Hunters of Dune - Brian Herbert [123]
Why, then, was Murbella so difficult to get over? He could not break the debilitating bond she had with him.
Duncan had slept little in the past week because whenever he went to his cot and clasped his pillow, he could only think of Murbella, sensing the emptiness where her body wasn’t. So many years—why wouldn’t the ache and addictive longing fade?
Restless and wanting to put even more distance between himself and Murbella’s siren call, he erased the current navigation coordinates, used his bold—or reckless—intuition, and made a random foldspace jump.
When they arrived at a new and uncharted portion of space, Duncan let his mind drift in a fugue state, deeper than a Mentat’s trance. Though he did not admit it to himself, he was looking for any hint of Murbella’s presence, though she could not possibly be here.
Obsession.
Duncan could not concentrate, and his woolgathering left them vulnerable to the gossamer yet deadly net that began to coalesce unnoticed around the no-ship.
TEG ARRIVED ON the navigation bridge, saw Duncan at the controls, and noted that the other man seemed consumed by his thoughts, as he often was, especially of late.
His glance went to the control modules, the viewscreen, the path the no-ship had taken along its projected course. Teg studied the patterns on the console, then the patterns in the emptiness. Even without the no-ship’s sensors and viewscreens, he could grasp the sheer volume of empty space around them. A new void, a different starless region from where they had been.
Duncan had made a reckless jump through foldspace. But the nature of randomness was such that any new location was just as likely to be closer to the Enemy than farther away.
Something troubled him, something he could not ignore. His Atreides-based abilities allowed him to focus on those anomalies and discern what was not there. Duncan wasn’t the only one who could see strange things.
“Where are we?”
Duncan answered with a distant riddle. “Who knows where we are?” He snapped out of his preoccupied trance, then gasped. “Miles! The net—it’s closing in, tightening like a noose!”
Duncan had thrown the ship not into a safe wasteland, but directly into the vicinity of the Enemy. Like hungry spiders reacting to unexpected vibrations in their web, the old man and woman were closing in.
Already on edge from his premonition, Teg reacted with a burst of speed, without thinking. His body went into overdrive, his reflexes burning bright, his actions accelerating to indefinable speeds. Moving with a metabolism no human body was meant to withstand, he seized command of the navigation controls. His hands worked in a blur. His mind flashed from system to system, reactivating the Holtzman engines in the middle of their recharge. Immeasurably swift and alert, Teg became part of the ship—and guided them into a sudden and alarming foldspace jump.
He could feel the gossamer, sentient strands make one last futile grasp, but Teg tore the ship free, damaging the net as he lurched the huge vessel across a wrinkle in space, jumping to another place, and then another, wrenching the craft from the searchers’ trap. Behind him he sensed pain, severe damage to the net and its casters, and then outrage at losing their prey again.
Teg streaked across the bridge, making adjustments, sending commands, moving so swiftly that no one—not even Duncan—would know he was covering for the other man’s mistake. Finally, he slowed back to real time, exhausted, drained, and famished.
Astonished by what Teg had done in less than a second, Duncan shook his head to clear away the tar-pit memories of Murbella. “What did you just do, Miles?”
Slumped at a secondary console, the Bashar gave Duncan a mysterious smile. “Only what was necessary. We’re out of danger.”
A mere player should never assume he can influence the rules of a game.
—BASHAR MILES TEG,
strategy lectures
S
nip!
The blades of the hedge