Hunters of Dune - Brian Herbert [122]
The threat was worse than Murbella had imagined. She would have to deal with it immediately.
Teams of male workers used suspensor pallets to remove the ominous-looking spiked Obliterators, two from the hatches below each of the Honored Matre frigates. The angry rebels had no compunctions about destroying a whole planet and its inhabitants, just to decapitate the New Sisterhood. They would have to be punished.
“We need to study these weapons,” Murbella said, excited by the prospect of duplicating them. “We must reproduce the technology. We will need thousands of them once the Enemy arrives.”
Janess looked grimly at the dead body of the priestess on the floor and at the slaughtered whores strewn like dolls in the ship’s corridors. Simmering anger colored her cheeks. “Perhaps we should use one of the Obliterators against Gammu and wipe out those women once and for all.”
Murbella smiled with anticipation. “Oh, we will indeed move on Gammu next, but it will be a much more personal attack.”
We never see the jaws of the hunter closing around us until the fangs draw blood.
—DUNCAN IDAHO,
A Thousand Lives
D
uncan tapped the touchpads of the instrument console to alter course slightly as the Ithaca moved through empty space. Without charts or records, he had no way of knowing if any humans had gone this far in the Scattering. It made no difference. For fourteen years they had been flying blind, going nowhere. To reduce the risk of a navigational disaster, Duncan only rarely activated the Holtzman engines.
At least he had kept them safe. So far. Some of the passengers—especially Garimi and her faction, as well as the Rabbi’s people—were growing increasingly restless. By now, dozens of children had been born, and were being raised by Bene Gesserit proctors in isolated sections of the Ithaca. They all wanted a home.
“We can’t keep running forever!” Garimi had said during one of their recent all-hands meetings.
Yes we can. We may have to. The giant self-contained ship needed refueling only once or twice a century, since it was able to gather most of what it needed from the rarified sea of molecules scattered throughout space.
The no-ship had been cruising for years without making another leap through foldspace. Duncan had taken them farther than the imaginations of those who charted space. Not only had he eluded the Enemy, he had slipped away from the Oracle of Time, never knowing whom to trust.
In all that time, he had seen no sign of the glittering net, but it made him uneasy to remain in one area for long. Why do the old man and woman want us so badly? Is it me they’re after? Is it the ship? Or is it someone else aboard?
As Duncan waited, letting his thoughts drift along with the vessel itself, he felt the overlappings of his own lifetimes, so many lifetimes. The mergings of flesh and consciousness, the flow of experience and imagination, the great teachings and the epic events he had experienced. He sifted through countless lifetimes, all the way back to his original boyhood on Giedi Prime under Harkonnen tyranny, and later on Caladan as the loyal weapons master of House Atreides. He had given his first life to save Paul Atreides and Lady Jessica. Then the Tleilaxu had restored him as a ghola called Hayt, and afterward many Duncan Idaho incarnations had served the capricious God Emperor. So much pain, so much exhilaration.
He, Duncan Idaho, had been present at many critical moments in human history, from the fall of the Old Empire and the rise of Muad’Dib, through the long rule and death of the God Emperor . . . and beyond. Through it all, history had been distilling events, processing and sifting them through the Duncans, renewing them.
Long ago, he had loved the beautiful, dark-haired Alia, even with all her strangeness. Centuries later, he had loved Siona deeply, though