Hunters of Dune - Brian Herbert [209]
All the while, they led the Enemy toward the Old Empire.
Murbella knew it all. She saw it vividly in her past, in her history, in her memories. She needed to Share those experiences with other Sisters who had not yet unlocked their generational secrets. The Enemy is Omnius. The Enemy is coming.
Now, under the domed rotunda with the audience hushed, Accadia worked the display with gnarled fingers. A holoprojection of the Known Universe materialized over their heads in the great vaulted room, highlighting key star systems in the Old Empire as well as planets described by those who had returned from the Scattering. A variety of independent federations had formed out there—clustered governments, trade alliances, and isolated religious colonies, all tied together by a thin common thread of humanity.
The Tyrant spoke of this in his Golden Path, Murbella thought. Or is our understanding imperfect, as usual?
The old librarian’s voice crackled. “Here are the planets the whores already charred, using the terrible Obliterator weapons they stole from the Enemy.”
A spangle of red spattered like blood across the star chart. Too much red! So many Bene Gesserit planets, even Rakis, all of the Tleilaxu worlds, and any other planet that happened to be in the way. Lampadas, Qalloway, Andosia, the low-gravity fairyland cities on Oalar . . . Now graveyards, all of them.
How could she not have seen this blatant horror when she called herself an Honored Matre? We never looked behind us except to find out how close the Enemy was. We knew we had provoked something ferocious, but we still barged into the Old Empire like a hound into a chicken house, wreaking havoc in our attempt to flee.
When the Enemy got here, the stirred-up planets would fight instinctively, and they would be annihilated. The Honored Matres used that as a stalling tactic, throwing obstructions in the path of the oncoming opponent.
“The whores did all that?” breathed Reverend Mother Laera, one of Murbella’s administrative advisors.
Accadia seemed intrinsically fascinated by what she could show. “Look—this is far more frightening.”
Another swath of the perimeter systems turned a dull, sickly blue. The star charts displayed some as blurry points, indicating unverified coordinates. The number of affected worlds was far greater than the red wound of Honored Matre destruction.
“These are the planets we know have already been destroyed by the Enemy out in the Scattering. Honored Matre worlds wiped out primarily through devastating plagues.”
Studying the huge, complex projection, Murbella didn’t need a Mentat to draw the obvious conclusions from the patterns she saw. Her Bene Gesserit and Honored Matre advisors muttered uneasily. They had never before seen the outside threat so plainly displayed.
Murbella could truly sense the nearness of “Arafel,” the cloud-darkness at the end of the universe. With so many dark legends pointing in the same direction, she smelled her human mortality.
Even Chapterhouse, marked on the three-dimensional holoprojection as a pristine white ball far from the Guild’s main shipping lanes, would become the target of those relentless hunters.
The unified Sisters now had the Spacing Guild to assist them, though Murbella did not fully trust the Navigators or the less-mutated Administrators. She harbored no illusions about a lasting alliance with the Guild or CHOAM, if the war went badly. The Navigator Edrik dealt with her only because she’d bribed him with spice, and he would cease to cooperate if he ever found an alternative source of melange. If the Guild’s administrative faction chose to rely on Ixian mathematical compilers, then she had very little hold over them.
“The Enemy does not seem to be in a particular hurry,” Janess said.
“Why should they be?” Kiria said. “They are coming, and nothing seems able to slow them.”
Searching, Murbella noted the general mark—a locus in space, poorly defined by only anecdotal coordinates—of the first encounter with the Enemy, where a long-dead Honored Matre named Lenise had stumbled