Dune_ House Atreides - Brian Herbert [3]
Mobile ground units ranged across the open sand in the vicinity of the factory, dipping probes beneath the surface, scraping samples, mapping the extent of the buried spice vein. Overhead, heavier machinery borne by jumbo ornithopters circled, waiting. Peripherally, spotter craft cruised up and down the sands with alert watchers searching for the telltale ripples of wormsign. One of the great sandworms of Arrakis could swallow their entire operation whole.
“M’Lord Baron,” the pilot said and handed the communicator wand over to him, “the captain of the work crew wishes to speak with you.”
“This is your Baron.” He touched his ear to listen to the pickup. “Give me an update. How much have you found?”
Below on the sands, the crew captain answered, his voice gruff, his manner annoyingly unimpressed with the importance of the man to whom he was speaking. “Ten years working spice crews, and this deposit’s beyond anything I’ve ever seen. Trouble is, it’s buried deep. Normally, you know, we find the spice exposed by the elements. This time it’s densely concentrated, but . . .”
The Baron waited for only a moment. “Yes, what is it?”
“Something strange going on here, sir. Chemically, I mean. We’ve got carbon dioxide leaking from below, some sort of a bubble beneath us. The harvester’s digging through outer layers of sand to get at the spice, but there’s also water vapor.”
“Water vapor!” Such a thing was unheard-of on Arrakis, where the moisture content of the air was nearly unmeasurable, even on the best of days.
“Could have stumbled on an ancient aquifer, sir. Maybe buried under a cap of rock.”
The Baron had never imagined finding running water beneath the surface of Arrakis. Quickly he considered the possibilities of exploiting a free-flowing water resource by selling it to the populace. That was sure to upset the existing water merchants, who had grown too swollen with self-importance anyway.
His basso voice rumbled. “Do you think it’s contaminating the spice somehow?”
“Not able to say, sir,” said the crew captain. “Spice is strange stuff, but I’ve never seen a pocket like this before. It doesn’t seem . . . right somehow.”
The Baron looked over at the ’thopter pilot. “Contact the spotters. See if they’ve picked up any wormsign yet.”
“No wormsign, m’Lord,” the pilot said, scanning the reply. The Baron noticed sparkles of sweat on the man’s forehead.
“How long has the harvester been down there?”
“Nearly two standard hours, sir.”
Now the Baron scowled. One of the worms should definitely have come before now.
Inadvertently, the pilot had left the comsystem open, and the crew captain gruffly acknowledged over the speaker. “Never had this much time either, sir. The worms always come. Always. But something’s going on down here. Gases are increasing. You can smell it in the air.”
Taking a deep breath of the recycled cabin air, the Baron detected the musky cinnamon smell of raw melange scooped from the desert. The ornithopter flew in a holding pattern now, several hundred meters from the main harvester.
“We’re also detecting vibrations underground, some kind of a resonance. I don’t like it, sir.”
“You’re not paid to like it,” the Baron replied. “Is it a deep worm?”
“I don’t think so, sir.”
He scanned the estimates being transmitted from the spice harvester. The numbers boggled his mind. “We’re getting as much from this one excavation as a month’s production on my other sites.” He drummed his fingers on his right thigh in a rhythmic pattern.
“Nevertheless, sir, I suggest that we prepare to pack up and abandon the site. We could lose—”
“Absolutely not, Captain,” the Baron said. “There’s no wormsign, and you’ve already got nearly