Hunters of Dune - Brian Herbert [165]
But nothing came to him.
Ingva lifted her long blade, jerking the Waff Three ghola into the air with it, his legs still kicking. Then she let him slide off the tip, and he thudded to the floor. Ingva stepped back, waiting to be called again. She was clearly enjoying this.
“You make this more difficult than it needs to be,” Uxtal said. “The rest of you can stay alive—all you have to do is remember. Or does death mean nothing to a ghola?”
With a disappointed sigh, he nodded again, and Ingva killed another one.
“Five left.” He looked down at the unpleasant mess, then glanced apologetically to Hellica. “There is a possibility that none of these gholas is acceptable. The next batch will be ready soon, but perhaps we should prepare more axlotl tanks, just in case.”
“We’re trying!” one of the Waffs cried.
“You are also dying. Time is running out.” Uxtal waited for a moment, until his anticipation turned to clear dismay. He was sweating, too; his entire career, such as it was, was hanging on the line.
Ingva killed another one. Half of the Waffs now lay dead on the floor.
Moments later she killed a fifth, stepping up behind him, grabbing his dark hair, and slitting his throat.
Frantic, the remaining three Waffs tore at their own hair and struck themselves in the chests and faces, as if physical blows could dislodge memories. Weaving back and forth with her long knife, Ingva slashed at them, making shallow and playful cuts in their gray skin. Despite their continued frantic protestations, she murdered a sixth ghola.
Only two remained.
Waff One and his last identical sibling—Waff Seven—could feel hidden thoughts and experiences boiling through the turmoil in their minds, like regurgitated food. Waff One watched the agony around him, saw the corpses of his brothers. The memories were locked away, but not by the veils of time; rather, he suspected the old Masters had implanted some sort of internal security system.
“Oh, just kill them all!” Hellica said. “We have wasted your time today, Navigator.”
“Wait,” Edrik said through a speaker in his tank. “Allow this to play out.”
The tension and the panic in the two remaining gholas had reached a peak. By now the pressure of the crisis should have caused a critical meltdown.
Acting on her own, without looking at Uxtal or the Matre Superior, Ingva drew the slaughtering knife across the belly of Waff Seven and eviscerated him. Blood and entrails spilled out, and he doubled over, screaming, trying to hold his intestines inside. He took a long time dying, and his moans filled the room, with Uxtal’s repeated demands for information as a counterpoint.
Now the Matre Superior herself strode forward, glaring at Uxtal. “This is a tedious failure, little man. You are worthless.” She drew a small, stubby dagger from her waist. Moving up to Waff One, she pressed the point against his temple. “This is the thinnest point in your skull. I’d barely need to press at all to shove my blade into your brain. Maybe that will cut loose your memories?” The knife’s tip drew a drop of dark blood. “You have ten seconds.”
Waff was giddy with terror, and only distantly aware that both his bowels and his bladder had let loose. Hellica began counting down. Numbers like sledgehammers struck his mind. Numbers . . . formulae, calculations. Sacred mathematical combinations.
“Wait!”
The Matre Superior completed her countdown. The Navigator continued to observe. Uxtal himself trembled in terror, as if convinced she would kill him next.
Waff suddenly started babbling a steady stream of information that he had never learned from the forced-education systems. It flowed out of him like sewage from a burst pipe. Materials, procedures, random quotations from the secret catechism of the Great Belief. He described secret meetings with Honored Matres