Dune_ House Atreides - Brian Herbert [24]
With the tiny footstep vibrations stopped, the distant thumper seemed as loud as an Imperial band. Thump, thump, thump. The worm paused—then altered its path to head straight toward the cache of explosives.
Rabban gave a twitch of a shrug, nonchalant acceptance of an irrelevant defeat.
Kynes could hear the underground hiss of shifting sands, the approach of the behemoth. It came closer and closer, attracted like an iron filing to a deadly magnet. As it neared the thumper, the worm dived deeper underground, circled, and came up to engulf that which had attracted it, angered it—or whatever instinctive reaction these blind leviathans experienced.
When the worm rose from the sands, it revealed a mouth large enough to swallow a spacecraft, ascending higher and higher, its maw opening wider as its flexible jaws spread like the petals of a flower. In an instant it engulfed the insignificant black speck of the thumper and all the explosives. Its crystal teeth shone like tiny sharp thorns spiraling down its bottomless gullet.
From three hundred meters away, Kynes saw ridges of ancient skin, overlapping folds of armor that protected the creature in its passage beneath the ground. The worm gulped the booby-trapped bait and began to wallow into the sands again.
Rabban stood up with a demonic grin on his face and worked small transmitting controls. A hot breeze dusted his face, peppering his teeth with grains of sand. He pushed a button.
A distant thunderclap sent a tremor through the desert. The sands shifted in tiny avalanches from the fingernail dunes. The sequenced bomb ripped through the internal channels of the worm, blasting open its gut and splitting its armored segments.
As the dust cleared, Kynes saw the writhing, dying monstrosity that lay in a pool of disrupted sand, like a beached fur-whale.
“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