Hunters of Dune - Brian Herbert [208]
Like the Enemy . . . except that the Bene Gesserit had intentionally put the sands in motion, sacrificing everything else to produce one substance—melange—for the ultimate victory they hoped to achieve. The war against the Honored Matres had cost humanity dearly for the past several decades, inflicting great harm and destroying many planets. And the whores were by far the lesser threat.
Accadia, the old Archives Mother, stood in the center of the projection field in silent reverence, with a hundred of the New Sisterhood’s most intelligent followers. “This shows what you need to know, and the scope of the threat we now face. I’ve drawn heavily on candid testimonies provided by our former Honored Matres, tracking their initial expansion into unexplored territories . . . and their recent abrupt withdrawal back into the Old Empire.”
Now that Murbella had broken through the black wall in her Other Memories, she understood exactly what the Enemy was and what the Honored Matres had done to provoke them. She knew more about the nature of the Outside Enemy than Odrade, Taraza, or any previous Bene Gesserit leader had ever guessed.
She had lived those lives.
In particular she saw herself as a harsh, ambitious, and successful commander, driving her squadron of ships outward, ever outward. Lenise. That was my name. In those days she’d had spiky black hair, obsidian eyes, and an array of metal adornments protruding from her cheeks and brow—battle trophies, one for each rival she had killed in her rise to power. But after failing in a bid to assassinate a higher rank, she had taken her loyal squadrons and plunged farther out into uncharted territory. Not as an act of cowardice, Lenise had assured herself. Not to flee. But to conquer new territory of her own.
In their rapacious expansion, she and her Honored Matres had blundered into the fringe of a vast and growing empire—a nonhuman empire—the existence of which had not been previously suspected. Unknown to them, this dangerous Enemy had its genesis more than fifteen thousand years ago, in the last days of the Butlerian Jihad.
The Honored Matres had encountered a strange manufacturing outpost, a bustling interconnected metropolis inhabited entirely by machines. Thinking machines. The significance of this had been lost on Lenise and her women; they had asked few questions about the origin of what they’d found.
The self-perpetuating, evolving computer evermind had taken root again, building and spreading a vastly networked landscape of machine intelligences. Lenise had not understood, nor had she cared. She had issued the order—lost in the vision of history now, Murbella mouthed the words again—and the Honored Matres had done what they did best: attacking without provocation, expecting to conquer and dominate.
Never guessing the scale or strength of what she had found, Lenise and her Honored Matres had surprised the machines, stolen shiploads of powerful and exotic weapons, destroyed the outpost . . . and then left. She had added several metal adornments to her face to celebrate the victory. And then returned to reconquer the other Honored Matres who had initially defeated her.
The machines’ response had been swift and terrible. They launched a massive retaliation that swept forward into the settled worlds of the Scattering, exterminating whole Honored Matre planets with deadly new viruses. The Enemy continued to hound them, hunting down and destroying the whores in their hiding places.
Murbella saw various generations in different memories. Never terribly subtle, the Honored Matres began their panicked flight, stampeding across star systems, plundering them before moving on. Setting bonfires and burning bridges behind them. What an embarrassment to them . . . how resoundingly they had been