Dune_ House Atreides - Brian Herbert [5]
“All clear from here,” said a third.
“Why are they evacuating?” the Baron demanded, as if the pilot would know.
“Something’s happening,” the crew captain yelled. “Where’s that carryall? We need it now!”
The ground bucked. Four workers stumbled and pitched facefirst onto the sand before they could reach the ramp to the spice factory.
“Look, m’Lord!” The pilot pointed downward, his voice filled with awe. As the Baron stopped focusing on the cowardly men, he saw the sand trembling all around the excavation site, vibrating like a struck drumhead.
The spice harvester canted, slipped to one side. A crack opened in the sands, and the whole site began to swell from beneath the ground, rising in the air like a gas bubble in a boiling Salusan mudpot.
“Get us out of here!” the Baron shouted. The pilot stared for a fraction of a second, and the Baron swept his left hand with the speed of a cracked whip, striking the man hard on the cheek. “Move!”
The pilot grabbed the ’thopter controls and wrenched them into a steep ascent. The articulated wings flapped furiously.
On the terrain below, the swollen underground bubble reached its apex—then burst, hurling the spice harvester, the mobile crews, and everything else up off the surface. A gigantic explosion of sand sprayed upward, carrying broken rock and volatile orange spice. The mammoth factory was crushed and blasted to pieces, scattered like lost rags in a Coriolis storm.
“What the devil happened?” The Baron’s dark eyes went wide in disbelief at the sheer magnitude of the disaster. All that precious spice gone, swallowed in an instant. All the equipment destroyed. The loss in lives hardly occurred to him, except for the wasted costs of crew training.
“Hang on, m’Lord,” the pilot cried. His knuckles turned white on the controls.
A hammer-blast of wind struck them. The armored ornithopter turned end over end in the air, wings flailing. The engines whined and groaned, trying to maintain stability. Pellets of high-velocity sand struck the plaz windowports. Dust-clogged, the ’thopter’s motors made sick, coughing sounds. The craft lost altitude, dropping toward the seething maw of the desert.
The pilot shouted unintelligible words. The Baron clutched his crash restraints, saw the ground coming toward them like an inverted bootheel to squash an insect.
As head of House Harkonnen, he had always thought he would die by a treacherous assassin’s hand . . . but to fall prey to an unpredictable natural disaster instead—the Baron found it almost humorous.
As they plunged, he saw the sand open like a festering sore. The dust and raw melange were being sucked down, turned over by convection currents and chemical reactions. The rich spice vein of only moments before had turned into a leprous mouth ready to swallow them.
But the pilot, who had seemed weak and distractible during their flight, became rigid with concentration and determination. His fingers flew over sky rudder and engine throttle controls, working to ride the currents, switching flow from one motor to another to discharge dust strangulation in the air intakes.
Finally the ornithopter leveled off, steadied itself again, and cruised low over the dune plain. The pilot emitted an audible sigh of relief.
Where the great opening had been ripped into the layered sand, the Baron now saw glittering translucent shapes like maggots on a carcass: sandtrout, rushing toward the explosion. Soon giant worms would come, too. The monsters couldn’t possibly resist this.
Try as he might, the Baron couldn’t understand spice. Not at all.
The ’thopter gained altitude, taking them toward the spotters and the carryalls that had been caught unawares. They hadn’t been able to retrieve the spice factory and its precious cargo before the explosion, and he could blame no one for it—no one but himself. The Baron had given them explicit orders to remain out of reach.
“You just saved my life, pilot. What is your name?”
“Kryubi, sir.”
“All right, then, Kryubi—have you ever seen such a thing? What happened down there? What caused that explosion?