Dune_ House Atreides - Brian Herbert [65]
Tired after the long journey, his mind still boggling at the weighty strangeness of this underground metropolis, Leto stripped off his comfortable shirt and sprawled back on the bed. He had barely managed to test out the mattress and fluff up the pillow before Rhombur came pounding on his door. “Come on, Leto! Hurry up! Get dressed and we’ll, uh, catch a transport.”
Still fumbling to get his arm through his left sleeve, Leto met the other young man in the hall.
A bullet tube took them between the upside-down buildings to the outskirts of the underground city, and then a lift capsule dropped them to a secondary level of buildings studded with observation domes. After emerging, Rhombur bustled through the crowds gathered at the balconies and broad windows. He grabbed Leto’s arm as they pushed past Vernius guards and assembled spectators. The Prince’s face was flushed, and he turned quickly to the others there. “What time is it? Has it happened yet?”
“Not yet. Another ten minutes.”
“The Navigator’s on his way. His chamber’s being escorted across the field right now.”
Muttering thanks and pardons, Rhombur led his confused companion to a broad metaglass window in the sloping wall of the observation gallery.
At the far end of the room another door glided open, and the crowd parted for two dark-haired young men—identical twins, from the looks of them. Small in stature, they flanked Rhombur’s sister Kailea as proud escorts. In the brief time since Leto had last seen her, Kailea had somehow managed to change into a different dress, less frilly but no less beautiful. The twins seemed drunk with her presence, and Kailea seemed to enjoy their fawning attention. She smiled at both of them and guided them toward a good spot at the observation window.
Rhombur took Leto to stand beside them, far more interested in the view than in the members of the crowd. Glancing around, Leto assumed that all the people there must be important officials of some sort. He peered down, still at a loss as to what was going on.
An immense enclosure funneled into the distance where the grotto ceiling and the horizon came together. Down below he saw a full-scale Heighliner, an asteroid-sized ship like the one that had carried him from Caladan to Ix.
“This is the largest, uh, manufacturing facility on all of Ix,” Rhombur said. “It’s the only surface hold in the Imperium large enough to accommodate an entire Heighliner. Everyone else uses dry docks in space. Here, in a terrestrial environment, the safety and efficiency for even large-scale construction is very cost-effective.”
The shining new ship crowded the subterranean canyon. A fan of decorative dorsal arrays shone from the nearer side. On the fuselage, a gleaming purple-and-copper Ixian helix interlocked into the larger white analemma of the Spacing Guild, symbolizing infinity inside a rounded convex cartouche.
Constructed in place deep underground, the spaceship rested on a suspensor-jack mechanism, which elevated the craft so that large groundtrucks could drive underneath the hull. Suboid workers in silver-and-white uniforms scanned the fuselage with handheld devices, performing rote duties. As the teams of underclass workers checked the Guild craft, readying it for space, lines of light danced around the manufacturing center—energy barriers to repel intruders.
Cranes and suspensor supports looked like tiny parasites crawling over the Heighliner’s hull, but most of the machinery was clustered against the sloping walls of the chamber, moved out of the way . . . for a launch? Leto didn’t think it was possible. Thousands of surface-bound workers swarmed like a static pattern across the ground, removing debris and preparing for the departure of the incredible ship.
The buzz of the audience in the observation chamber grew louder, and Leto sensed something was about to happen. He spotted numerous screens and images transmitted by comeyes. Numbed by the spectacle, he asked, “But . . . how do you get it out? A ship this size? There’s a rock ceiling overhead, and all the walls