looked up in sudden alarm, toward the door of the hut, peeling back his thick lips to expose tiny sharp teeth.

Corysta became aware of sounds outside and felt a bitter, sinking sensation. She barely had time to gather up the child and hold him against her before the door burst open in a hail of splinters.

Matre Skira loomed in the doorway. “What sort of witchery is this?”

“Stay away from us! Please.”

Sinewy women in tight leotards and black capes surrounded her. One of them tore the phibian child from her grasp; another beat her to the floor in a flurry of fists and sharp kicks. At first Corysta tried to fight back, but her efforts were hopeless, and she covered her face. The blows still got through. One broke her nose, and another shattered her arm. She cried out in pain, knowing that was what the whores wanted, but her physical discomfort didn’t compare with the terrible anguish she felt over losing a child. Another child.

Sea Child was hidden from her view, but she heard the baby phibian make his own terrible sounds, high-pitched squeals that chilled her to the bone. Were the Honored Matres hurting him? Anger surged through her, but she could not fight back against their numbers.

These whores from the Scattering—were they offshoots of the Bene Gesserit, descendants of Reverend Mothers who had fled into space centuries ago? They returned to the old Imperium like evil doppelgängers. And now, despite the dramatic differences between Honored Matres and Bene Gesserit, both groups had taken a child from Corysta.

She screamed in frustration and rage. “Don’t hurt him! Please. I’ll do anything, just let me keep him.”

“How touching.” Matre Skira rounded on her, feral eyes narrowing. “But do you mean it? You’ll do anything? Very well, tell us the location of Chapterhouse, and we will let you keep the brat.”

Corysta froze, and nausea welled up insider her. “I can’t.”

Sea Child let out a very human-sounding cry.

The Honored Matres scowled viciously. “Choose—Chapterhouse, or the child.”

She couldn’t! Or could she? She’d been trained as a Bene Gesserit, sworn her loyalty to the Sisterhood … which had, in turn, punished her for a simple human emotion. They had exiled her here because she dared to feel love for a child, for her own child.

Sea Child was not like her, but he did not care about Corysta’s shame, nor did she care about a patch of discoloration on his skin. He had clung to her, the only mother he had ever known.

But she was a Bene Gesserit. The Sisterhood ran through every cell of her body, through a succession of Other Lives descending through the endless chain of ancestors whom she had discovered upon becoming a Reverend Mother. Once a Bene Gesserit, always a Bene Gesserit … even after what the Sisterhood had done to her. They had already taught her what to do with her emotions.

“I can’t,” she said again.

Skira sneered. “I knew you were too weak.” She delivered a kick to the side of Corysta’s head.

A black wave of darkness approached, but Corysta used her Bene Gesserit bodily control to maintain consciousness. Abruptly, she was jerked to her feet and dragged down to the cove, where the women threw her onto the spray-slick rocks.

Struggling to her knees, Corysta fought the pain of her injuries. To her horror she saw Skira wade into shallow water with Sea Child. The little phibian struggled against her and kept looking toward Corysta, crying out eerily for his mother.

Her own baby had not known her so well, snatched from her arms only hours after birth. Corysta had never gotten to know her own little daughter, never learned how the girl’s life had been, what she had accomplished. Corysta had known this poor, inhuman baby much more closely. She had been a real mother, for just a little while.

Restrained by two strong women, Corysta saw froth in the sea just offshore, and presently she made out hundreds of swimming shapes in the water. Phibians. Half a dozen adults emerged from the ocean and approached Matre Skira, dripping water from their unclothed bodies.

Sea Child cried out again and reached back toward Corysta, but Skira held his arms and blocked his view with her own body.

Corysta watched helplessly as the adult phibians studied the mark of rejection on the struggling child’s forehead. Would they just kill him now? Trying to remain strong, Corysta wailed when the phibians took her child with them and swam out to sea.

Would they cast him out again like a tainted chick from a nest, pecked to death and cast out? Corysta already longed to see him—if the phibians were going to kill him, and if the whores were going to murder her, she wanted at least to cling to him. Her Sea Child!

Instead, she saw a remarkable thing. The phibians who had originally rejected the child, who had made their bloody mark on the baby’s forehead, were now clearly helping him to swim. Supporting him, taking him with them. They did not reject him!

Her vision hampered by tears, she saw the phibians disappear beneath the waves. “Goodbye, my darling,” she said, with a final wave. She wondered if she would ever see him again … or if the whores would just break her neck with a swift blow now, leaving her body on the shore.

Matre Skira made a gesture, and the other Honored Matres released their hold, letting Corysta drop to the ground. The evil women looked at one another, thoroughly amused by her misery. They turned about and left her there.

She and Sea Child were still prisoners of the Honored Matres, but at least she had made the phibian stronger, and his people would raise him. He would prove the phibians wrong for ever marking him.

She had given him life after all, the true maternal gift. With a mother’s love, Corysta hoped her little one would thrive in deep and uncertain waters.

The End

TREASURE IN THE SAND

A Tale of Dune

Originally appeared in Jim Baen’s Universe online magazine
Copyright © 2006.

This tale takes place after the events in Chapterhouse Dune, after the vicious Honored Matres have turned the planet Dune into a seemingly lifeless charred ball, a place where only the most desperate searchers would go.

“When the last worm dies and the last melange is harvested upon our sands, these deep treasures will spring up throughout our universe. As the power of the spice monopoly fades and the hidden stockpiles make their mark, new powers will appear throughout our realm.”

—Leto Atreides II, the God Emperor of Dune

Pressing his fingers against the windowport of the Spacing Guild landing shuttle, Lokar stared at the blasted world beneath them. Rakis, once called Dune—home of the holy sandworms, the only natural source of the spice melange, the place where the God Emperor Leto II had gone into the sand.

Now everything was dead, incinerated by the obliterating weapons of the Honored Matres.…

Lokar, one of the last Priests of the Divided God, closed his eyes before tears could come. Giving water to the dead. To a whole dead world. He murmured a prayer, which was drowned out by the sound of dry air currents that buffeted the descending ship.

“The planet looks like one giant scab. How can there be anything left down there?” asked Dak Pellenquin. Lokar didn’t like him; he was the expedition member who had talked loudest and bragged most frequently during the Heighliner journey to Rakis. “One giant scab. Is this expedition going to be worth our while? Worth anyone’s while?”

“We’ll find whatever there is to find.” Guriff, the expedition leader, cut him off. “Our priest will show us where to dig.” Guriff had close-cropped dark hair, narrow-set eyes, and a persistent bristly stubble on his chin, no matter how often he attended to his facial hygiene. “Anything left down there—that whole planet is ours for the taking.”

“Only because no one else wants it,” said a stocky man. He had a jovial expression, but icy cold eyes behind his forced smile. This one called himself Ivex, though rumor held that this was not his true name. He propped his feet up on the empty seat in front of him.

Lokar didn’t answer any of them, just clung to his prayer like a lifeline, eyes shut. Joining these treasure hunters on the departure planet of Cherodo had been a risk, but the devout priest had considered his options. Rakis was the most sacred of all worlds, home of the great sandworms that comprised the Divided God. Away from Rakis on a mission during the cataclysm, Lokar had survived by the purest luck—or divine destiny. He must recover what he could, if only to atone.

Since scanning had proved imprecise on the planet still in flux after the bombardment, Lokar had offered to use his own instincts and first-hand knowledge to guide their searches. Among many poor choices, this one made the most sense, the only way he could afford to travel back to what was left of his beloved Rakis. A last, desperate pilgrimage.

He had agreed to accompany their “archaeological expedition”—what a euphemism!—under very specific terms. CHOAM, the ancient and powerful trading organization, financed the expedition for its own reasons, hoping for a financial boon. They had agreed to the priest’s demands, drawn up a contract, and specified the terms. Provided the Priest of the Divided God could indeed show the scavengers the way, Guriff’s men were authorized to grab whatever physical treasures they managed to dig out of the blasted sands, but any sacred relics would be turned over to Lokar (though the distinction between “sacred relics” and “treasure” remained uncomfortably nebulous).

A slender woman stepped out of the cockpit and looked at the hodge-podge members of the expedition. Representing CHOAM, Alaenor Ven had reddish-gold hair that hung to her shoulders, the strands so precisely neat and straight that they seemed held in place with a nullentropy field. Her eyes were crystalline blue, her facial features flawlessly (and probably artificially) sculpted to the absolute perfection one might find on the visage of a mannequin. In an odd way, her very lack of flaws made her seem cold and unattractive.

“CHOAM has provided all the equipment you will need. You have two survey ‘thopters, two groundcars, prefabricated shelters, excavation machines, and supplies for two months. Even with all of the sand plankton killed, sample probes show the air is thin but breathable. The oxygen content remains tolerable, though diminished.”

Ivex gave a scornful laugh. “How can that be? If sand plankton create the oxygen, and they were all burned away—”

“I merely report the readings. I do not explain them. You will have to find your own answers.”

Listening without participating, Lokar nodded quietly to himself at the obvious explanation: It was a miracle. There had always been mysteries about the planet Dune. This was just one more.

“Though the environment is not as inhospitable as one might expect, do not allow yourselves to be overconfident. Rakis is still a harsh place.” She looked at them again. “We land in forty minutes. Our schedule permits you only three standard hours to unload and make your preparations.”

Eleven members of the team shifted in their seats, fully attentive; two pretended to sleep, as if ignoring the challenges they would face; the remaining three peered through the windowports with varying levels of interest and trepidation.

Pellenquin cried, “Three hours? Can’t you wait a day or two to make sure we’re not stranded there.”

Guriff scowled at his own crewman. “The Spacing Guild has schedules and customers. If you don’t trust your own survival abilities, Dak, you have no business on my team. Tear up your contract now and go back with Alaenor Ven if you like.”

“I would if she’d have me,” Ivex said with a snort. A few others chuckled in their seats. The icily beautiful CHOAM woman’s expression did not change at all.

High overhead, the huge Heighliner that had carried them here orbited the seared desert planet as the landing shuttle set down on the unmarked ground. Devastating weapons had entirely reshaped the terrain—cities leveled, mountains turned to glass, oceans of sand vitrified. A few sketchy landmarks remained, and despite the planet’s unpredictable magnetics, the transport’s deep-scan probes had found enough of a street grid to identify the buried city of Keen. The team would set up camp there.

When the cargo doors opened onto the glassy, baked plain, Guriff’s team wore oxygen intensifiers with supplemental tanks on their shoulders. Lokar was the first to remove his breather and inhale deeply. The air was thin and dry, with what others found to be an unpleasant burnt smell; even so, when he filled his lungs, the taste was sweet. He was returning home. He fell to his knees on the hard, scorched sand, thanking the Divided God for bringing him back safely, for helping him to continue holy work.

Guriff went over to the kneeling priest and nudged him roughly. “Work now, pray later. You’ll have plenty of time to commune with your desert once we set up the camp.”

Under a tight schedule, the crew threw themselves into the task at hand. Guriff shouted orders to them, and the scavengers moved about unloading the groundcars and ‘thopters, removing the shelter structures, prefabricated huts, crates of food supplies, and large barrels of water. To protect the exploratory ‘thopters and groundcars, they erected a hangar dome.

For his own shelter, Lokar had specified a simple desert tent. To really understand this planet, to touch its pulse, the Holy Books of the Divided God said it was better to live on the surface and in natural rock formations, facing the heat, sandstorms, and behemoth worms. But this was not the old Rakis, not a great planetary expanse of windblown sand. Much of the loose sand had turned to glass, and surely the great worms had all perished in the conflagration. The scavengers spoke excitedly of the great treasure the God Emperor was said to have concealed on Rakis. Though no one had found the hoards in thousands of years, during prime conditions on Rakis, the scavengers hoped the very devastation had churned something up from the depths.

In less than three standard hours, they had unloaded the equipment and supplies. All the while, the CHOAM representative stood staring at the wasteland, frequently consulting her wrist-embedded chronometer. She stepped back into the transport precisely when her schedule told her to do so. “A ship will return to gather whatever you have found in thirty standard days. Complete your survey and assess any value this planet retains.” Her voice became harder. “But do not disappoint us.”

With a hum of suspensor engines and a roar of displaced air, the large landing shuttle climbed back into the atmosphere, leaving Lokar with Guriff’s crew, alone on an entire planet.

Like frenzied worker bees, the treasure hunters laid out their equipment and gear, ready to begin their work. Guriff and his men fanned out with handheld probes, using several models of Ixian ground-penetrating scanners in a useless attempt to peer through the sandy surface. Lokar watched them with patient skepticism. The Divided God would never make their work so simple. They would have to labor, sweat, and suffer for any gains they achieved.

These men would learn, he knew.

It was late afternoon, with the sun low in the restless atmosphere, but the men were anxious to get underway, frustrated by the long wait of the journey. They made a lot of noise, unlike the old days when such vibrations would have brought the monster worms. Not anymore. Lokar felt a wave of sadness.

Off by himself, he moved to a low spot, a glassy featureless depression that he thought might be the center of the lost city. He placed himself in relation to the low rocky escarpments that distinguished the site from the rest of the bleak surroundings. The sensation felt right, as if his entire life and all its experiences, large and small, had pointed him in this direction.

The Priests of the Divided God had placed many of the God Emperor’s treasures in safekeeping at their temple in the city of Keen. Though he held only a middle rank, Lokar had once seen the protected subterranean vaults. Perhaps those chambers were far enough beneath the surface to have survived the bombardment.

The air, while dry and thin, was disturbingly cool, as if the planet’s great furnace had flickered out. But he could not shake the belief that his Divided God still lived here, somehow. As he stared, hypnotically drawn to the shimmering and melted surface, Lokar began to see with a different set of eyes.

He walked around the blasted city with an increasing sensation. Each step of the way he knew exactly where he was. When he narrowed his eyes, ancient structures began to appear around him like mirages, dancing on the sand in ghostly, flickering color, as if his mind had its own scanner.

Am I going mad? Or am I receiving divine guidance?

A few hundred meters away, the others gathered around the expedition leader, shaking their heads at their equipment in anger, hurling it to the ground and cursing it. Pellenquin shouted, “Just like they said. Our damned scanners don’t work here!”

Although Guriff brought out a tough, thin map printed on spice paper, he and his companions could not get their bearings. Annoyed, he stuffed it back in his pocket.

“Maybe our priest will have a revelation,” Ivex said with a forced chuckle.

Guriff led them over to Lokar. “Priest, you had better earn your keep.”

Still seeing spectral images of the lost city, he nodded distractedly. “The Divided God is speaking to you through this planet. All of your technology didn’t destroy it. Rakis still has a pulse.”

“We didn’t destroy it,” Pellenquin protested. “Don’t blame us for this.”

“Mankind is a single organism. We are all responsible for what occurred here.”

“He’s talking strangely,” Ivex said. “Again.”

“If you insist on thinking that way, you will never understand.” Lokar narrowed his eyes, and the illusory splendor of the great city danced beyond and around the men. “Tomorrow, I will show you the way.”

As he slept alone in his flimsy tent, listening to the rustle of silence outside, Lokar lived through a peculiar dream. He saw the Temple at Keen restored in all of its glory, with dark-robed priests going about their business as if the Divided God would last forever.

Lokar had not been one of the Priesthood’s elite, though he’d undergone rituals and tests that could one day grant him entry into the most secret sanctums. In his dream he gazed through the slit-window of a tower that overlooked the sands, the realm of the holy worms. A procession of hooded priests entered the tower room and gathered around him. They pulled down their hoods to reveal their faces: Guriff, Pellenquin, Ivex, and the others.

The shock awoke him, and he sat up in the darkness of his tent. Poking his head out through the flap seals, Lokar smelled moisture in the darkness, an oddly heavy night-scent unlike any of the Rakian odors he remembered. What had the bombardment done to the cycles of water on this planet? In bygone days there had been subterranean caches of water, but the devastating weapons must have damaged them, broken them loose. He drew another deep breath, savoring the smell. Moist air on Rakis!

Above the disconcertingly bumpy eastern horizon, the sky glowed softly red, then brightened with sunrise to profile the nubby, melted escarpments. The treasure hunters emerged from their stiff-walled shelters and milled around.

Lokar walked out onto the sandy surface. The men formed a circle outside, opened food and beverage packages provided by CHOAM, and made faces as they chewed and swallowed. He picked up a breakfast pack and joined them, lifting a self-heating coffee cup from an extruded holder on his plate. The dark blend should have had melange in it, especially on Rakis. It had been so long since he’d had good spice coffee.

Eager to get started, stocky Ivex tested his handheld scanner again. In disgust he tossed it into a half-buried storage bin.

At sunset the night before, their two survey ‘thopters had already taken off for a first look at the surrounding area. When they returned, the men had streamed out of them like enraged bees. Lokar didn’t have to hear their complaints and expectations. Their faces told it all. Rakis had not met their expectations, and now they were stuck here for at least a month.

Guriff said, “We’re relying on you, Priest. Where is the buried temple?” He pointed over his left shoulder. “That way?”

“No. Government offices were in that direction, and the Bene Gesserit keep.”

The expedition leader brought out the rumpled spice-paper map. “So the temple was more to the west?”

“Your map is flawed. Important streets and structures are missing. The scale is off.”

“Reliable documents about Rakis are hard to come by, especially now. No one thought maps of Keen would ever be useful again.”

“I’m your only reliable map now.” He could easily have led them off track, but he was anxious to explore the religious site himself—and they had the appropriate tools. “Remember, according to my CHOAM agreement, I am to be the caretaker of the most important religious artifacts. And I am to decide which artifacts are the most significant.”

“Yes, yes.” Guriff’s eyes flashed angrily. “But first you have to find something for us to discuss.”

Lokar pointed to the northwest. “The great Temple of Keen is that way. Follow me.”

As if his comment had fired the starting gun in a race, the scavengers ran for digging machines kept in the ‘thopters and began assembling the components. He had seen the powerful wheeled machines demonstrated back on Cherodo, during preparation for the expedition.

As the priest led the treasure hunters across the desolate sand, he hoped he was doing the right thing. If God didn’t want me to do this, he would tell me so. With each step, a more intense trancelike state came over him, as if the Divided God were still transmitting across the cosmos, telling the priest exactly what to do, despite the grievous injury that had been committed against Him.

Through narrowed eyes, Lokar absorbed the images of the lost buildings, and the grandeur of Keen danced around him. These unbelievers noticed nothing more than dead rolling sand around them. He led the men along a thoroughfare that only he could see, a wide boulevard that once had been lined with devout followers. Behind him, the men chattered anxiously over the soft rumble of their rolling, self-propelled digging machines.

At the main entrance of the Temple, where a statue-lined bridge had once crossed a deep, dry arroyo, Lokar pointed a wavering finger downward. “Dig there. Carefully.”

Two men donned protective suits and climbed onto a pair of digging machines. Side by side, they began to bore downward at an angle into the fused sandy surface, blasting a reinforced shell into the soft, sloping walls. Behind them, the exhaust funnels spewed dirt back out with great force, shooting material high into the air.

Guriff handed an imager headset to the priest. “Here, watch the progress of the drilling. Tell us if you see anything wrong.”

When Lokar put the device on, the illusory images of the city faded in his mind, leaving only ugly reality. He watched as the tunnelers reached a glassy-black surface several meters beneath the surface—the remains of a melted structure that had been covered over by blowing sand. The headlamps of the digging machines revealed a partially uncovered door and an ancient symbol.

He transmitted an urgent signal to the tunnelers, halting their machines. “They’ve reached the entrance to one of the meeting chambers!” He and Guriff climbed down the fused slope into the deep hole, pressing past the tunnelers. “Remove the door carefully.”

One of the men activated a small, spinning drill on his machine, while the other tunneler produced a mechanical hand that held several small, black cartridges. While Lokar and Guriff looked on, the men drilled holes in the door and inserted cartridges. Before the priest could express his alarm, tiny explosions went off, and the ancient, heavy door shuddered and tilted, and a narrow opening showed on the hinge side. The men used a hook to pull the door open, then shone a bright light inside the chamber.

A partially collapsed ceiling hung like a thunderhead over a room filled with debris. Lokar squeezed through the opening and entered the room, demanding the right of first inspection. He hunched beneath a section of partially collapsed ceiling, scuttled across the rough floor.

“The whole thing could cave in on you,” Guriff warned. Lokar knew, though, that the Divided God would not allow that, not after all he’d been through.

His heart beating wildly, he spotted a glittering object in the pile of debris and shoved rubble aside to clear a large platinum-colored goblet capped with an engraved lid so that the symbolic blood of God would not evaporate into the dry desert air.

Digging deeper into the pile, he found something more interesting, a small golden statue of a sandworm rising out of the desert and turning its proud, eyeless face upward to the heavens. Excited, the priest set it next to the goblet.

Then, like a miracle, he noticed moisture seeping down a wall behind the debris pile. Could it be? What was the source? Hearing a rumble, he looked upward and saw the ceiling start to give way over his head. Water trickled and then poured on him—water on Rakis! Grabbing the goblet and the statuette, he ran for the doorway. Just as he squirmed out next to Guriff, the whole room collapsed behind him in a roar.

“What do you have there?” the expedition leader asked, looking at the goblet as if nothing remarkable had happened.

“This goblet should have some value to you. I believe it is made of rare metal.” Lokar handed it to Guriff, while slipping the sandworm sculpture into the pocket of his wet robe. “This is something more sacred. Not for outside eyes.”

With a shrug, Guriff said, “It’s a start.” He swung up the goblet’s metal lid to investigate whether the large vessel contained any other treasure. He cried out as a tiny creature jumped out and scampered partway up the inclined tunnel, then stopped and looked back at the intruders with tiny, dark eyes.

“Damn thing bit me!” Guriff rubbed a red spot on his thumb. “How the hell did it survive?”

“It’s just a mouse,” one of the men said. “Something’s alive here after all.”

“A desert mouse. The ancient Fremen called it muad’dib,” Lokar murmured in awe. “The mouse that jumps.”

The two tunnelers left their machines and ran up the fused incline, boisterously chasing after the creature.

“Terrible catastrophe will befall anyone who harms a muad’dib,” Lokar cried. The rodent easily scurried away from its pursuers and disappeared into a tiny opening in the doorway.

Guriff rolled his eyes. “Now you consider a mouse a sacred object?”

Two weeks later, the sunset looked like a layer of spilled blood over a hot flame. Dust smeared the horizon in an ominous approaching line. The air around the settlement, which normally held a silence so deep as to be a hole of sound, was alive with an angry background hum like buried thunder.

Lokar knew what the signs meant. Because of his human failings, he felt the thrill of fear; because of his religious faith, he felt awe. Rakis was wounded, perhaps mortally, but not entirely dead. The planet was restless in its sleep.

“What I wouldn’t give for a set of weathersats.” Guriff propped his hands on his hips and sniffed the air. “That looks dangerous.” He had already called back the exploration ‘thopters and groundcars, though a team continued to dig in the tunnels of buried Keen, excavating a large labyrinth underground.

“You know what it is,” Lokar said. “You can see. It’s a storm, maybe the mother of them all.”

“I thought that with the bombardment, with the fusing of so much sand, the usual Coriolis effect—”

“This will not be usual, Guriff. Not in any way.” The priest continued to stare. He had not moved. “The whole environment has been thrown into turmoil. Some weather patterns might have been suppressed, and others inflamed.” Lokar nodded toward the blood-red horizon. “We will be lucky if we survive this night.”

Taking the warning seriously, Guriff shouted for his men, picked up a commlink and summoned his teams for an immediate emergency meeting. “Tell me then, Priest, what shall we do? You’ve lived through storms here before. What is our best option for shelter? In the tunnels under Keen, or sealed inside our shelters? What about the hangar dome? Will the vehicles be safe?”

Lokar responded with a vacant smile and a shrug. “I shall remain in my tent, but you do whatever you see fit. Only God can save us. No shelter in the universe can protect you if He deems that tonight is the night you will die.”

Guriff cursed under his breath, then trudged off to meet with his crew.…

That night the wind howled like an awakening beast, and abrasive sand scratched against the fabric of the priest’s small tent. The storm whispered and muttered maddening temptations like the hoarse voice of Shaitan.

Lokar huddled with his bony knees drawn up to his chest, his arms wrapped around them, his eyes closed. He recited his prayers over and over, raising his voice until he was practically shouting against the roar outside. The true God could hear even the tiniest whisper, no matter what the background din might be, but Lokar comforted himself by hearing his own words.

The reinforced tent fabric stretched taut, as if demons were breathing against it. Lokar knew he could survive this storm. A storm had unquestionable power—yet faith was more powerful still.

Lokar held on, rocking himself throughout the night. He heard a clatter and a groan as one of the camp’s larger, heavily armored structures was torn apart in the gale, but if he ran outside, the blowing sand grains would flay the flesh from his bones.

The men of Guriff’s team had made their choices and placed their bets. Some had dug themselves underground in Keen; others believed in the security of their own structures. Their fates had been written by a hand of fire in the Book of Heaven from the moment they were born. In the morning after the storm had passed, Lokar would see what had been decided.

Hours passed, and he didn’t actually sleep so much as go into a deep trance. Sand and dust sprinkled his face, caking his eyes and his nose.

Finally, he blinked and looked around him to see washed-out daylight. Miraculously, his tent still stood erect, but the fabric had been scoured down to fine gauzy remnants. Breezes, now gentle in the exhausted aftermath of the terrific winds, spilled through tiny gaps in the tent, stirring against him. The priest stood up and parted the spiderweb-thin fibers of the wall of his tent, like a man emerging from a womb.

Rakis seemed pristine and virginal. He blinked into the dawn radiance, rubbed the dust from his face, and stared at the freshly scoured landscape. The early morning sunlight sparkled across fresh sand that had been freed from the glassy crust that covered so many dunes.

Debris from the entire encampment had scattered, probably over an expanse of kilometers. Nearby, one of the prefabricated structures had been destroyed, and everyone inside was surely dead. Although the hangar dome was also breached, the vehicles and ‘thopters were still intact, though damaged.

Lokar heard shouts and voices, other members of the scavenging team crawling out of where they had huddled during the night, assessing the losses, counting the casualties, and cursing. Guriff’s voice was unmistakable as he shouted profanities, finding one set of wreckage after another.

Lokar couldn’t believe he had survived in his tiny shelter, where he should have been wiped out. There was no logical explanation, but a Priest of the Divided God did not look for logic. He found himself wrapped up in his own revelation, his own ecstasy. He bent down to the fresh sand at his feet, scooped up a handful and looked at it in his palm. He pinched a single grain between thumb and forefinger and lifted it to the sunlight, studying the sparkle. He saw in even this tiny fleck of silica a symbol of miraculous, divine power. He smiled.

Without warning, Guriff slapped his hand, and cuffed Lokar in the side of the head. The priest blinked and turned to the expedition leader, whose face was red with anger and disgust. Guriff had lost so much during the night that he needed to take out his outrage on someone.

Lokar refused to be rattled. “Be thankful, Guriff. You survived.”

Disheartened, the man stalked away. A few moments later, Lokar went to join him, offering his assistance. God had saved them for a reason.

The robed priest stood on a high lump of rock, gazing across the mottled, lifeless wasteland. The lens of dust in the air made the rising orange sun appear larger than normal.

Like immense birds riding the air currents, the two repaired ornithopters approached from the night, flying low over the desert, flapping their wings rhythmically. In the week following the storm, disgusted with the lack of success at Keen, Guriff had sent his scouts to search the south polar regions for treasure sites. Optimistically and unrealistically, the scavengers hoped they might find signs of ancient hidden vaults exposed by the upheaval. Lokar knew they would find nothing. The Divided God would reveal his treasure only to the faithful—like himself.

Lokar climbed down from the rock and made his way across the makeshift field as the aircraft landed. Guriff came forward to meet the ‘thopter crews and receive his report.

The rough-and-tumble scout leader knocked dust from his clothes. “Nothing down south at all. We landed more than twenty times and poked around, took core samples, tested the deep scanners.” He shook his head. “Looks like Keen is all we have.”

In the background, the priest heard engines whirring to life, the drone of tunneling machines as they awoke for the day. Excavation crews had so far discovered a handful of artifacts, a sealed chest of clothes, flatware, broken pieces of furniture, portions of tapestries, a few relatively undamaged statues.

“Even junk collectors wouldn’t pay more than ten solaris for these scraps,” Pellenquin had said in disgust.

The priest did not share the general feeling of disappointment. Something valuable would turn up, if they persisted in their efforts. But God had his own tricks, and perhaps Guriff and his crew would not see the treasure in front of their eyes.

As the returning scouts from the second ‘thopter plodded toward the settlement to curl up and sleep in the heat of the day, the tunnel-riddled ground trembled. On the other side of the camp, a cloud of dust spurted upward, accompanied by a loud thud and shouts. Guriff and the men ran toward the excavations. “Cave-in!”

Within the hour, all working together, they pulled two bodies out of the dirt. Lokar recognized a pair of young men who had been eager to contribute, anxious to earn their fortunes. Guriff bitterly watched the bodies being wrapped for chemical cremation. The team was still reeling from the damage the unexpected storm had inflicted. “There is treasure on Rakis,” Lokar said, trying to reassure him. “We just have to look in the right place.”

“You’re as blind as your precious worms, Priest!”

“The worms of Rakis were never blind. They simply saw in a different manner.”

“They didn’t see the obliteration of their planet coming,” Guriff said, and Lokar had no response.

Gazing out at the barren, blasted planet, Lokar turned and strode out onto the wasteland. Though he took no water or supplies, he walked for hours as the day warmed and the air began to shimmer. He ventured farther from camp than he had ever gone before.

Out on the sand, instinctively Lokar walked with an irregular shuffling step in the manner of the Fremen who used to live here, as if any worms still existed deep underground that might be able to detect him. He felt something driving him forward, galvanizing his energies, enticing him.

Far from view of the camp, with only a trail of footprints snaking behind him to show him the way back, Lokar climbed up a wide, gnarled rock formation under the harsh afternoon sunlight. He reached the top and gazed across the expanse. Something dark and rounded caught his eye, an obstruction large enough to form a stark lip of shadow. It seemed to call to him.

Lokar made his way down the other side of the rock and plodded across the desert. The sinuous mound was larger than it looked, as if most of it was still covered by the sand. Its exterior was mottled and weathered with splotches of black, like a giant buried tree trunk. He touched it and pulled back as sand and dust sloughed down from a rough, pebbly surface. Lokar fell to his knees in the dust.

A sandworm had risen to the surface and perished in the last shocks of the bombardment of Rakis, roasted alive. These weathered cartilaginous remnants had been burned, fused with a layer of glassy sand, exposed by the shifting storms.

In the loose sand that had gathered in the lee of the obstruction, he discovered a fist-sized ball of clear glass, perfectly spherical. Filled with wonder, Lokar dug it out, then found another melted sphere buried beside it. These nodules of flash-melted sand were not an unusual consequence of the ferocious heat of the attack. But placed where they were, beneath the head of the fallen worm, Lokar interpreted them as something entirely different. The tears of God. Out on the blasted landscape, staring in wonder at the hulk of the long-dead worm, Lokar felt a new kind of light suffusing him from all directions. Just as he had seen ghostly visions of the lost city of Keen, he now also saw the entire planet as it once had been, in all of its perilous glory. No matter what the Honored Matres had done, all the splendor of Rakis was not gone. The treasure was everywhere, for all of the faithful. The priest knew exactly what the Divided God wanted him to do.

Lokar smiled beatifically. “We just weren’t looking for it with the proper eyes.”

The CHOAM ship returned in a month, exactly on schedule. Exploring at random in the ruins of Keen and the collapsed Temple, Guriff ordered his prospectors to continue their scavenging and excavation work up to the last minute, hoping to find some lost treasure to justify the expedition.

The expedition leader had managed to consolidate what remained of his crew, but two days ago the useless priest had gone missing. Guriff had sent an ornithopter out to search for the frustrating man, but gave up the effort after a few hours. Lokar was mad; they should never have wasted time or supplies on him in the first place. But the trading company had hired him, sent him along.

As soon as the large CHOAM transport ship landed, workers emerged from the transport, scurrying about like ants on the sand. They opened the cargo doors and removed equipment.

Guriff was surprised to see the priest disembark onto the blasted sands with the coldly beautiful Alaenor Ven. How had they gotten together? The cargo shuttle must have found him wandering like a lunatic on the sands. Guriff didn’t know why they would have bothered to rescue the man.

As he watched Lokar and the woman talking, not even looking in his direction, the expedition leader balled his fists. He was tempted to stride over and knock down the babbling priest for being so reckless, not acting as part of this crew. But he realized that his outburst would be childish, and he doubted the cool, businesslike representative would have the time or patience for power plays like that. Instead, Guriff decided it would be better for him to ignore the situation entirely, retreat to his headquarters hut, and put together documents and records. She could come to him. He sealed the door against oxygen and moisture loss and made himself a cup of potent spice coffee using the last scraps of melange from their supplies.

As he sat in his sealed chamber, Guriff listened to the hum of excavating machines outside, the groan of equipment. New diggers? He didn’t know what the company was doing out there, nor could he understand why Alaenor Ven continued to ignore him. Did she not want her report?

At last she unsealed the door and strode into his headquarters hut without signaling or asking permission. She probably thought she owned the entire camp because CHOAM had supplied it.

Not letting her take control of the conversation, Guriff faced her clear blue eyes. “My team and I would like to stay for another month. We have not found the wealth you expected, but I’m convinced that the legends of the God Emperor’s treasure hoards are true.” He had no direct evidence to support what he said, but he would not give up. Not yet.

She responded with a thin smile. “Oh, the treasure is here all right—more wealth than we can imagine, perhaps more than CHOAM could sell.”

“Then I’ll find it,” Guriff said. “We’ll keep digging, keep hunting.”

“Perhaps you will find something else of interest, but my transport already has a hold full of treasure, something you overlooked. Quite foolishly, I must say. We found the priest Lokar out in the desert, and he convinced me that he had found something of great value. Priests are very good salesmen, you know.”

Guriff felt his skin grow hot. “What has the crazy priest found? He reported nothing to me.” He pushed past the woman, and she slowly turned to watch him as he unsealed the door hatch and marched toward the landed transport.

Lokar stood there on the ramp, looking saintly. The last large pieces of equipment had been rolled back aboard. A great deal of digging had been done in the sand around the landing area.

Guriff grabbed him by the collar of his robes. He felt betrayed, after all his effort, all the disasters his misbegotten crew had faced. “What have you been hiding from me?”

“I have hidden nothing. It was right in front of you all the time.”

“Explain yourself.”

“I am a messenger of God, chosen to continue His great work. Even though the priesthood is mostly dead, even though our temples have been leveled here on Rakis, our belief remains widespread across the galaxy. Many new cults and spinoff sects have sprung up. The faithful continue to believe and worship. They need more. They need their Divided God.”

“What does that have to do with treasure?”

Lokar slumped down onto the ship’s ramp, sitting there as if meditating. Guriff wanted to strangle him.

“You simply don’t understand, Guriff.” The CHOAM woman walked calmly up to him. “Treasure and wealth are a matter of definitions. You defined your search too narrowly.”

He walked up the ramp, ignoring her, demanding to see exactly what they had loaded into their hold. Guild and CHOAM workers had returned to their seats, preparing to take off again. Crates of new camp supplies had been left behind on the ground to be sorted and restacked by the scavenger crew. It was certainly enough to last them for another month. He would demand that the woman take Lokar with her when she departed.

Guriff pushed his way down the aisle with Alaenor Ven following him. He reached the back, where a hatch led into the cargo bay.

“You forgot to recognize the importance and power of religion,” she said, continuing as if she had never paused. “Even if the fanatics are not wealthy, they will sacrifice everything to pay for something they believe is important. They truly revere their Divided God.”

Guriff worked the hold’s controls, but missed the proper button. He slapped his palm on the wall and rekeyed the pad. Finally, the hatch slid open.

The transport’s cargo hold was full of sand.

Ordinary sand.

The CHOAM woman continued to smile. “The faithful seek any sort of artifact from Rakis. Sacred relics. Even in the best of times, only the richest and most dedicated could afford to make a pilgrimage to their sacred Dune. Now that the planet is dead and almost all travel cut off, every scrap—every holy artifact—is worth even more.”

“You’re planning to sell sand?”

“Yes. Beautiful in its simplicity, isn’t it?”

“I’ve never heard of anything so absurd.”

“CHOAM will file for the necessary mining rights and patents to prevent claim jumpers. When word gets out, of course, there will be smugglers and purveyors of fraudulent goods, but those are all problems we can deal with.”

Lokar came up beside them and beamed as he stared into the dusty, sand-filled hold. Stepping forward, he bent down and thrust his hands into the soft grains, pulling up handfuls. “Isn’t it wonderful? Offworld, throughout the Old Empire, even a tiny vial of this sand will sell for many solaris. People will line up for a single grain, to touch the dust to their lips.”

“The sand must flow,” the CHOAM woman said.

“You’re all idiots.” In disgust, Guriff exited the transport and went to meet what was left of his crew. They were pleased at the stacks of fresh supplies. When they asked him about the departing priest and what the CHOAM representative had said, he refused to answer, gruffly telling them to get back to work. They all had risked everything to come here, and they needed to find something worthwhile on Rakis. Something other than sand.

As the heavily laden transport ship lifted off, kicking up a blast of sand around it—worthless sand, in his view—Guriff looked at the barren landscape and imagined the real treasure out there, treasure that he would find.

The End

BONUS MATERIAL

These two stories were originally standalone extracts from Dune: House Harkonnen, published separately.

The Dune universe offers such a complex tapestry that we found plenty of intriguing threads to be explored as separate stories. This piece introduces readers to Abulurd Harkonnen, the Baron’s (much nicer) half-brother and father to the wicked and intelligent Feyd Rautha and the brutish Rabban, who will one day call himself “the Beast.” Abulurd is a very different person from his disgusting half-brother, yet he will find himself trapped in the evil webs of family intrigues. Blood is thicker than water … but with ties to House Harkonnen, it is often hardest to be the white sheep of the family.

When writing “Blood and Water,” we were delighted to visit—for the very first time—the Harkonnen holding of Lankiveil, center of the Imperium’s lucrative whale-fur industry. “Fremen Justice” is a spotlight on the Fremen Stilgar and one of his early battles with the Harkonnens on Arrakis.

DUNE: BLOOD AND WATER

Within the ice-choked arctic circle of Lankiveil, commercial whale-fur boats were like cities on the water, enormous processing plants that lumbered across the steel-gray waters for months before returning to spaceport docks to disgorge their cargo.

But Abulurd Harkonnen, the Baron’s younger half-brother, preferred smaller vessels with native crews. To them, whale hunting was a challenge and an art, rather than an industry.

Biting wind blew his ash-blond hair around his ears and shoulders as he squinted pale-eyed into the distance. The sky was a soup of dirty clouds, but he’d grown accustomed to the climate. Despite the glamorous and expensive Harkonnen palaces on other planetary holdings, Abulurd had chosen this frigid, mountainous world to call home.

He had been out on the sea for a week now, cheerfully attempting to assist the swarthy crew, though his appearance was far different from that of the Lankiveil natives. His hands were sore and covered with blisters that sooner or later would turn to calluses. The Buddislamic whalers seemed bemused that their planetary governor wanted to come out and work, but they knew his eccentricities. Abulurd had never been one for pomp and ceremony, for abusing his power, or showing off his riches.

In the deep northern seas, Bjondax fur whales swam in herds like aquatic bison. Golden-furred beasts were common; those with exotic leopard spots were much rarer. Standing next to rattling prayer wheels and streamers, lookouts on observation platforms scanned the ice-thick sea with binoculars, searching for lone whales. Off-shift whalers took turns praying. These native hunters were selective of the beasts they killed, choosing only those with the best coats that would bring in the highest prices.

Abulurd smelled the salt air and the omnipresent tang of impending sleet. He waited for the action to begin, for a fast hunt when the captain and his first mate would bellow orders, treating Abulurd as just another crewman. For now, he had nothing to do but wait and think about home.…

At night, when the whaling boat rocked and swayed, accompanied by the patter and thump of ice chunks bumping against the reinforced hull, Abulurd would sing or play a local betting game that involved stacked beads. He would recite required sutras with the gruff, deeply religious crew.

Glowing heaters inside the boat cabins could not match the roaring fireplaces in his bustling main lodge on Tula Fjord or his romantic private dacha at the mouth of the fjord. Although he enjoyed the whale hunt, Abulurd already missed his quiet and strong wife. He and Emmi Rabban-Harkonnen had been married for decades, and the separation of days would only make their reunion sweeter.

Emmi had noble blood, but from a diminished Minor House. Four generations ago, before the alliance with House Harkonnen, Lankiveil had been the fief of an unimportant family, House Rabban, which had devoted itself to religious pursuits. They built monasteries and seminary retreats in the rugged mountains, instead of exploiting the resources of their world.

Long ago, after the death of his father Dmitri, Abulurd had taken Emmi with him to spend seven unpleasant years on Arrakis. His elder half-brother Vladimir had consolidated all the power of House Harkonnen in his iron fist, but their father’s will had given control of spice operations to Abulurd, the kind and bookish son. Abulurd understood the importance of the position, how much wealth melange brought to his family, though he never grasped the nuances and political complexities of the desert world.

Abulurd had been forced to leave Arrakis in supposed disgrace. But no matter what they said, he preferred to live on Lankiveil with manageable responsibilities, among people he understood. He felt sorry for those being trampled by the Baron’s overzealous efforts on the desert planet, but Abulurd vowed to do his best here, though he had not yet bothered to reclaim his rightful title of subdistrict governor. The tedious politics seemed like such a waste of human effort.

He and Emmi had only one son, 34-year-old Glossu Rabban, who, according to Lankiveil tradition, was given the distaff name from his mother’s bloodline. Unfortunately, their son had a coarse personality and took after his uncle more than his own parents. Although Abulurd and Emmi had always wanted more children, the Harkonnen bloodline had never been particularly fecund.

But Rabban was coming back to Lankiveil, soon. The Baron would send him back here, and Abulurd hoped to strengthen his paternal ties to the young man. Baron Vladimir Harkonnen was getting to be a bad influence on him, Abulurd thought.…

“Albino!” shouted the lookout, a sharp-eyed boy whose dark hair hung in a thick braid kinked over his warm parka. “White fur swimming alone—twenty degrees to port.”

The vessel became a hive of activity. Neuro-harpooners grabbed their weapons while the captain increased the engine speed. Men scrambled up deck ladders, shading their eyes and staring into water laden with icebergs that looked like buoyant white molars. It had been a full day since the last chase, so the decks were clean, the processing bins open and prepped, the men anxious.

Abulurd waited his turn to peer through a set of binoculars, staring across the whitecaps. He saw flashes that might have been an albino whale, but were instead just chunks of drifting ice. Finally he spotted the creature as it breached, a creamy arc of white fur. It was young. Albinos, the rarest of the breed, were ostracized from the pod, cut loose and left without the support of the swimming herd. Rarely did they survive to full adulthood.

The men bent to their weapons as the vessel bore down upon its prey. Prayer continued to spin and clack in the breeze. The captain leaned out from the bridge deck and shouted in a voice resonant enough to break solid ice. “If we get this one undamaged, we’ll have enough shares to go home.”

Abulurd loved to see the sheer joy and exhilaration on their faces. He felt the thrill himself, his heart pounding to keep the blood moving in this intense cold. He never took a share of the whaling profits, since he had no use for additional money, but allowed the men to divide it among themselves.

The albino beast, sensing pursuit, swam faster, heading toward an archipelago of icebergs as if it could hide there. The captain increased the throbbing engines, churning a wake behind them. If the Bjondax whale dove, they would lose it.

Fur whales spent months at a time beneath the heavy ice sheets. There, in dark waters fed by volcanic vents full of nutrients and warmth, the whales devoured swarms of krill, spores, and Lankiveil’s rich plankton that did not require direct sunlight for photosynthesis.

With a loud pop, one of the long-range rifles planted a pulse-tagger on the white whale’s back. In response to the prick, the albino dove. The crewman working the controls sent a jolt of electricity through the pulse-tag, which made the whale breach again.

The boat came about, grinding the starboard side against an iceberg, but the reinforced hull held as the captain closed the gap. Two master harpooners, moving with forced calm and precision, got into separate pursuit boats, sleek craft with narrow prows and ice-cutting keels. The men strapped themselves in, sealed the thermal environment around them, and dropped into the icy water.

The pursuit boats bounced across the choppy water, striking chunks of ice but closing on the target. The main boat circled, approaching from the opposite direction. Each of the master harpooners crossed in front of the albino whale, popping out of their compartments. With perfect balance, they hurled long stun-staves into the whale, delivering a blast of numbing energy.

The whale rolled and came toward the whaling boat. The master harpooners pursued, but by now the main boat was close enough and four other harpooners leaned over the deck. Like a well-practiced Roman legion, they pitched stun-staves with enough force to render the whale unconscious. The two pursuit craft approached the furred hulk and, working as a team, the master harpooners delivered the coup de grâce.

Later, as the pursuit craft were winched up to the boat, furriers and skinners strapped on spiked footwear and rapelled down the vessel sides to the floating carcass.

Abulurd had seen whales taken many times before, but he had an aversion to the actual butchering process, so he crossed to the starboard deck and stared northward at the mountain ranges of icebergs. Their rugged shapes reminded him of steep rocks that formed the fjord walls of near where he lived.

The whaling vessel had reached the far northern limit of even the native hunting waters. CHOAM whaling crews never ventured into these high latitudes, since their enormous vessels could not navigate the treacherous waters.

Alone at the bow, Abulurd enjoyed the prismatic purity of arctic ice, a crystal glow that enhanced the shrouded sunlight. He heard the grind of colliding icebergs and stared, not realizing what his peripheral vision registered. Something gnawed at his subconscious until finally his gaze centered on one of the monoliths of ice, a squarish mountain that appeared fractionally grayer than the others. It reflected less light.

He squinted, then retrieved a pair of binoculars left lying on the deck. Abulurd listened to the wet sounds behind him, the men shouting as they cut their prize into pieces ready to take home. He focused the oil lenses and stared at the floating iceberg.

Glad to have a distraction from the bloody work, Abulurd spent long minutes scrutinizing fragments that had been hacked out of the ice. The shards were too precise, too exact to have broken free from the glacial shelf and drifted about, battering and scraping other icebergs.

Then, at water level, he saw something that looked suspiciously like a door.

He marched up to the bridge deck. “You’ll be at work here for another hour, won’t you, Captain?”

The big-shouldered man nodded. “Aye. Then we go home tonight. Do you want to get down into the wet work?”

Abulurd drew himself up, queasy at the prospect of being smothered in whale blood. “No … actually, I’d like to borrow one of the small boats to go explore … something I found on an iceberg.” Normally, he would have asked for an escort, but the whalers were all occupied with the butchery. Even in these cold, uncharted seas, Abulurd would be glad to be away from the smell of death.

The captain raised his bushy eyebrows. Abulurd could tell the gruff man wanted to express his skepticism, but he maintained his silence. His broad, flat face carried only respect for the planetary governor.

Abulurd Harkonnen knew how to handle a boat himself, often took one into the fjords and explored the coastline, so he declined the offer of other whalers to accompany him. Alone, he cruised away at a slow speed, watching out for dangerous ice. Behind him, the butchering continued, filling the iron-scented air with a richer, evil smell of blood and entrails.

Twice as he piloted his boat through the maze of floating mountains, Abulurd lost sight of his target, but eventually he found it again. Hidden among the drifting icebergs, this one chunk seemed not to have moved. He wondered if it was anchored in place.

He brought the small boat up against the rugged side, then force-docked it to the ice. A feeling of unreality and displacement shrouded this strange monolith. As he gingerly stepped out of the boat and onto the nearest flat white surface, he realized just how exotic this object was.

The ice was not cold.

Abulurd bent to touch what appeared to be milky shards of ice. He rapped with his knuckles: the substance was some kind of polymer crystal, a translucent solid that had the appearance of ice—almost. He stomped hard, and the iceberg echoed beneath him. Very odd indeed.

He rounded a jagged corner to the place where he’d seen a geometrically even line of cracks, a parallelogram that might have been an access hatch. He stared at it until he found an indentation, an access panel that appeared to have been damaged, perhaps in a collision with a real iceberg. He found an activation button, and the trapezoidal covering slid aside.

He gasped as a strong cinnamon scent wafted out, a pungent odor that he recognized instantly. He had smelled enough of it during his time on Arrakis. Melange.

He breathed deeply just to make sure, then ventured into the eerie corridors. The floors were smooth as if worn down by many feet. A secret base? A command post? A hidden archive?

He discovered room upon room filled with nullentropy containers, sealed bins that bore the pale blue griffin of House Harkonnen. A stockpile of spice put here by his own family—and no one had told him of it. A grid-map showed how far the storehouse extended beneath the water. Here on Lankiveil, under Abulurd’s own nose, the Baron had secreted a huge illegal hoard!

Such an amount of spice could have purchased this entire planetary system four times over. Abulurd’s mind reeled, unable to comprehend the treasure he had stumbled upon. He needed to think. He needed to talk to Emmi. With her quiet wisdom, she would give him the advice he needed. Together they would decide what to do.

Though he considered the whaling crew to be honest, wholesome men, such a stockpile would tempt even the best of them. Abulurd left in a hurry, sealed the door behind him, and scrambled aboard his boat.

Upon returning to the whaling ship, he made sure to mark the coordinates carefully in his mind. When the captain asked if he had found anything, Abulurd shook his head and retreated into his private cabin. He didn’t trust himself to control his expressions around the other men. It would be a long voyage home until he could get back to his wife. Oh, how he missed her, how he needed her wisdom.

Before leaving the dock at Tula Fjord, the captain presented the fur-whale’s liver to Abulurd as his reward, though it was worth little compared to the share of the albino’s fur he had given to each of the crewmen.

When he and Emmi dined together at the main lodge for the first time in a week, Abulurd was distracted and fidgeting, waiting for the chef to finish her grand workings.

The steaming, savory whale liver came out on two gilded silver platters, surrounded by mounds of salted stringreens with a side dish of smoked oyster nuts. The long formal dining table could accommodate up to thirty guests, but Abulurd and Emmi sat next to each other near one end, serving themselves from the platters.

Emmi had a pleasant, wide Lankiveil face and a squarish chin that was not glamorous or beautiful—but Abulurd adored it anyway. Her hair was the truest color of black and hung straight, cut horizontally just below her shoulders. Her round eyes were the rich brown of polished jasper.

Often, Abulurd and his wife would eat with the others in the communal dining hall, joining in the conversations. But since Abulurd had just returned from a long whaling journey, everyone in the household knew the two wanted to talk quietly. Abulurd had no qualms about telling his wife the great secret he had discovered in the icy sea.

Emmi was silent, but deep. She thought before she spoke, and didn’t talk unless she had something to say. Now she listened to her husband and did not interrupt him. When Abulurd finished his tale, Emmi sat in silence, thinking about what he had said. He waited long enough for her to consider a few possibilities, then said to her, “What shall we do, Emmi?”

“All that wealth must have been stolen from the Emperor’s share. It’s probably been there for years.” She nodded to reinforce her own convictions. “You don’t want to dirty your hands with it.”

“But my own half-brother has deceived me.”

“He must have plans for it. He didn’t tell you because he knew you’d feel honor-bound to report it.”

Abulurd chewed a mouthful of the tart stringreens and swallowed, washing it down with a Caladan blanc. With the smallest hints, Emmi could always tell exactly what he was thinking. “But I do feel honor-bound to report it.”

She considered for a moment, then said, “If you call attention to this stockpile, I can think of many ways it could harm us, harm the people of Lankiveil, or harm your own family. I wish you had never found it.”

He looked into her jasper-brown eyes to see if any glimmer of temptation had crossed them, but he saw only concern and caution there. “Perhaps Vladimir is avoiding taxes or just embezzling to fill the coffers of House Harkonnen,” she ventured, her expression turning hard. “But he is still your brother. If you report him to the Emperor, you could bring disaster upon your House.” Then she frowned even more deeply. “And our son is coming back. What if he is implicated?”

Abulurd realized another consequence and groaned. “If the Baron is imprisoned, then I would have to control all of the Harkonnen holdings. Assuming we keep the Arrakis fief, I’d have to go back there, or else live on Giedi Prime.” Miserably, he took another drink of the wine. “I couldn’t stomach either option, Emmi. I like it here. I won’t even mention the stockpile to Glossu.”

Emmi reached over to touch his hand. She stroked it, and he raised her hand to his lips, kissing her fingers. “Then we’ve come to our decision,” she said. “We know the spice is there … but we’ll just leave it be.”

As far as Rabban was concerned, his uncle could not have conceived a more cruel punishment than to send him to this dreary planet. At least Arrakis was warm and had clear skies, and Giedi Prime offered all the comforts of civilization.

Lankiveil was just … miserable.

Time dragged at such a sluggish pace that Rabban found himself appreciating the geriatric benefits of melange. He would have to live longer than a normal life span just to make up for all this abysmally wasted time.…

He had absolutely no interest in the villages that dotted the convoluted fjords: they held nothing but smelly fishermen, native hunters, and a few vegetable growers who found fertile land in the cracks of the steep black mountains.

Rather than going to see his parents—that would be just too much to bear—Rabban spent most of his time on the largest island in the north, close to the glacial ice sheet and far from the swimming lanes of the Bjondax fur whales. It was not civilization by any standard, but at least it had factories, processing plants, and a spaceport to send loads of whale-fur to orbit. Here, he could be with people who understood that resources and raw materials existed for the benefit of whatever House owned them.

He lived in CHOAM company barracks and commandeered several large rooms for himself. Though he occasionally gambled with the other contract workers, he spent most of his time brooding and thinking of ways to change his life as soon as he returned to Giedi Prime.

Unfortunately, his father traveled up to the CHOAM processing centers, ostensibly on an inspection tour. Abulurd met his son in the barracks building with an optimistic expression on his hangdog face as if he expected some kind of teary-eyed reunion. He embraced his only son, and Rabban broke away quickly.

Glossu Rabban, with square shoulders and a blocky face, heavy lips and a widow’s peak, took after his mother more than his father, who had thin arms, bony elbows, and big knuckles. Abulurd’s ash-blond hair looked old and dirty, and his face was weathered from being outside too much.

The only way Rabban got his father to leave, after hours of inane jabbering, was to promise that he would indeed come down to Tula Fjord and stay with his parents. A week later, he arrived at the main lodge, smelling the sour air, feeling the clamminess sink into his bones. Enduring their coddling, Rabban swallowed his disgust and counted the days until he could meet the Heighliner that would take him home.

In the lodge they ate elaborate meals of smoked fish, boiled clabsters, seafood paella, snow mussels and clams, pickled squid, and salted ruh-caviar, accompanied by the bitter, stringy vegetables that survived in the poor soil. The fishwife, a broad-faced woman with red hands and massive arms, cooked one dish after another, proudly serving each one to Rabban. She had known him as a child, had tried to spoil him, and now she did everything but pinch his cheeks. Rabban hated her for it.

He couldn’t seem to get the foul tastes out of his mouth, or the odors from his fingers or clothes. Only pungent wood smoke from the great fireplaces managed to relieve his anguished nose. His father found it quaint to use real fire instead of thermal heaters or radiant globes.…

One night, bored and brooding, Rabban latched upon an idea, his first imaginative spark in two years. The Bjondax whales were docile and easily killed—and Rabban knew he could interest wealthy nobles from Great and Minor Houses in coming to Lankiveil. He remembered how much joy he had taken in hunting feral children at Forest Guard Preserve, how thrilled he had been to kill a great sandworm on Arrakis. Perhaps he could start a new whale-hunting industry, pursuing the enormous aquatic beasts for sport. It would add profit to the Harkonnen treasury and turn Lankiveil into something better than the primitive hellhole it was now.

Even the Baron would be pleased.

Two nights before he was due to depart for home, he suggested the idea to his parents. Like an ideal family, they sat together at table eating another meal from the sea. Abulurd and Emmi kept looking at each other with pathetic sighs of contentment. His ebony-eyed mother didn’t speak much, but she provided unwavering support to her husband. They touched affectionately, brushed a hand from one shoulder to an elbow.

“I plan to bring some big-game hunters to Lankiveil.” Rabban sipped a watery glass of sweet mountain wine. “We’ll track down the fur whales—your native fishermen can act as guides. Many people in the Landsraad would pay handsomely for such a trophy. It’ll be a boon to all of us.”

Emmi blinked and looked over to see Abulurd’s mouth drop open in shock. She let him say what they were both thinking. “That would be impossible, son.”

Rabban flinched at the offhand way this weakling called him son. Abulurd explained, “All you’ve seen are the processing docks up in the north, the final step in the whale-fur business. But hunting proper specimens is a delicate task, done with care and training. I’ve been on the boats many times, and believe me, it’s not a lighthearted task! Killing Bjondax whales was never meant for … sport.”

Rabban’s thick lips twisted. “And why not? If you’re the planetary governor here, you’re supposed to understand economics.”

His mother shook her head. “Your father understands this planet better than you do. We just can’t allow it.” She seemed surrounded by an impenetrable veil of self-assurance, as if nothing could shake her.

Rabban simmered in his chair, more disgusted than angry. These people had no right to forbid him anything. He was the nephew of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, the designated heir of a Great House. Abulurd had already proven he couldn’t handle the responsibility. No one would listen to a failure’s complaints.

Rabban pushed himself away from the table and stalked off to his suite. There, in a bowl made from an abalone shell, the house servants had arranged clumps of sweet-smelling lichens peeled from tree bark, a typical Lankiveil bouquet. With a swat from his thick hand, Rabban knocked it aside, shattering the shell on the weathered plank floor.

The abrasive sounds of Bjondax whale songs awoke him from a restless sleep. Outside the window in the deep channel, the whales hooted and honked in an atonal sound that made Rabban’s skull resonate.

The night before, his father had smiled wistfully, listening to the music of the beasts. He’d stood with his son out on the split-log balcony, which was slick from an ever-clinging mist. Gesturing out to the narrow fjords where dark shapes swam, Abulurd said, “Mating songs. They’re in love.”

Rabban wanted to kill something.

Fresh from hearing his father’s flat refusal of the simple plan to bring hunters to Lankiveil, he couldn’t imagine how he shared a heritage from such people. He’d spent too long enduring the annoyances of this world; he’d tolerated the smothering attentions of his mother and father; he’d despised how they had thrown away the grandeur they could have achieved, and then allowed themselves to be content here.

Rabban’s blood began to boil.

Knowing he could never sleep with the whale-racket outside, he dressed and plodded down into the quiet great room. Orange embers in the cavernous fireplace lit the room as if the hearth were filled with lava. A few servants should be up, some cleaners in the back rooms, a cook in the kitchen preparing for the day ahead. Abulurd never posted guards.

Instead, the inhabitants of the main lodge slept with the quiet snores of the unambitious. Rabban hated it all.

He gathered a warm garment, even deigned to take mittens, and crept outside. He trudged down rugged steps to the waterline, the docks, and the fishing shed. The cold condensed a frost from the mist in the air.

Inside the dank and reeking shed, he found what he wanted: worn, jag-tipped spears for hunting fish. Certainly sufficient to kill a few fur whales. He could have brought along heavier weaponry, but that would have taken away all the sport.

Drifting in the placid fjord, Bjondax whales crooned in unison; their songs resonated like belches from the cliff walls. Gloomy clouds muffled the starlight, but an eerie illumination shone down so that Rabban could see what he was doing.

He untied one of the medium-sized boats from the dock—small enough that he could handle it by himself, yet with a thick hull and sufficient mass to withstand being bumped by lovesick fur-whales. He cast off and powered up the humming motor, easing into the deep channel where the beasts splashed and played, singing foolishly to each other. The sleek forms drifted through the water, surfacing, bellowing with their vibrating vocal membranes.

Grasping the controls with a mittened hand, he guided his boat into deeper waters and approached the pod of whales. They swam about, undisturbed by his presence. Some even playfully collided with his craft.

He looked into the dark water to see the adults spotted like leopards—some with mottled patches, others a creamy gold color. Numerous smaller calves accompanied them. Did the animals take their children with them when they came to the fjords to spawn? Rabban snorted, then hefted the handful of jagged spears.

He stopped the engine and drifted, poised as the Bjondax beasts went about their antics, oblivious to danger. The monsters fell silent, apparently taking notice of his boat, then began hooting and burbling again. Stupid animals!

Rabban threw the first of many spears, a rapid sequence of powerful thrusts. Once the slaughter began, the whale song rapidly changed its tone.

Throwing on thick robes and slippers to cover themselves, Abulurd and Emmi raced toward the docks. Confused servants turned on the lights in the main lodge, and glowglobes shone into the darkness, startling shadows away.

The soothing whale songs had turned into a raucous cacophony of animal screams. Emmi gripped her husband’s arm, helping him retain his balance as he stumbled down the stairs to the shore, trying to see out into the darkness, but the house lights behind them were too bright. They discerned only shadows, thrashing whales … and something else. Finally they activated the glowbeacon at the end of the dock, which sprayed illumination across the fjord.

Emmi let out a dismayed sound, like grief being swallowed whole. Behind them, servants clattered down the steep staircase, some carrying sticks or crude weapons, not knowing whether they might be called upon to defend the main lodge.

A powerboat approached across the waters, its engine humming as it dragged a heavy load toward the dock. When Emmi nudged him, Abulurd ventured out onto the boards to make out who might be at the helm of the vessel. He did not want to admit what in his heart he already knew.

The voice of Glossu Rabban called out, “Throw me that rope so I can tie up here.” Then he came into the light. Sweating from exertion even in the cold, he had taken off his jacket. Blood covered his arms, his chest, his face.

“I’ve hunted eight of them, I think. Got two of the smaller fur whales tied up here, but I’ll need help retrieving the other carcasses. Do you skin them right at the dock, or take them to some kind of facility?”

Abulurd could only stare in paralyzed shock. The rope fell like a strangled snake from his grasp. Leaning over the edge of the boat, Rabban grabbed the rope and looped it around a dock cleat himself,

“You … killed them!” Abulurd said. “You murdered them all.”

He looked down to see the floating corpses of two Bjondax calves, their fur matted and soaked with blood oozing from numerous stab wounds. Their pelts were torn. Their eyes stared sightlessly like plates from the water.

“Of course I killed them.” Rabban’s heavy brow furrowed. “That’s the idea when you go hunting.” He stepped from the swaying boat and stood on the dock as if he expected to be congratulated for what he had done.

Abulurd clenched and unclenched his fists as an unaccustomed sensation of outrage and disgust burned within him. All his life he had squelched it, but perhaps he did have the legendary Harkonnen temper.

From years of experience he knew that Bjondax whale trapping was a precise and delicate business. It needed to be done at certain times and locations, or else the great herds would shun a place. Rabban had never bothered to learn the basics of the whale-fur business, had practiced none of the techniques, barely knew how to command a boat.

“You’ve slaughtered them in their mating grounds, you idiot!” Abulurd cried, and a look of insulted shock splashed across Rabban’s face. His father had never spoken to him like this before.

“For generations they have been coming to Tula Fjord to raise their young and to mate before returning to the deep arctic seas. But they have a long memory, a generational memory. Once blood has tainted the water, they will avoid the place for as long as the memory lasts.”

Abulurd’s face turned blotchy with horror and frustration. His own son had effectively cursed these breeding grounds, spilling so much blood into the fjord that no Bjondax whale would return here for decades.

Rabban looked down at his prizes floating dead beside the boat, then scanned back across the fjord waters, ignoring what his father had just said. “Is anyone going to help me, or do I have to get the rest of them myself?”

Abulurd slapped him hard across the face—then stared in horror and disbelief at his hand, as if he couldn’t believe he had struck his son.

Rabban glowered at him. With the slightest provocation, he would have killed everyone who stood there.

His father continued in a forlorn voice. “The whales won’t come back here to spawn. Don’t you understand? All of these villages in the fjord, all of the people who live here, depend on the fur trade. Without the whales, these villages will die. All the buildings up and down the waterline will be abandoned. The villages will become ghost towns overnight. The whales won’t come back.”

Rabban just shook his head, unwilling to understand the severity of the situation. “Why do you care about these people so much?” He looked at the servants behind his parents, the men and women who’d been born on Lankiveil with no noble blood and no prospects: just villagers, just workers. “They’re nothing special. You rule them. If times are hard, they’ll put up with it. That’s the fact of their lives.”

Emmi glared at him, finally displaying the powerful emotions she kept inside herself. “How dare you speak like that? It’s been hard to forgive you for many things, Glossu—but this is the worst.”

Still, Rabban exhibited no shame. “How can you both be so blind and foolish? Don’t you have any conception of who you are? Of who I am? We are House Harkonnen!” he roared, then lowered his voice again. “I’m ashamed to be your son.”

He strode past them without another word and went to the main lodge, where he cleaned himself and packed his few things, then left. Another two days remained before he had permission from the Baron to leave this planet. He would spend the time out at the spaceport.

He couldn’t wait to be back at a place where life made sense to him again.

The End

DUNE: FREMEN JUSTICE

(also published as “Nighttime Shadows on Open Sand”)

“Nature commits no errors; right and wrong are human categories.”

—Pardot Kynes, Arrakis Lectures

Monotonous days. The three-man Harkonnen patrol cruised over the golden swells of dunes along a thousand-kilometer flight path. In the unrelenting desert landscape, even a puff of dust caused excitement.

The troopers flew their armored ornithopter in a long circle, skirting mountains, then curving south over great pans and flatlands. Glossu Rabban, the Baron’s nephew and temporary governor of Arrakis, had ordered them to fly regularly, to be seen—to show the squalid settlements that Harkonnens were watching. Always.

Kiel, the sidegunner, considered the assignment a license to hunt any Fremen found wandering near legitimate spice-harvesting operations. What made those dirty wanderers think they could trespass on Harkonnen lands without permission from the district office in Carthag? But few Fremen were ever caught abroad in daylight, and the task had grown dull.

Garan flew the ’thopter, rising up and dipping down to catch thermals, as if operating an amusement ride. He maintained a stoic expression, though occasionally a grin stole across his lips as the craft bucked and jostled in rough air. As they completed their fifth day on patrol, he continued to mark discrepancies on topographical maps, muttering in disgust each time he found another mistake. These were the worst charts he had ever used.

In the back passenger compartment sat Josten, recently transferred from Giedi Prime. Accustomed to industrial facilities, gray skies, and dirty buildings, Josten gazed out over the sandy wastelands, studying hypnotic dune patterns. He spotted the knot of dust off to the south, deep in the open Funeral Plain. “What’s that? Spice-harvesting operation?”

“Not a chance,” the sidegunner Kiel said. “Harvesters shoot a plume like a cone into the air, straight and thin.”

“Too low for a dust devil. Too small.” With a shrug, Garan jerked the ’thopter controls and soared toward the low, reddish-brown cloud. “Let’s take a look.” After so many tedious days, they would have gone out of their way to investigate a large rock sticking out of the sand.…

When they reached the site, they found no tracks, no machinery, no sign of human presence—and yet acres of desert looked devastated. A mottled rust color stained the sands a darker ochre, as if blood from a wound had dried in the hot sun.

“Looks like somebody dropped a bomb here,” Kiel said.

“Could be the aftermath of a spice blow,” Garan suggested. “I’ll set down for a closer look.”

As the ’thopter settled on the churned sands, Kiel popped open the hatch. The temperature-controlled atmosphere hissed out, replaced by a wave of heat. He coughed dust.

Garan leaned over from the cockpit and sniffed hard. “Smell it.” The odor of burnt cinnamon struck his nostrils. “Spice blow for sure.”

Josten squeezed past Kiel and dropped onto the soft ground. Amazed, he bent down, picked up a handful of ochre sand and touched it to his lips. “Can we scoop up some fresh spice and take it back? Must be worth a fortune.”

Kiel had been thinking the same thing, but now he turned to the newcomer with scorn. “We don’t have the processing equipment. You need to separate it from the sand, and you can’t do that with your fingers.”

Garan spoke in a quieter, but firmer voice. “If you went back to Carthag and tried to sell raw product to a street vendor you’d be hauled in front of Governor Rabban—or worse yet, have to explain to Count Fenring how some of the Emperor’s spice ended up in a patrolman’s pockets.”

As the troopers tromped out to the ragged pit at the center of the dissipating dust cloud, Josten glanced around. “Is it safe for us to be here? Don’t the big worms go to spice?”

“Afraid, kid?” Kiel asked.

“Let’s throw him to a worm if we see one,” Garan suggested. “It’ll give us time to get away.”

Kiel saw movement in the sandy excavation, shapes squirming, buried things that tunneled and burrowed, like maggots in rotten meat. Josten opened his mouth to say something, then clamped it shut again.

A whiplike creature emerged from the sand, two meters long with fleshy segmented skin. It was the size of a large snake, its mouth an open circle glittering with needle-sharp teeth that lined its throat.

“A sandworm!” Josten said.

“Only a runt,” Kiel scoffed.

“Newborn—do you think?” Garan asked.

The worm waved its eyeless head from side to side. Other slithering creatures, a nest of them, squirmed about as if they’d been spawned in the explosion.

“Where in the hells did they come from?” Kiel asked.

“Wasn’t in my briefing,” Garan said.

“Can we … catch one?” Josten asked.

Kiel stopped himself from making a rude rejoinder, realizing that the young recruit did have a good idea. “Come on!” He charged forward into the churned sand.

The worm sensed the movement and reared back, uncertain whether to attack or flee. Then it arced like a sea serpent and plunged into the sand, wriggling and burrowing.

Josten sprinted ahead and dove face-first to grasp the segmented body three-quarters of the way to its end. “It’s so strong!” Following him, the sidegunner jumped down and grabbed the thrashing tail.

The worm tried to tug away, but Garan reached the front, where he dug into the sand and grabbed behind its head with a strangle-hold. All three troopers wrestled and pulled. “Get it!” The small worm thrashed like an eel on an electric plate.

Other sandworms on the far side of the pit rose like a strange forest of periscopes sprouting from the sea of dunes, round mouths like black O’s turned toward the men. For an icy moment, Kiel feared they might attack like a swarm of marrow leeches, but the immature worms darted away and disappeared underground.

Garan and Kiel hauled their captive out of the sand and dragged it toward the ornithopter. As a Harkonnen patrol, they had all the equipment necessary to arrest criminals, including old-fashioned devices for trussing a captive like a herd animal. “Josten, go get the binding cords in our apprehension kit,” the pilot said.

The new recruit came running back with the cords, fashioning a loop which he slipped over the worm’s head and cinched tight. Garan released his hold on the rubbery skin and grabbed the rope, tugging while Josten slipped a second cord lower on the body.

“What are we going to do with it?” Josten asked.

Once, early in his assignment on Arrakis, Kiel had joined Rabban on an abortive worm hunt. They had taken a Fremen guide, well-armed troops, even a Planetologist. Using the Fremen guide as bait, they had lured one of the enormous sandworms and killed it with explosives. But before Rabban could take his trophy, the beast had dissolved, sloughing into amoeba-creatures that fell to the sand, leaving nothing but a cartilaginous skeleton and loose crystal teeth. Rabban had been furious.

Kiel’s stomach knotted. The Baron’s nephew might consider it an insult that three simple patrolmen could capture a worm, when he’d been unable to do so himself. “We’d better drown it.”

“Drown it?” Josten said. “What for? And why would I want to waste my water ration to do that?”

Garan stopped as if struck by a thunderbolt. “I’ve heard the Fremen do it. If you drown a baby worm, they say it spits out some kind of drug or poison. It’s very rare.”

Kiel nodded. “Oh, yeah. The desert people use it in their religious rituals. It makes everybody go crazy, wild orgies and everything.”

“But … we’ve only got two literjons of water in the compartment,” Josten said, still nervous.

“Then we only use one. I know where we can refill it, anyway.” The pilot and his sidegunner exchanged glances. They had patrolled together long enough that they’d both thought of the same thing.

As if understanding its fate, the worm bucked and thrashed even more, but it was already growing weaker.

“Once we get the drug,” Kiel said, “let’s have some fun.”

At night, with the patrol ’thopter running in stealth mode, they flew over the razor-edged mountains, approaching from behind a ridge and landing on a rough mesa above the squalid village of Bilar Camp. The villagers lived in hollowed-out caves and aboveground structures that extended out to the flats. Windmills generated power; supply bins glittered with tiny lights that attracted a few moths and the bats that fed on them.

Unlike the nomadic Fremen, these villagers were slightly more civilized but also more downtrodden: men who worked as desert guides and joined spice-harvesting crews. They had forgotten how to survive on their world without becoming parasites upon the planetary governors.

On an earlier patrol, Kiel and Garan had discovered a camouflaged cistern on the mesa, a treasure trove of water. Kiel didn’t know where the villagers had gotten so much moisture; most likely, they had committed fraud, inflating their census numbers so that Harkonnen generosity provided more than they deserved.

The people of Bilar Camp covered the cistern with rock so that it looked like a natural protrusion, but the villagers placed no guards around their illegal stockpile. For some reason desert culture forbade thievery even more than murder; they trusted the safety of their possessions from bandits or thieves of the night.

Of course, the Harkonnen troopers had no intention of stealing the water—that is, no more than enough to refill their own supply containers.

Dutifully, Josten trotted along with their sloshing container, which held the thick, noxious substance exuded by the drowned worm after it had stopped thrashing and bucking inside the container. Awed and nervous about what they’d done, they dumped the flaccid carcass near the perimeter of the spice blow and then taken off with the drug.

Garan operated the Bilar cistern’s cleverly concealed spigot and refilled one of their empty containers. No sense in letting all the water go to waste just for a practical joke on the villagers.

“Do you know what this drug will do to them?” Josten asked.

Garan shook his head. “I’ve heard plenty of crazy stories.”

“Maybe we should make the kid try it first,” the sidegunner said.

Josten backed away, raising his hands.

Kiel took the container of worm bile and upended it into the cistern. The villagers would certainly have a surprise next time they all drank from their illegal water hoard. “Serves them right.”

Garan looked at the contaminated cistern again. “I bet they tear off their clothes and dance naked in the streets, squawking like dinfowl.”

“Let’s stay here and watch the fun for ourselves,” Kiel said.

Garan frowned. “Do you want to be the one to explain to Rabban why we’re late returning from patrol?”

“Let’s go,” Kiel answered quickly.

As the worm-poison infused the cistern, the Harkonnen troopers hurried back to their ornithopter, reluctantly content to let the villagers discover the prank for themselves.

“It is said that the Fremen has no conscience, having lost it in a burning desire for revenge. This is foolish. Only the rawest primitive and the sociopath have no conscience. The Fremen possesses a highly evolved world-view centered on the welfare of his people. His sense of belonging to the community is almost stronger than his sense of self. It is only to outsiders that these desert-dwellers seem brutish … just as outsiders appear to them.”

—Pardot Kynes, The People of Arrakis

“Luxury is for the noble-born, Liet,” Pardot Kynes, Imperial Planetologist to Arrakis, said to his son as the groundcar trundled across the uneven ground. “On this planet you must instantly become aware of your own surroundings, and remain alert at all times. If you fail to learn this lesson, you won’t live long.”

As Kynes operated the simple controls, he gestured toward the buttery morning light that melted across the stark dunes. “There are rewards here, too.” Kynes exhaled a long breath between his hard chapped lips.

Young Liet stared out the scratched windowplaz. Unlike his father, who reeled off whatever random thoughts occurred to him, making pronouncements that the Fremen heeded as if they were weighty spiritual matters, Liet preferred silence. He narrowed his eyes to study the landscape, searching for any small thing out of its place. Always alert.

On such a harsh planet, one had to develop stored perceptions, each of them linked to every moment of survival. Though his father was much older, Liet wasn’t certain the Planetologist understood as much as he himself did. The mind of Pardot Kynes contained powerful concepts, but the older man experienced them only as esoteric data. He didn’t understand the desert in his heart or in his soul.…

For years, Kynes had lived among the Fremen. It was said that Emperor Shaddam IV had little interest in his activities, and since Kynes asked for no funding and few supplies, the Emperor and the Harkonnens left him alone. With each passing year he slipped farther from attention. Shaddam and his advisors had stopped expecting any grand revelations from the Planetologist’s periodic reports.

This suited Pardot Kynes, and his son as well.

In his wanderings, Kynes often made trips to outlying villages where the people of the pan and graben scratched out squalid lives. True Fremen rarely mixed with the towns people, and viewed them with veiled contempt for being too soft, too civilized. Liet would never have lived in those pathetic settlements for all the solaris in the Imperium. But still, Pardot visited them.

Eschewing roads and commonly traveled paths, they rode in the groundcar, checking meteorological stations and collecting data, though Pardot’s troops of devoted Fremen would gladly have done this menial work for their “Umma,” or prophet.

Liet-Kynes’s features echoed many of his father’s, though with a leaner face and the closely set eyes of his Fremen mother. He had pale hair, and his chin was still smooth, though later he would likely grow a beard similar to the great Planetologist’s. Liet’s eyes had the deep blue of spice addiction, since every meal and breath of air was laced with melange.

Liet heard a sharp intake of breath from his father as they passed the jagged elbow of a canyon where camouflaged catchtraps directed moisture to plantings of rabbitbush and poverty grasses. “See? It’s taking on a life of its own. We’ll ‘cycle’ the planet through prairie phase into forest over several generations. The sand has a high salt content, indicating old oceans, and the spice itself is alkaline.” He chuckled. “People in the Imperium would be horrified that we’d use spice byproducts for something as menial as fertilizer.” He smiled at his son. “But we know the value of such things, eh? If we break down the spice, we can set up protein digestion. Even now, if we flew high enough, we could spot patches of green where matted plant growth holds the dune faces in place.”

The young man sighed. His father was a great man with magnificent dreams for Dune—and yet Kynes was so focused on one thing that he failed to see the universe around him. Liet knew that if any Harkonnen patrols found the plantings, they would destroy them and punish the Fremen.

Though only twelve, Liet regularly went out on guerrilla raids with his Fremen brothers and had already killed Harkonnens. For more than a year, he and his friends—led by the brash Stilgar—had struck targets that others refused to consider. Only a week before, Liet’s companions had blown up a dozen patrol ’thopters at a supply post. Unfortunately, the stupid Harkonnen troops had taken their revenge against poor villagers, seeing no difference between settled folk and the will-o’-the-sand Fremen.

He hadn’t told his father about his guerrilla activities, since the elder Kynes wouldn’t understand the necessity. Premeditated violence, for whatever reason, was a foreign concept to the Planetologist. But Liet would do what needed to be done.

Now, the groundcar approached a village tucked into the rocky foothills; it was called Bilar Camp on their terrain maps. Pardot continued to talk about melange and its peculiar properties. “They found spice too soon on Arrakis. It deflected scientific inquiry. It was so useful right from the outset that no one bothered to probe its mysteries.”

Liet turned to look at him. “I thought that was why you were assigned here in the first place—to understand the spice.”

“Yes … but we have more important work to do. I still report back to the Imperium often enough to convince them I’m working at my job … though not very successfully.” Talking about the first time he’d been to this region, he drove toward a cluster of dirty buildings the color of sand and dust.

The groundcar jounced over a rough rock, but Liet ignored it and stared ahead at the village, squinting his eyes in the harsh light of the desert morning. The morning air held the fragility of fine crystal. “Something’s wrong,” he said, interrupting his father.

Kynes continued talking for a few seconds and then brought the vehicle to a stop. “What’s that?”

“Something is wrong.” Liet pointed ahead at the village.

Kynes shaded his eyes against the glare. “I don’t see anything.”

“Still … let us proceed with caution.”

In the center of the village, they encountered a festival of horrors.

The noise was appalling, as was the smell. Bodies lay sprawled on the ground like squashed insects, arms and legs stiffened at odd angles, while tortured survivors wandered about as if insane, shrieking and snarling like animals. They had ripped hair out of their heads in bloody clumps. Some used long fingernails to claw the eyes out of their faces, then held the scooped eyeballs in their palms; blind, they staggered against the tan walls of dwellings, leaving wet crimson smears.

Even the dead ones did not look at peace.

“By Shai-Hulud!” Liet whispered under his breath, while his father let out a louder curse in common Imperial Galach.

One man with torn eye sockets like bloody extra mouths above his cheekbones collided with a crawling woman; both victims flew into a rage and ripped at each other’s skin with bare hands, biting and spitting and screaming. There were muddy spots on the street, overturned containers of water.

Some buildings were locked and shuttered, barricaded against the crazed wretches outside who pounded on the walls, wailing wordlessly to get in. On an upper floor Liet saw a woman’s terrified face at the dust-streaked windowplaz. Others hid, somehow unaffected by the murderous insanity.

“We must help these people, Father.” Liet leaped out of the sealed groundcar before his father had brought it to a complete stop. “Bring your weapons. We may need to defend ourselves.”

They carried old maula pistols as well as knives. His father, though a scientist at heart, was also a good fighter—a skill he reserved for defending his vision for Arrakis. The legend was told of how he had slain several Harkonnen bravos who’d been attempting to kill three young Fremen. Those rescued Fremen were now his most loyal lieutenants, Stilgar, Turok, and Ommun. But Pardot Kynes had never fought against anything like this.…

The maddened villagers noticed them and moaned. They began to move forward.

“Don’t kill them unless you must,” Kynes said, amazed at how quickly his son had armed himself with a crysknife and maula pistol. “Watch yourself.”

Liet ventured into the street. What struck him first was the terrible stink, as if the foul breath of a dying leper had been captured in a bottle and slowly released.

Staring in disbelief, Pardot stepped farther from the groundcar. He saw no lasgun burn marks in the village, no chip scars from projectile weapons, nothing that would have indicated an overt Harkonnen attack. Was it a disease? If so, it might be contagious. If a plague or some kind of communicable insanity was at work here, he could not let the Fremen take these bodies for the deathstills.

Liet moved forward. “Fremen would attribute this to demons.”

Two of the bloody-faced victims let out demonic shrieks and rushed toward them, their fingers outstretched like eagle claws, their mouths open like bottomless pits. Liet pointed the maula pistol, closed his eyes to utter a quick prayer, then fired twice. The perfect shots hit each of the attackers in the chest, and they fell dead.

Liet bowed. “Forgive me, Shai-Hulud.”

Pardot watched him. I have tried to teach my son many things, but at least he has learned compassion. All other information can be learned from filmbooks … but not compassion. This was born into him.

The young man bent over the two bodies, studied them closely, pushing back his superstitious fear. “I do not think it’s a disease.” He looked back at Pardot. “I’ve assisted the healers, as you know, and …” His voice trailed off.

“What, then?”

“I believe they’ve been poisoned.”

One by one, the tortured villagers wandering the dusty streets fell onto their backs in screaming convulsions, until only three remained alive. Liet moved quickly with the crysknife and dispatched the last victims painlessly and efficiently. No tribe or village would ever accept them again, no matter how much they recovered, for fear that they had been corrupted by demons; even their water would be considered tainted.

Liet found it odd how easily he had taken command in front of his father. He gestured toward two of the sealed buildings. “Convince the people inside those barred dwellings that we mean them no harm. We must discover what happened here.” His voice became low and icy. “And we must learn who is to blame.”

Pardot Kynes moved to the dusty building. Fingernail scratches and bloody handprints marked the mud-brick walls and pitted metal doors where crazed victims had tried to pound their way in. He swallowed hard and prepared to make his case, to convince the terrified survivors that their ordeal was over. He turned back to his son. “Where will you be, Liet?”

The young man looked at an overturned water container. He knew of only one way the poison could affect so many people at once. “Checking the water supply.”

His face etched in concern, Pardot nodded.

Liet studied the terrain around the village, saw a faint trail leading up the side of the overhanging mesa. Yes, they had hidden a qanat there, their own emergency water supply.

Moving with the speed of a sun-warmed lizard, he scurried up the mountain path and reached the cistern. The evidence of its location had been cleverly disguised, though the villagers had made many errors. Even a clumsy Harkonnen patrol could have discovered the illegal reservoir. He studied the area quickly, noting patterns in the sand.

Smelling a harsh alkaloid bitterness near the upper opening of the cistern, he tried to place the odor. He’d experienced it rarely, and only during great celebrations in the sietch, the Fremen hidden communities. The Water of Life! The Fremen people consumed such a substance only after a Sayyadina had converted the exhalation of a drowned worm, using her own body chemistry as a catalyst to create a tolerable drug that sent the sietch community into an ecstatic frenzy. Unconverted, the substance was a ferocious toxin.

The villagers in Bilar Camp had drunk pure Water of Life, before it was transformed. Someone had done this intentionally … poisoning them.

Then he saw the marks of ornithopter pads in the soft soil atop the plateau. It had to be a Harkonnen ’thopter. One of the regular patrols … a practical joke?

Frowning grimly, Liet descended to the devastated village, where his father had succeeded in bringing out the survivors who had barricaded themselves within their dwellings. Through luck, these people had not drunk the poisoned water. Now they fell to their knees in the streets, surrounded by the awful carnage. Their keening cries of grief drifted like the thin wails of ghosts along a sheer cliffside.

Harkonnens did this.

Pardot Kynes moved about doing what he could to comfort them, but from the quizzical expressions on the villagers’ faces, Liet knew his father was probably saying the wrong things, expressing his sympathy in abstract concepts that they had no ability to understand.

Liet moved down the slope, and already plans were forming in his mind. As soon as they returned to the sietch, he would meet with Stilgar and his commando squad.

And they would plan their retaliation against the Harkonnens.…

“The desert is a surgeon cutting away the skin to expose what is underneath.”

—Fremen Saying

As the first moon rose copper-red over the desert horizon, Liet-Kynes and seven Fremen departed the rocks and made their way out to the soft curving dunes where they could be easily seen.

“Prepare yourselves,” Stilgar said, his narrow face like a desert hawk’s in the moonlight. His pupils had dilated, making his solid blue eyes look black. He wrapped his desert camouflage around him, as did the other, older guerrillas. “It is said that when one waits for vengeance, time passes slowly but sweetly.”

Liet-Kynes nodded. He was dressed to look like a weak, water-fat village boy, but his eyes were as hard as Velan steel. Beside him, his sietch-mate and blood-brother Warrick, a slightly taller lad, nodded as well. This night, the two would pretend to be helpless children caught out in the open … irresistible targets for the anticipated Harkonnen patrol.

“We do what must be done, Stil.” Liet clapped a hand on Warrick’s padded shoulder. These twelve-year-olds had already blooded more than a hundred Harkonnens apiece, and would have stopped keeping count, except for their friendly rivalry with each other. “I trust my brother with my life.”

Warrick covered Liet’s hand with his own. “Liet would be afraid to die without me at his side.”

“With or without you, Warrick, I don’t plan to die this night,” Liet said, which elicited a deep laugh from his companion. “I plan to exact revenge.”

After the orgy of poisoned death had fallen upon Bilar Camp, Fremen rage had spread from sietch to sietch like water soaking into sand. From the ’thopter markings found near the hidden cistern, they knew who was responsible. All Harkonnens must pay.

Around Carthag and Arsunt, word had been passed to timid-looking workers and dusty servants placed inside Harkonnen strongholds. Some of the infiltrators scrubbed the floors of troop barracks using dry rags and abrasives. Others posed as water sellers supplying the occupation force.

As the tale of the poisoned village passed from one Harkonnen soldier to another in progressively exaggerated anecdotes, the Fremen informants noted who derived the greatest pleasure from the news. They studied the crew assignments and route logs of Harkonnen patrols. Before long, they had learned exactly which Harkonnen troopers were responsible. And where they could be found.…

With a high-pitched squeak and a dancing blur of gossamer wings, a tiny distrans bat swooped from observation outcroppings in the mountains behind them. When Stilgar held up a hand, the bat landed on his forearm, primly folding its wings and waiting for a reward.

Stilgar drew a tiny drop of water from the sipping tube at his throat and let the moisture fall into the open mouth of the bat. Then he brought forth a thin cylinder and placed it to his ear, listening as the bat emitted complex, wavering squeaks. Stilgar tapped the bat on its head, then flung it into the night air again, like a falconer releasing his bird.

He turned back to his expectant troop, a predatory smile on his moonshadowed face. “Their ornithopter has been seen over the ridge. The Harkonnens fly a predictable path as they scan the desert. But they have been on patrol for so long, they are complacent. They do not see their own patterns.”

“Tonight, they fly into a web of death,” Warrick said from the dune top, lifting his fist into the air in a very un-boy like gesture.

The Fremen checked their weapons, loosed crysknives in sheaths at their sides, tested the strength of garroting cords, preparing. With swishing robes, they erased all marks of their passage. Leaving the two young men alone.

Stilgar looked up at the night sky, and a muscle on his jaw flickered. “This I learned from Umma Kynes. When we were cataloguing lichens, we saw a rock lizard that seemed to vanish before our eyes. Kynes said, ‘I give you the chameleon, whose ability to match itself with its background tells you all you need to know about the roots of ecology and the foundations of personal identity.’” Stilgar looked gravely at his men, and his expression faltered. “I don’t know exactly what he meant … but now we must all become chameleons of the desert.”

Wearing light-colored clothes, Liet stepped up the slipface of the dune, leaving deliberate, painfully apparent footprints. Warrick followed just as clumsily, while the other Fremen spread out on the flat sand. After pulling out breathing tubes and covering their faces with loose hoods, they flailed their arms in a blur of motion. Powdery sand engulfed them, and then they lay still.

Liet and Warrick ran about, smoothing wrinkles on the surface and leaving nothing but their own footprints. They finished just as the patrol ’thopter whirred over the line of rocks, flashing red lights.

The two white-clad Fremen froze out in the open, their bright clothes unmistakable against the pale, moonlit sand. No true Fremen would ever be caught in such a show of clumsiness … but the Harkonnens didn’t know that. They would not suspect.

As soon as the ’thopter came into view, Liet made an exaggerated gesture of alarm. “Come on, Warrick. Let’s make a good show of it.” The two ran away pell-mell, as if in a panic.

Predictably, the ’thopter circled to intercept them. A powerful spotlight flooded down, then a laughing sidegunner leaned out of the ’thopter. He fired his lasgun twice, sketching a line of melted glass upon the sand surface.

Liet and Warrick tumbled down the steep side of a dune. The gunner fired three more blasts, missing them each time.

The ’thopter landed on the broad surface of a nearby dune … close to where Stilgar and his men had buried themselves. Liet and Warrick flashed each other a smile, and prepared for the second part of the game.

Sidegunner Kiel shouldered his still-hot lasgun rifle and popped open the door. “Let’s go hunt some Fremen.” He jumped onto the sand as soon as Garan had landed the patrol craft.

Behind them, the fresh-faced recruit Josten fumbled for his own weapon. “It would be easier just to shoot them from above.”

“What kind of sport would that be?” Garan asked in his gruff voice.

“Or is it just that you don’t want blood on your new uniform, kid?” Kiel called over his shoulder. They stood beside the armored craft looking across the moonlit dunes, where the two scrawny nomads stumbled away (as if they had any hope of escape once a Harkonnen trooper decided to target them).

Garan grabbed his weapon, and the three of them strode across the sands. The two Fremen youths scuttled like beetles, but the threat of the troops might cause them to turn around and surrender … or better yet, fight like cornered rats.

“I’ve heard stories about these Fremen.” Josten panted as he kept up with the two older men. “Their children are said to be killers, and their women will torture you in ways that even Piter de Vries couldn’t imagine.”

Kiel gave a rude snort of laughter. “We’ve got lasguns, Josten. What are they going to do—throw rocks at us?”

“Some of them carry maula pistols.”

Garan looked back at the young recruit, then gave a shrug. “Why don’t you go back to the ’thopter and get our stunner, then? We can use a wide field if things get bad.”

“Yeah,” Kiel said, “that way we can make this last longer.” The two white-clad Fremen continued to flounder across the sand, and the Harkonnen troopers closed the distance with purposeful strides.

Glad for the opportunity to be away from the fight, Josten sprinted over the dune toward the waiting ’thopter. From the dune top, he looked back at his companions, then rushed to the darkened craft. As he ducked inside, he encountered a man clad in desert tans, hands flicking across the controls with the speed of a snake on a hot plate.

“Hey, what are you—” Josten cried.

In the cabin light he saw that the figure had a narrow leathery face. The eyes captivated him, blue-within-blue with the sharp intensity of a man accustomed to killing. Before Josten could react, his arm was grabbed with a grip as strong as an eagle’s talon, and he was dragged deeper into the cockpit. The Fremen’s other hand flashed, and he saw a curved, milky-blue knife strike up. A bright icicle of pain slashed into his throat, all the way back to his spine—then the knife was gone before even a droplet of blood could cling to its surface.

Like a scorpion that had just unleashed its sting, the Fremen backed up. Josten fell forward, already feeling red death spreading from his throat. He tried to say something, to ask a question that seemed all-important to him, but his words only came out as a gurgle. The Fremen snatched something from his stillsuit and pressed it against the young man’s throat, an absorbent cloth that drank his blood as it spilled.

Was the desert man saving him? A bandage? A flash of hope rose in Josten’s mind. Had it all been a mistake? Was this gaunt native trying to make amends?

But Josten’s blood pumped out too quickly and forcefully for any medical help. As his life faded, he realized that the absorbent pack had never been meant as a wound dressing, but simply to capture every droplet of blood for its moisture.…

When Kiel came to within firing distance of the two Fremen youths, Garan looked back into the moonlight. “I thought I heard something from the ’thopter.”

“Probably Josten tripping on his own feet,” the sidegunner said, not lowering his weapon.

The trapped Fremen staggered to a halt across a shallow pan of soft sand. They crouched and pulled out small, clumsy-looking knives.

Kiel laughed out loud. “What do you mean to do with those? Pick your teeth?”

“I’ll pick the teeth from your dead body,” one of the boys shouted. “Got any old-fashioned gold molars we can sell in Arrakeen?”

Garan chortled and looked at his companion. “This is going to be fun.” Moving in lockstep, the troopers marched into the flat sandy area.

As they closed to within five meters, the sand around them erupted. Human forms popped out of the dust, covered with grit—tan human silhouettes, like animated corpses boiling up from a graveyard.

Garan let out a useless warning cry, and Kiel fired once with his lasgun, burning down one of the men. Then the dusty forms surged forward. Clustering around the pilot, they pressed in so close that he couldn’t bring his lasgun to bear. They attacked him like blood-lice on an open wound.

As they drove Garan to his knees, he cried out in the manner of an old woman. The Fremen restrained him so that he could do little more than breathe and blink his eyes. And scream.

One of the white-clad “victims” hurried forward. The young man held out the small knife that Garan and Kiel had snickered at just moments ago. The youth darted downward, jabbing with the tip of the blade—but with precise control, as gentle as a kiss—to gouge out both of Garan’s eyes, transforming his sockets into red Oedipal stains.

Stilgar barked out a command, “Bind him and keep him. We shall bring this one back to our sietch alive, and let the women take care of him in their own way.”

Garan screamed again.…

When the Fremen rushed forward to attack Kiel, the sidegunner responded by swinging his weapon like a club. As clawing hands grabbed for it, he surprised them by releasing the lasrifle. The Fremen who clutched the gun fell backward, caught off balance by the unexpected action.

Then Kiel began to run. Fighting would do him no good here. They had already taken Garan, and he assumed Josten was dead back at the ’thopter. So he left the Fremen, running as he had never run before. He sprinted across the night sands away from the rocks, away from the ’thopter … and out into the open desert. The Fremen might be able to catch him, but he would give them a run for it.

Panting, leaving his companions behind, Kiel raced across the dunes with no plan and no thought other than to flee farther and farther away.…

“We’ve captured the ’thopter intact, Stil,” Warrick said, flushed with adrenaline and quite proud of himself. The commando leader nodded grimly. Umma Kynes would be exceedingly pleased at the news. He could always use a ’thopter for his agricultural inspections, and he didn’t need to know where it came from.

Liet looked down at the blinded captive, whose gouged eye sockets had been covered by a cloth. “I saw what the Harkonnens did to Bilar Camp with my own eyes … the poisoned cistern, the tainted water.” The other body had already been packed in the rear of the patrol ’thopter to be taken to the deathstills. “This doesn’t pay back a tenth part of the suffering.”

Going to his blood-brother’s side, Warrick made a face of disgust. “Such is my scorn that I don’t even want to take their water for our tribe.”

Stilgar glowered at him as if he had spoken sacrilege. “You would prefer to let them mummify in the sands, to let their water go wasted into the air? It would be an insult to Shai-Hulud.”

Warrick bowed his head. “It was only my anger speaking, Stil. I did not mean it.”

Stilgar looked up at the ruddy rising moon. The entire ambush had lasted less than an hour. “We shall perform the ritual of tal hai so that their souls will never rest. They will be damned to walk the desert for all eternity.” Then his voice became harsh and fearful. “But we must take extra care to cover our tracks, so that we do not lead their ghosts back to our sietch.”

The Fremen muttered as superstitious fear dampened their vengeful pleasure. Stilgar intoned the ancient chant, while others drew designs in the sand, labyrinthine power-shapes that would bind the spirits of the cursed men to the dunes forever.

Out across the moonlit sands they could still see the clumsily running figure of the remaining trooper. “That one is our offering to Shai-Hulud,” Stilgar said, finishing his chant. The tal hai curse was complete. “The world will be at balance, and the desert will be pleased.”

“He’s chugging like a broken crawler.” Liet stood next to Stilgar, drawing himself up, though he was still small compared to the commando leader. “It won’t be long now.”

They gathered their supplies. As many as possible piled into the patrol ’thopter, while the remaining Fremen slipped back across the sands. They used a well-practiced random gait so that their footsteps made no sound that was not natural to the desert.

The Harkonnen sidegunner continued to flee in a blind panic. By now, he might be entertaining a hope of escape, though the direction of his flight across the ocean of dunes would take him nowhere.

Within minutes, a worm came for him.

The End

Look for These & Other Digital Works from WordFire Press
by Kevin J. Anderson

Alternitech

“Alternitech” sends prospectors into alternate but similar timelines where tiny differences yield significant changes: a world where the Beatles never broke up, or where Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t gunned down after the Kennedy assassination, where an accidental medical breakthrough offers the cure to a certain disease, where a struggling author really did write the great American novel, or where a freak accident reveals the existence of a serial killer. Alternitech finds those differences—and profits from them.

Alien Landscapes 1

Collection of four science fiction tales from the mind of Kevin J. Anderson, each with a short introduction by the author. Includes: “Landscapes,” “Fondest of Memories,” “Controlled Experiments,” and “Human, Martian—One, Two, Three.”

Alien Landscapes 2

Four science fiction tales from the mind of Kevin J. Anderson, each with a short introduction by the author. Includes: “Collaborators” (written with Rebecca Moesta), “Good Old Days,” “Job Qualifications,” and “Prisoner of War.”

Assemblers of Infinity (Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Beason)

Nebula Award Nominee. The crew of Moonbase Columbus make an amazing discovery on the far side of the Moon—a massive alien structure is erecting itself, built up atom by atom by living machines, microscopically small, intelligent, and unstoppable, consuming everything they touch. The mysterious structure begins to expand and take shape, and its creators begin to multiply.

Is this the first strike in an alien invasion from the stars? Or has human nanotechnology experimentation gone awry, triggering an unexpected infestation? As riots rage across a panicked Earth, scientists scramble to learn the truth before humanity’s home is engulfed by the voracious machines.

Blindfold

Atlas is a struggling colony on an untamable world, a fragile society held together by the Truthsayers. Parentless, trained from birth as the sole users of Veritas, a telepathy virus that lets them read the souls of the guilty. Truthsayers are Justice—infallible, beyond appeal.

But sometimes they are wrong.

Falsely accused of murder, Troy Boren trusts the young Truthsayer Kalliana … until, impossibly, she convicts him. Still shaken from a previous reading, Kalliana doesn’t realize her power is fading. But soon the evidence becomes impossible to ignore. The Truthsayers’ Veritas has been diluted and someone in the colony is selling smuggled telepathy. Justice isn’t blind—it’s been blinded.

From an immortal’s orbital prison to the buried secrets of a regal fortress, Kalliana and Troy seek the conspiracy that threatens to destroy their world from within. For without truth and justice, Atlas will certainly fall.…

Climbing Olympus

They were prisoners, exiles, pawns of a corrupt government. Now they are Dr. Rachel Dycek’s adin, surgically transformed beings who can survive new lives on the surface of Mars. But they are still exiles, unable ever again to breathe Earth’s air. And they are still pawns.

For the adin exist to terraform Mars for human colonists, not for themselves. Creating a new Earth, they will destroy their world, killed by their own success. Desperate, adin leader Boris Tiban launches a suicide campaign to sabotage the Mars Project, knowing his people will perish in a glorious, doomed campaign of mayhem—unless embattled, bitter Rachel Dycek can find a miracle to save both the Mars Project and the race she created.

Craig Kreident 1: Virtual Destruction (Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Beason)

At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California—one of the nation’s premier nuclear-weapons design facilities—high-level physicists operate within heavy security to model and test new warhead designs. But politics can be just as dangerous as the weapons they design, and with gigantic budgets on the line, scientific egos, and personality clashes, research can turn deadly.

When a prominent and abrasive nuclear-weapons researcher is murdered inside a Top Security zone, FBI investigator Craig Kreident is brought in on the case—but his FBI security clearance isn’t the same as a Department of Energy or Department of Defense clearance, and many of the clues are “sanitized” before he arrives. Kreident finds that dealing with red tape and political in-fighting might be more difficult than solving a murder.

Written by two insiders who have worked at Lawrence Livermore, Virtual Destruction is not only a gripping thriller and complex mystery, but a vivid portrayal of an actual US nuclear-design facility.

Craig Kreident 2: Fallout (Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Beason)

They call themselves Eagle’s Claw, one of the most extreme militia groups in the United States. They have infiltrated the Device Assembly Facility at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, and the most frightening display of nuclear terrorism is about to unfold.

Only the Nebula-nominated collaboration of Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason could masterfully blend hard-as-nails high-technology with hard-driving intrigue to deliver such an explosive thriller. FBI Special Agent Craig Kreident—the unforgettable hero from Virtual Destruction—returns in this breathtaking tour de force of terrorism, cutting-edge technology, and raw emotional power.

Written by two insiders who have worked at the nation’s nuclear design laboratories and high-security research facilities, including the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, Fallout is a pulse-pounding thriller of an extremist group and stolen nuclear weapons, as well as a detailed portrait of what happens behind the fences of government facilities.

Craig Kreident 3: Lethal Exposure (Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Beason)

At Fermilab near Chicago, researchers use the world’s largest particle accelerator to unlock the secrets of the subatomic universe. While working late one night, Dr. Georg Dumenico—candidate for the Nobel Prize in physics—is bombarded with a lethal exposure of radiation. He will die horribly within days.

FBI Special Agent Craig Kreident knows it was no accident—but he has to prove it, and the clock is ticking. The nation’s most valued research is at stake, and only Dumenico himself knows enough to track down his own murderer … if he survives long enough to do it.

Dark Labyrinth 1

Four dark fantasy tales from the mind of Kevin J. Anderson, each with a short introduction by the author. Includes: “Final Performance,” “Special Makeup,” “Much at Stake,” and “The Sum of His Parts.”

Dark Labyrinth 2

Four dark fantasy tales from the mind of Kevin J. Anderson, each with a short introduction by the author. Includes: “New Recruits,” “Santa Claus is Coming to Get You,” “Splinter” (written with Rebecca Moesta), and “Redmond’s Private Screening.”

“Drumbeats” (Kevin J. Anderson & Neil Peart)

A chilling story cowritten with Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart. A rock drummer bicycling through the African wilderness encounters a village that makes very special drums. This one will make your heart skip a beat. Includes essays by Neil Peart and by Kevin J. Anderson.

Fantastic Realms 1

Four fantasy tales from the mind of Kevin J. Anderson, each with a short introduction by the author. Includes: “Loincloth” (written with Rebecca Moesta), “Frog Kiss,” “Short Straws,” and “Technomagic.”

Fantastic Realms 2

Four fantasy tales from the mind of Kevin J. Anderson, each with a short introduction by the author. Includes: “The Old Man & the Cherry Tree,” “The Ghost of Christmas Always,” “Sea Wind,” and “Sea Dreams” (written with Rebecca Moesta).

Five by Five (Kevin J. Anderson, Aaron Allston, Loren L. Coleman, B.V. Larson, Mike Stackpole) [also in trade paperback]

Five short novels by five masters of military science fiction. Edited by Kevin J. Anderson. Based on a concept by Loren L. Coleman.

It’s a war out there.

In these pulse-pounding tales, the best (or worst) soldiers in the galaxy are pitted against powerful aliens on distant battlefields. Never before published stories about monsters, deadly combat tech, treachery, and honor:

Big Plush by Aaron Allston (a novella from the Action Figures series)—The Dollgangers, artificial people made in mankind's image, take up arms in a desperate bid to win their freedom.

Comrades in Arms by Kevin J. Anderson—A damaged cyborg soldier and an enemy alien fighter turn their backs on the war and try to escape. But the human and alien governments can't tolerate the two deserters working together, so they join forces to hunt them down.

Shores of the Infinite by Loren L. Coleman (a novella from the ICAS File series)—Separated from command & control, Combat Assault Suit troopers force a beachhead to liberate a new planet from the cyborg threat.

The Black Ship by B.V. Larson (a mech novella from the Imperium Series)—A human settlement on the deadliest planet ever colonized clings to life … but today new invaders are coming down from the stars.

Out There by Michael A. Stackpole—The Qian have discovered humanity and welcomed them into their star-spanning empire. The benefits they offer humanity are many, and they don't want much in return: just the best human pilots available to take apart a most diabolical enemy.

Gamearth Trilogy Omnibus

Gamearth—It was supposed to be just another Sunday night fantasy role-playing game for David, Tyrone, Scott, and Melanie. But after years of playing, the game had become so real that all their creations—humans, sorcerers, dragons, ogres, panther-folk, cyclops—now had existences of their own. And when the four outside players decide to end their game, the characters inside the world of Gamearth—warriors, scholars, and the few remaining wielders of magic—band together to keep their land from vanishing. Now they must embark on a desperate quest for their own magic—magic that can twist the Rules enough to save them all from the evil that the players created to destroy their entire world.

Gameplay—It was written in the Rules: Save the World! Over the past two years, a group of four players had given so much to their role-playing world that it had developed a magic of its own. The creatures, warriors, sorcerers, thieves—all had come alive. And now there is an odd connection between the gamers and their characters, splitting into factions to determine the fate of the Game itself and both the inside and the outside worlds.

Game’s End—It’s all-out war between the players and characters in a role-playing game that has taken on a life of its own. The fighter Delrael, the sorcerer Bryl, and famed scientists Verne and Frankenstein, use every trick in the Book of Rules to keep the world of Gamearth intact while the outside group of players does everything possible to destroy it.

Gamearth Trilogy 1: Gamearth

It was supposed to be just another Sunday night fantasy role-playing game for David, Tyrone, Scott, and Melanie. But after years of playing, the game had become so real that all their creations—humans, sorcerers, dragons, ogres, panther-folk, cyclops—now had existences of their own. And when the four outside players decide to end their game, the characters inside the world of Gamearth—warriors, scholars, and the few remaining wielders of magic—band together to keep their land from vanishing. Now they must embark on a desperate quest for their own magic—magic that can twist the Rules enough to save them all from the evil that the players created to destroy their entire world.

Gamearth Trilogy 2: Gameplay

The Gamearth Trilogy continues. It was written in the Rules—Save the World! Over the past two years, a group of four players had given so much to their role-playing world that it had developed a magic of its own. The creatures, warriors, sorcerers, thieves—all had come alive. And now there is an odd connection between the gamers and their characters, splitting into factions to determine the fate of the Game itself and both the inside and the outside worlds.

Gamearth Trilogy 3: Game’s End

The finale to the Gamearth Trilogy. It’s all-out war between the players and characters in a role-playing game that has taken on a life of its own. The fighter Delrael, the sorcerer Bryl, as well as famed scientists Verne and Frankenstein, use every trick in the Book of Rules to keep the world of Gamearth intact while the outside group of players does everything possible to destroy it.

Ill Wind (Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Beason)

A supertanker crashes into the Golden Gate Bridge, spilling oil. Desperate to avert environmental & PR disaster, the oil company uses an oil-eating microbe to break up the spill. But the microbe, becomes airborne … and mutates to consume petrocarbons: oil, gas, synthetic fabrics, plastics. When all plastic begins to dissolve, it’s too late.…

Ignition (Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Beason)

NASA—you have a problem. In this high-tech action adventure from Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason, terrorists seize control of the Kennedy Space Center and hold the shuttle Atlantis and its crew hostage on the launchpad. But astronaut “Iceberg” Friese, grounded from the mission because of a broken foot, is determined to slip through the swamps and rocket facilities around Cape Canaveral and pull the plug on the terrorists. With their years of experience in the field, Anderson and Beason have packed Ignition with insider information to create an extremely plausible, action-packed thriller.

Magnetic Reflections (Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Beason)

Three collected tales from Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason: “Reflections in a Magnetic Mirror”—Gripping science fiction story set at a Magnetic Mirror Fusion Facility. “Rescue at L-5”—The short story that became the basis for their novel Lifeline. “Prisons”—On a harsh prison planet, the warden and the staff are as much prisoners as the convicts, but a risky prison break might free them all. Bonus material includes deleted chapters from their eco-thriller novel Ill Wind.

Mythical Creatures

An original, standalone story in the TERRA INCOGNITA universe: A prester in search of penance accepts an assignment to the rugged Soeland Islands, but he must confront his faith after he is cast overboard and then rescued by a mythical creature that the Scriptures tell him cannot exist. BONUS: Also contains the complete story and lyrics (written by Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta) for the two TERRA INCOGNITA crossover rock CDs performed by Roswell Six.

Resurrection, Inc. (2012 edition, Author’s Preferred Text) [also in trade paperback]

In the future, the dead walk the streets—Resurrection, Inc. found a profitable way to do it. A microprocessor brain, synthetic heart, artificial blood, and a fresh corpse can return as a Servant for anyone with the price. Trained to obey any command, Servants have no minds of their own, no memories of their past lives.

Supposedly.

Then came Danal. He was murdered, a sacrifice from the ever-growing cult of neo-Satanists who sought heaven in the depths of hell. But as a Servant, Danal began to remember. He learned who had killed him, who he was, and what Resurrection, Inc. had in mind for the human race.

Saga of Seven Suns: Veiled Alliances [also in trade paperback]

This prequel novella to Kevin J. Anderson’s international bestselling space opera Saga of Seven Suns, is based on his 2004 graphic novel Veiled Alliances from Wildstorm/DC Comics.

The novella offers glimpses into the origin of the green priests on Theroc, the first Roamer skymining operations on a gas-giant planet, the discovery of the Klikiss robots entombed in an abandoned alien city, the initial Ildiran expedition to Earth, the rescue of the generation ship Burton and the tragedy that leads to sinister breeding experiments. Veiled Alliances is an excellent starting point for readers new to the Saga, as well as an unforgettable adventure for fans of the series.

The Trinity Paradox (Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Beason)

Activist Elizabeth Devane wished for an end to nuclear weapons. Surely, she thought, if they’d known what they were unleashing, the scientists of the Manhattan Project would never have created such a terrible instrument of destruction. But during a protest action, the unthinkable happened: a flash of light, a silent confusion, and Elizabeth awakes to find herself alone in a desolate desert arroyo … and almost fifty years in the past. June 1944. Los Alamos, New Mexico. While the Allies battle in the Pacific and begin the Normandy invasion in Europe, Nazi Germany deviates from the timeline Elizabeth knows and uses its newfound nuclear arsenal against America. Somehow, someway, Elizabeth has been given the chance to put the genie back in the bottle … yet could she—should she—attempt the greatest sabotage in history?

by Brian Herbert

The Garbage Chronicles

In the super-consumer society of the future, recycling is illegal, and Earth’s garbage is catapulted into deep space. But as humankind reluctantly learns, what goes up must come down….

In this rollicking, thought-provoking, highly imaginative exploration, Brian Herbert shares the environmental concerns of his father, Frank Herbert, the world-famous author of Dune.

House Atreides (Prelude to Dune 1) (Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson)

Frank Herbert’s Dune chronicles became an enduring classic and the most popular science fiction series of all time. Working from recently discovered files left by his father, Brian Herbert and best-selling novelist Kevin J. Anderson bring us Dune: House Atreides, the prequel, which captures all the complexity and grand themes of the original work while weaving a new tapestry of great passion and momentous destiny into a saga that expands the tale written by Frank Herbert more than thirty years ago.

Complex, brilliant, and prophetic, Frank Herbert’s award-winning Dune chronicles captured the imaginations of millions of readers worldwide—and transformed their perception of what the future could be. By his death in 1986, Frank Herbert had completed six novels in the Dune series. But much of his vision—vast, sprawling, and multilayered—remained unwritten. Now, working from recently discovered files left by his father, Brian Herbert and bestselling novelist Kevin J. Anderson collaborate on a new novel, the first volume in the prequel to Dune—where we step onto planet Arrakis.

House Harkonnen (Prelude to Dune 2) (Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson)

Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson return to the vivid universe of Frank Herbert’s Dune, bringing a vast array of rich and complex characters into conflict to shape the destiny of worlds.…

As Shaddam sits at last on the Golden Lion Throne, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen plots against the new Emperor and House Atreides—and against the mysterious Sisterhood of the Bene Gesserit. For Leto Atreides, grown complacent and comfortable as ruler of his House, it is a time of momentous choice: between friendship and duty, safety and destiny. But for the survival of House Atreides, there is just one choice—strive for greatness or be crushed.

House Corrino (Prelude to Dune 3) (Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson)

In Dune: House Corrino Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson bring us the magnificent final chapter in the unforgettable saga begun in Dune: House Atreides and continued in Dune: House Harkonnen.

Here nobles and commoners, soldiers and slaves, wives and courtesans shape the amazing destiny of a tumultuous universe. An epic saga of love and war, crime and politics, religion and revolution, this magnificent novel is a fitting conclusion to a great science fiction trilogy … and an invaluable addition to the thrilling world of Frank Herbert’s immortal Dune.

Dune: House Corrino—Fearful of losing his precarious hold on the Golden Lion Throne, Shaddam IV, Emperor of a Million Worlds, has devised a radical scheme to develop an alternative to melange, the addictive spice that binds the Imperium together and that can be found only on the desert world of Dune.

In subterranean labs on the machine planet Ix, cruel Tleilaxu overlords use slaves and prisoners as part of a horrific plan to manufacture a synthetic form of melange known as amal. If amal can supplant the spice from Dune, it will give Shaddam what he seeks: absolute power.

The Lost Apostles [also in trade paperback]

Long ago, the ancient gospels of Jesus’s female apostles were stolen by powerful churchmen and relegated to the rubbish heaps of history. But those apostles have been reborn as female children, and are dictating new gospels that will be incorporated into a radical new religious text, the Holy Women’s Bible.

At a hidden women’s fortress in Greece, the teenager Lori Vale develops a paranormal relationship with one of the reincarnated children, and soon begins to suspect that she may have been connected to the female apostles of Jesus in ancient times, when the Son of God walked the earth and preached to the people of the Holy Land.

While information about Lori’s past is unfolding, she finds herself caught in a violent religious conflict that has immense historical repercussions. Powerful, brutal men want to suppress the emerging gospels of the she-apostles, men who are hell-bent on destroying the radical women and their heretical texts. The women race to get their material completed and published before they are annihilated, but they have another big problem: the twelfth she-apostle—Martha of Galilee—has not been found yet, and the other female apostles say she holds a dark secret that could do enormous damage to the cause of women, and to the entire planet….

Memorymakers (with Marie Landis)

Memorymakers tells the story of an ancient race of beings called the Ch’Var, who live among humans. They look like humans, act like humans, talk like humans. Their appetites, though, are anything but human.

First of two collaborations between Brian Herbert and his cousin Marie Landis.

The Race for God

God, it turns out, lives on the planet Tananius-Ofo in the distant galaxy 722C12009. And now, after countless millennia, He’s invited us to come visit Him.

Not everybody, mind you. Just an odd assortment of heathens, heretics, pantheists, perverts, and true believers of every sect and creed—all crammed into a single white spaceship piloted by a slightly crazed biocomputer. Each pilgrim is determined to be the first to reach God and learn His secrets …

If they don’t all kill each other on the way there.

Sidney’s Comet

Bestselling author Brian Herbert’s hilarious first novel. For centuries the slops that inhabit the Earth have been rocketing their refuse into the Galaxy, carelessly littering the cosmos with wrappers and peelings and bottles and cans. But now the universe is about to get even. An immense comet of garbage has been sighted on a collision course for Earth! Only one man can stop it: a human discard, a lowly government worker who dreams of becoming a Space Patrol Captain but could never pass the physical—the unheroic, the imperfect, the one-and-only Sidney Malloy!

The Stolen Gospels [also in trade paperback]

Lori Vale, a rebellious teenager, is thrust into the middle of a violent religious conflict when her mother is murdered, and the girl is taken to a heavily guarded fortress in an ancient Greek monastery. There, a group of radical women is creating an earthshaking religious text, the Holy Women’s Bible. The new sacred book will include the Old Testament and the New Testament, edited to alter gospels that are detrimental to the interests of women, such as passages asserting that they should obey their husbands, remain silent in churches, and suffer the burden of Eve’s sins.

A third section of the Holy Women’s Bible is the biggest bombshell, the Testament of the She-Apostles. It asserts that Jesus Christ had 24 apostles, not 12, and half were women called “she-apostles.” Eleven she-apostles have been reincarnated in modern times as female children, and are revealing new female-oriented gospels about the life of Jesus, stories they say were omitted from the Bible by male church authorities who decided what to include in the Bible and what to leave out of it, in order to assert the power and dominance of men over women.

The radical women have dangerous enemies, and Lori’s life is in grave peril, along with the lives of the remarkable female apostles of Jesus….

Stormworld (Brian Herbert & Bruce Taylor) [also in trade paperback]

Novella. After the Greenland ice cap suffers an abrupt and catastrophic collapse, Earth’s climate suddenly changes, turning the planet into a horrendous stormworld. Against this backdrop, men and women in the Cascade Seed Repository valiantly struggle to protect the food supply of civilization…..

Sudanna, Sudanna

On the peanut-shaped planetoid of Ut, a 150-million-year-old computer named Mamacita rules with dictatorial control. Her every whim is a steadfast rule, and no command is stronger than the ban of Sudanna, the wind that sweeps across Ut spreading the liberating sounds of music.

Hiley OIV is one of Ut’s most conscientious inhabitants, a man so afraid of losing his head (Utpeople have very precarious necks) that a Bad Thought almost never enters his mind. But now his teenage daughter has fallen in love with Prussirian BBD—Ut’s most notorious outlaw—a man who has broken Mamacita’s cardinal rule: he makes music.

Tales of Dune (Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson)

Three previously uncollected stories set in the Dune universe by Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson, includes the all-new tale “Wedding Silk,” a story of young Paul Atreides, as well as “Sea Child” and “Treasure in the Sand.” Bonus material includes “Dune: Blood and Water” and “Dune: Fremen Justice.”

Timeweb Chronicles Omnibus

Timeweb—Brian Herbert creates a universe of wondrous possibilities that is populated by sentient spaceships, shapwshifters, intriguing robots, and miniature aliens with mysterious powers. Humanity has become a mercantile society that has spread throughout the galaxy, ruled by wealthy merchant princes who live in decadent splendor—entirely unaware of another realm just beneath the fabric of the universe.

When galactic ecologist Noah Watanabe discovers the cause of a strange, cosmic disintegration, he embarks on an epic journey to restore the ancient balance to the crumbling galaxy. Noah must work with warring, alien races to unlock the secrets to a vast celestial puzzle.

The Web and the Stars—The web is unraveling, threatening to plunge the universe into oblivion.

Galactic ecologist Noah Watanabe is struggling to hold the cosmic filigree together, while the evil shapeshifter race of Mutatis threatens to use a doomsday weapon against humanity. Noah has his own paranormal ability to journey into the depths of the universe, but he has made enemies of his own, including a third powerful force determined to destroy humans and Mutatis alike.

Webdancers—The conclusion to Brian Herbert’s epic Timeweb trilogy. As the human race and the sinister shape-shifting Mutatis continue their epic war, the connecting filigree of Timeweb strands that hold the universe together, begins to unravel. Sentient podships travel the strands of the web, but the cosmos itself is disintegrating.

Galactic ecologist Noah Watanabe, possessed of special powers, is the one person who has a chance of saving all races. He is immortal, and faced with the crisis to the universe, he is also evolving, changing both mentally and physically … but into what? Noah is swept on a tidal wave of destiny and knows there is no turning back.

The Timeweb Chronicles 1: Timeweb

Brian Herbert creates a universe of wondrous possibilities that is populated by sentient spaceships, shapeshifters, intriguing robots, and miniature aliens with mysterious powers. Humanity has become a mercantile society that has spread throughout the galaxy, ruled by wealthy merchant princes who live in decadent splendor—entirely unaware of another realm just beneath the fabric of the universe.

When galactic ecologist Noah Watanabe discovers the cause of a strange, cosmic disintegration, he embarks on an epic journey to restore the ancient balance to the crumbling galaxy. Noah must work with warring, alien races to unlock the secrets to a vast celestial puzzle.

The Timeweb Chronicles 2: The Web and the Stars

In Timeweb, Brian Herbert introduced readers to the fantastically beautiful galactic web of space and time that interconnects the cosmos, which can be used as a transportation infrastructure for sentient starships. But the web is unraveling, threatening to plunge the universe into oblivion.

Galactic ecologist Noah Watanabe is struggling to hold the cosmic filigree together, while the evil shapeshifter race of Mutatis threatens to use a doomsday weapon against humanity. Noah has his own paranormal ability to journey into the depths of the universe, but he has made enemies of his own, including a third powerful force determined to destroy humans and Mutatis alike.

The Timeweb Chronicles 3: Webdancers

The conclusion to Brian Herbert’s epic Timeweb trilogy. As the human race and the sinister shape-shifting Mutatis continue their epic war, the connecting filigree of Timeweb strands that hold the universe together, begins to unravel. Sentient podships travel the strands of the web, but the cosmos itself is disintegrating.

Galactic ecologist Noah Watanabe, possessed of special powers, is the one person who has a chance of saving all races. He is immortal, and faced with the crisis to the universe, he is also evolving, changing both mentally and physically … but into what? Noah is swept on a tidal wave of destiny and knows there is no turning back.

by Frank Herbert

Angels’ Fall

One of Frank Herbert’s lost, never-before-published novels written before Dune.

Angels’ Fall is a gripping thriller set in the South American jungles. After a plane crash deep in the Amazon, freelance pilot Jeb Logan has to keep himself and his passengers alive in a gruelling trip downriver. Adrift in the wreckage of the plane with Jeb are a beautiful singer, her young son, and a ruthless murderer clinging to the last thread of sanity. With supplies running out and nature itself turning against them, this small desperate group struggles to survive against the jungle—and each other.

The Ascension Factor (Frank Herbert & Bill Ransom)

Pandora’s humans have been recovering land from its raging seas at an accelerated pace since The Lazarus Effect. The great kelp of the seas, sentient but electronically manipulated by humans, buffers Pandora’s wild currents to restore land and facilitate the booming sea trade. New settlements rise overnight, but children starve in their shadows. An orbiting assembly station is near completion of Project Voidship, which is the hope of many for finding a better world.

Pandora is under the fist of an ambitious clone from hibernation called The Director, who rules with a sadistic security force led by the assassin Spider Nevi. Small resistance groups, like the one led by Twisp Queets and Ben Ozette, have had little effect on his absolute power. The Director controls the transportation of foodstuffs; uprisings are punished with starvation.

The resistance fighters’ main hope is Crista Galli, a woman believed by some to be the child of God. Crista pools her talents with Dwarf MacIntosh, Beatriz Tatoosh, and Rico LaPush to transcend the barriers between the different species and overthrow The Director and the sinister cabal with which he rules.

Book 3 in Herbert & Ransom’s Pandora Sequence.

Direct Descent

Earth has become a library planet for thousands of years, a bastion of both useful and useless knowledge—esoterica of all types, history, science, politics—gathered by teams of “pack rats” who scour the galaxy for any scrap of information. Knowledge is power, knowledge is wealth, and knowledge can be a weapon. As powerful dictators come and go over the course of history, the cadre of dedicated librarians is sworn to obey the lawful government … and use their wits to protect the treasure trove of knowledge they have collected over the millennia.

Destination: Void

The starship Earthling, filled with thousands of hybernating colonists en route to a new world at Tau Ceti, is stranded beyond the solar system when the ship’s three Organic Mental Cores—disembodied human brains that control the vessel’s functions—go insane. An emergency skeleton crew sees only one chance for survival: to create an artificial consciousness in the Earthling’s primary computer, which could guide them to their destination … or could destroy the human race.

Frank Herbert’s classic novel that begins the epic Pandora Sequence (written with Bill Ransom), which also includes The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect, and The Ascension Factor.

The Heaven Makers

Immortal aliens have observed Earth for centuries, making full sensory movies of wars, natural disasters, and horrific human activities … all to relieve their boredom. When they finally became jaded by ordinary, run-of-the-mill tragedies, they found ways to create their own disasters, just to amuse themselves. However, interfering with human activities was forbidden, and by the time Investigator Kelexel arrived to investigate, things were really getting out of hand.…

High-Opp [also in trade paperback]

A never-before-published novel by Frank Herbert, author of the international bestseller Dune.

EMASI—Each Man A Separate Individual!

That is the rallying cry of the Seps, the Separatists engaged in a class war against the upper tiers of a society driven entirely by opinion polls.

Those who score high in the polls, the High-Opps, live in plush apartments, with comfortable jobs, every possible convenience. But those who happen to be low-opped, find themselves crowded in Warrens, with harsh lives and brutal conditions.

Daniel Movius, Ex-Senior Liaitor, rides high in the opinion polls until he becomes a casualty, brushed aside by a very powerful man. Low-opped and abandoned, Movius finds himself fighting for survival in the city’s underworld. There, the opinion of the masses is clear: It is time for a revolution against the corrupt super-privileged. And every revolution needs a leader.

The Jesus Incident (Frank Herbert & Bill Ransom)

A sentient Ship with godlike powers (and aspirations) delivers the last survivors of humanity to a horrific, poisonous planet, Pandora—rife with deadly Nerve-Runners, Hooded Dashers, airborne jellyfish, and intelligent kelp. Chaplain/Psychiatrist Raja Lon Flattery is brought back out of hybernation to witness Ship’s machinations as well as the schemes of human scientists manipulating the genetic structure of humanity. Sequel to Frank Herbert’s Destination: Void, the first book in Herbert & Ransom’s Pandora Sequence.

The Lazarus Effect (Frank Herbert & Bill Ransom)

In The Jesus Incident Herbert and Ransom introduced Ship, an artificial intelligence that believed it was God, abandoning its unworthy human cargo on the all-sea world of Pandora. Now centuries have passed. The descendants of humanity, split into Mermen and Islanders, must reunite … because Pandora’s original owner is returning to life!

Book 2 in Herbert & Ransom’s Pandora Sequence.

Man of Two Worlds (Frank Herbert & Brian Herbert)

Frank Herbert’s last published novel, a charming and witty science fiction adventure coauthored with his son Brian. What if the entire universe were the creation of alien minds? After an unfortunate spaceship accident, the hedonistic and ambitious human Lutt Hansen, Jr., finds himself sharing his body and mind with a naive alien dreamer. The two have to survive numerous dangers, schemes and assassination attempts … but can they survive each other?

The Pandora Sequence (Frank Herbert & Bill Ransom) [also in trade paperback]

The Jesus Incident—Book 1 in Herbert & Ransom’s Pandora Sequence.

A sentient Ship with godlike powers (and aspirations) delivers the last survivors of humanity to a horrific, poisonous planet, Pandora—rife with deadly Nerve-Runners, Hooded Dashers, airborne jellyfish, and intelligent kelp. Chaplain/Psychiatrist Raja Lon Flattery is brought back out of hybernation to witness Ship’s machinations as well as the schemes of human scientists manipulating the genetic structure of humanity. Sequel to Frank Herbert’s Destination: Void.

The Lazarus Effect—Book 2 in Herbert & Ransom’s Pandora Sequence.

Centuries have passed since The Jesus Incident. The descendants of humanity, split into Mermen and Islanders, must reunite … because Pandora’s original owner is returning to life!

The Acension Factor—Book 3 in Herbert & Ransom’s Pandora Sequence.

Pandora’s humans have been recovering land from its raging seas at an accelerated pace since The Lazarus Effect. The great kelp of the seas, sentient but electronically manipulated by humans, buffers Pandora’s wild currents to restore land and facilitate the booming sea trade. New settlements rise overnight, but children starve in their shadows. An orbiting assembly station is near completion of Project Voidship, which is the hope of many for finding a better world.

Pandora is under the fist of an ambitious clone from hibernation called The Director, who rules with a sadistic security force led by the assassin Spider Nevi. Small resistance groups, like the one led by Twisp Queets and Ben Ozette, have had little effect on his absolute power. The Director controls the transportation of foodstuffs; uprisings are punished with starvation.

The resistance fighters’ main hope is Crista Galli, a woman believed by some to be the child of God. Crista pools her talents with Dwarf MacIntosh, Beatriz Tatoosh, and Rico LaPush to transcend the barriers between the different species and overthrow The Director and the sinister cabal with which he rules.

Soul Catcher

Katsuk, a militant Native American student, kidnaps 13-year-old David Marshall—the son of the US Undersecretary of State. The two flee into the deepest wilds of the Pacific Northwest, where they must survive together as teams of hunters try to track them. David begins to feel a growing bond of respect for his captor, even as he struggles to escape. What the boy does not know, however, is that he has been chosen as an innocent from the white world for an ancient sacrifice of vengeance. And Katsuk may be divinely inspired … or simply insane.

by Bill Ransom

Burn

A vivid and gritty thriller in the vein of Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy, BURN takes today’s genetic research one step into a terrifying future, a “Hot Zone” world gone mad about a man-made contagion that literally leaves no one untouched. It is called GenoVax, and the death it brings is horrifying. It is the most frightening weapon mankind has ever created, and when it is unleashed, the human race will know what it is like to burn.… From the author of Jaguar and ViraVax and the coauthor, with Frank Herbert, of The Jesus Incident.

Jaguar

In waking life, he is a combat vet with a mysterious sleep disorder, confined to a VA hospital bed. When he sleeps, he roams the plains of another world, invading the minds of the people as they dream and forcing them to do his will. They call him … Jaguar.

In both worlds, there are those who know the Jaguar’s secret. They are learning to link their minds across the void between worlds, following the dreampaths the Jaguar created—all the way back to where his body lies helpless … an easy target for their justice.

ViraVax

In the private laboratory known as ViraVax, Rico Toledo has uncovered a horrifying truth. In this place, run by a mysterious group called the Children of Eden, the worst suspicions of ex-intelligence officer Toledo have been confirmed: his partner has been genetically programmed for assassination—and Toledo may have been altered too.

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