Dune: House Atreides (8 page)

"That thing's more than two hundred meters long!" Rabban cried, taking in the extent of his kill.

The guards cheered. Rabban turned and pounded Kynes on the back with nearly enough strength to dislocate his shoulder.

"Now there's a trophy, Planetologist. I'm going to take this back to Giedi Prime with me."

Almost unnoticed, Thekar finally arrived, sweating and panting, hauling himself up to safety on the rocks. He looked behind him with mixed emotions at the faraway dead creature sprawled on the sands.

Rabban led the charge as the worm ceased its final writhing. The eager guards sprinted across the sands, shouting, cheering. Kynes, anxious now to see the amazing specimen up close, hurried along, stumbling as Harkonnen troops plowed a battered path ahead of him.

Many minutes later, panting and hot, Kynes stood awestruck in front of the towering mass of the ancient worm. Its skin was scaled, covered with gravel, thick with abrasion-proof calluses. Yet between the segments that sagged open from the explosions, he saw pink, tender skin. The gaping mouth of the worm itself was like a mine shaft lined with crystal daggers.

"It's the most fearsome creature on this miserable planet!" Rabban crowed.

"And I've killed it!"

The soldiers peered, none of them wanting to approach closer than several meters. Kynes wondered how the Baron's nephew intended to haul this trophy back with him. With the Harkonnen penchant for extravagance, however, he assumed Rabban would find a way.

The Planetologist turned to see that the exhausted Thekar had plodded up beside them. His eyes held a silvery sheen, as if some inner fire blazed bright.

Perhaps by coming so close to death and seeing the Fremen desert god laid low by Harkonnen explosives, his perspective on the world had changed.

"Shai-Hulud," he whispered. Then he turned to Kynes, as if sensing a kindred spirit. "This is an ancient one. One of the oldest of the worms."

Kynes stepped forward to look at the encrusted skin, at its segments, and wondered how he might go about dissecting and analyzing the specimen. Certainly Rabban couldn't object to that? If necessary, Kynes would invoke his assignment from the Emperor to make the man understand. But as he approached closer, intending to touch it, he saw that the skin of the old worm was shimmering, moving, shifting. The beast itself wasn't still alive -- its nerve functions had ceased even to twitch . . . and yet its outer layers trembled and shifted, as if melting.

While Kynes stared in amazement, a rain of translucent cellular flaps dripped off the hulk of the old worm, like scales shed to the churned sand, where they vanished.

"What's going on?" Rabban cried, his face purpling. Before his eyes the worm seemed to be evaporating. The skin sloughed off into tiny flopping amoebalike patches that jiggled and then burrowed into the sand like molten solder. The ancient behemoth slumped into the desert.

In the end, only skeletal, cartilaginous ribs and milky teeth were left. Then even these remains sank slowly, dissolving into mounds of loose gelatin covered by sand.

The Harkonnen troops stepped back to a safer distance.

To Kynes, it seemed as if he had seen a thousand years of decay in only a few seconds. Accelerated entropy. The hungry desert seemed eager to swallow every shred of evidence, to conceal the fact that a human had defeated a sandworm.

As Kynes thought about it, more in confusion and growing amazement than in dismay at losing all chance of dissecting the specimen, he wondered just how strange the life cycle of these magnificent beasts must be.

He had so much to learn about Arrakis . . . .

Rabban stood, seething and furious. The muscles in his neck stretched taut like iron cables. "My trophy!" He whirled, clenched his fists, and struck Thekar full across the face, knocking him flat onto the sands. For a moment, Kynes thought the Baron's nephew might actually kill the desert man, but Rabban turned his rage and fury on the still-dissolving, shuddering heap of the sandworm sinking into the exploded sands.

He screamed curses at it. Then as Kynes watched, a determined look came into Rabban's cold, menacing eyes. His sunburned face flushed a deeper red. "When I return to Giedi Prime, I'll hunt something a lot more satisfying." Then, as if distracted from all thoughts of the sandworm, Rabban turned and stalked away.

One observes the survivors, and learns from them.

-Bene Gesserit Teaching

0f all the fabled million worlds in the Imperium, young Duncan Idaho had never been anywhere but Giedi Prime, an oil-soaked, industry-covered planet filled with artificial constructions, square angles, metal, and smoke. The Harkonnens liked to keep their home that way. Duncan had known nothing else in his eight years.

Even the dark and dirt-stained alleys of his lost home would have been a welcome sight now, though. After months of imprisonment with the rest of his family, Duncan wondered if he would ever again go outside the huge enslavement city of Barony. Or if he would live to see his ninth birthday, which shouldn't be too far off now. He wiped a hand through his curly black hair, felt the sweat there.

And he kept running. The hunters were coming closer.

Duncan was beneath the prison city now, with his pursuers behind him. He hunched down and rushed through the cramped maintenance tunnels, feeling like the spiny-backed rodent his mother had let him keep as a pet when he was five.

Ducking lower, he scuttled along in tiny crawl spaces, smelly air shafts, and power-conduit tubes. The big adults with their padded armor could never follow him here. He scraped his elbow on the metal walls, worming his way into places no human should have been able to navigate.

The boy vowed not to let the Harkonnens catch him -- at least not today. He hated their games, refused to be anyone's pet or prey. Negotiating his way through the darkness by smell and instinct, he felt a stale breeze on his face and noted the direction of the air circulation.

His ears recorded echoes as he moved: the sounds of other prisoner children running, also desperate. They were supposedly his teammates, but Duncan had learned through previous failures not to rely on people whose feral skills might not match his own.

He swore he would get away from the hunters this time but knew he would never be entirely free of them. In this controlled environment the stalking teams would catch him again and run him through the paces, over and over. They called it

"training." Training for what, he didn't know.

Duncan's right side still ached from the last episode. As if he were a prized animal, his tormentors had put his injured body through a skin-knit machine and ace-cellular repair. His ribs still didn't quite feel right, but they had been getting better each day. Until now.

With the locator beacon implanted in the meat of his shoulder, Duncan could never really escape from this slaveholding metropolis. Barony was a megalithic construction of plasteel and armor-plat, 950 stories tall and 45 kilometers long, with no ground-level openings whatsoever. He always found plenty of places to hide during the Harkonnen games, but never any freedom.

The Harkonnens had many prisoners, and they had sadistic methods of making them cooperate. If Duncan won in this training hunt, if he eluded the searchers long enough, the keepers had promised that he and his family could return to their former lives. All the children had been promised the same thing. Trainees needed a goal, a prize to fight for.

He ran by instinct through the secret passageways, trying to muffle his footfalls. Not far behind, he heard the blast and sizzle of a stun gun firing, a child's high-pitched squeal of pain, and then teeth-chattering spasms as another one of the young boys was brought to ground.

If the searchers captured you, they hurt you -- sometimes seriously and sometimes worse, depending upon the current supply of "trainees." This was no child's game of hide-and-seek. At least not for the victims.

Even at his age, Duncan already knew that life and death had a price. The Harkonnens didn't care how many small candidates suffered during the course of their training. This was how the Harkonnens played. Duncan understood cruel amusements. He had seen others do such things before, especially the children with whom he shared confinement, as they pulled the wings off insects or set tiny rodent babies on fire. The Harkonnens and their troops were like adult children, only with greater resources, greater imaginations, greater malice.

Without making a sound, he found a narrow, rusted access ladder and scrambled up into the darkness, wasting no time on thought. Duncan had to do the unexpected, hide where they'd have trouble reaching him. The rungs, pitted and scarred with age, hurt his hands.

This section of ancient Barony still functioned; power conduits and suspensor tubes shot through the main structure like wormholes -- straight, curved, hooking off at oblique angles. The place was one enormous obstacle course, where the Harkonnen troops could fire upon their prey without risking damage to more important structures.

Above him in a main corridor, he heard booted feet running, filtered voices through helmet communicators, then a shout. A nearby pinging sound signaled that the guards had homed in on his locator implant.

Hot white lasgun fire blasted the ceiling over his head, melting through metal plates. Duncan let go of the ladder and allowed himself to drop, freefall. One armed guard peeled up the hot-edged floor plate and pointed down at him. The others fired their lasguns again, severing the struts so that the ladder fell in tandem with the small boy.

He landed on the floor of a lower shaft, and the heavy ladder clattered on top of him. But Duncan didn't cry out in pain. That would only bring the pursuers closer . . . though he had no real hope of eluding them for long because of the pulsing beacon in his shoulder. How could anyone but Harkonnens win this game?

He pushed himself to his feet and ran with a new, frantic desire for freedom.

To his dismay, the small tunnel ahead opened into a wider passage. Wider was bad. The bigger men could follow him there.

He heard shouts behind, more running feet, gunfire, and then a gurgling scream.

The pursuers were supposed to be using stun guns, but Duncan knew that this late in the day's hunt, most everyone else would have been captured -- and the stakes were higher. The hunters didn't like to lose.

Duncan had to survive. He had to be the best. If he died, he couldn't go back to see his mother again. But if he lived and defeated these bastards, then perhaps his family would get their freedom . . . or as much freedom as Harkonnen civil service workers could ever have on Giedi Prime.

Duncan had seen other trainees who had defeated the pursuers before, and those children had disappeared afterward. If he could believe the announcements, the winners and their captive families had been set free from the hellhole of Barony. Duncan had no proof of this, though, and had plenty of reasons to question what the Harkonnens told him. But he wanted to believe them, could not give up hope.

He didn't understand why his parents had been thrown into this prison. What had minor government office workers done to deserve such punishment? He remembered only that one day life had been normal and relatively happy . . . and the next, they were all here, enslaved. Now young Duncan was forced nearly every day to run and fight for his life, and for the future of his family. He was getting better at it.

He remembered that last normal afternoon out on a manicured lawn planted high up in one of the Harko City terraces, one of the rare balcony parks the Harkonnens allowed their subjects to have. The gardens and hedges were carefully fertilized and tended, because plants did not fare well in the residue-impregnated soil of a planet that had been too long abused.

Duncan's parents and other family members had been playing frivolous lawn games, tossing self-motivated balls at targets on the grass, while internal high-entropy devices made the balls bounce and ricochet randomly. The boy had noticed how different, how dry and structured the games of adults were compared with the reckless romping he did with his friends.

A young woman stood near him, watching the games. She had chocolate-colored hair, dusky skin, and high cheekbones, but her pinched expression and hard gaze detracted from what might have been remarkable beauty. He didn't know who she was and understood only that her name was Janess Milam, and she worked with his parents somehow.

As Duncan had watched the adult yard game, listening to the laughter, he smiled at the woman and observed, "They're practicing to be old men." It became apparent, though, that Janess had no real interest in him or his opinion, for she'd given him a sharp verbal brush-off.

Under the hazy sunlight Duncan had continued to watch the game, but with increasing curiosity about the stranger. He sensed tension in her. Janess, who didn't participate, frequently glanced over her shoulder, as if watching for something.

Moments later Harkonnen troops had come, grabbing Duncan's parents, himself, even his uncle and two cousins. He understood intuitively that Janess had been the cause of it all, for whatever reason. He'd never seen her again, and he and his family had been in prison for half a year now . . . .

Behind him, an overhead trapdoor opened with a hiss. Two blue-uniformed pursuers dropped through, pointed at him, and laughed in triumph. Weaving from side to side, Duncan dashed ahead. A lasgun blast ricocheted off the wall plates, leaving a lightning-bolt scorch mark down the corridor.

Duncan smelled the ozone from the singed metal. If even one of those bolts hit him, he'd be dead. He hated the way the hunters snickered, as if they were merely toying with him.

A pair of pursuers charged out of a side passage only a meter in front of him, but Duncan moved too fast. They didn't recognize him or react quickly enough.

He struck one stout man in the knee and knocked him sideways before dashing between the two at a full run.

The stout man stumbled, then shouted as a laser bolt singed his armor, "Stop firing, you idiot! You'll hit one of us!"