Sandworms of Dune - Brian Herbert [129]
But the Futar rolled as he collapsed, spun in a blur, and before she could feel a moment of victory, he snapped Garimi’s neck. She dropped with barely a sigh. In a purely spiteful gesture, he ripped out her throat before calmly reshaping his body to his blank Face Dancer state. He wiped blood from his face with one sleeve.
More broken than even his own shape-shifter abilities could easily heal, the Rabbi crawled and then limped to the Ithaca’s main controls. He heard running feet in the corridor, so he sealed the navigation bridge, applied emergency locks, and activated a mutiny-defense protocol.
In the years he had maintained his disguise, the Face Dancer had covertly sampled the skin cells of Duncan Idaho, Sheeana, and Bashar Miles Teg. Now his hands flowed into the proper identification prints so that the no-ship’s highly secure controls responded to him. The sealed doors would stand against any intrusion. Eventually the Bene Gesserits would find a way to break in, but by that time he would have completed his mission.
His thinking-machine masters would be alerted. And they would come.
Long ago, he had studied how to operate the Holtzman engines. Estimating the coordinates as best he could, not worried about the lack of a Navigator, the Face Dancer folded space and plunged the Ithaca across the galaxy. The ship tumbled out into a different stellar region, not far from Omnius’s advancing forces. He reconfigured the ship’s comsystems and triggered a locator beacon. His superiors knew the signal.
The thinking machines would respond swiftly. Already the Face Dancer could sense the hungry, invisible tachyon net coming closer. This time there would be no escape. The no-ship would be completely trapped.
Even small opponents can be deadly.
—Bene Gesserit Analytical Report on the Tleilaxu Problem
By the time Duncan, Sheeana, and Teg reached the navigation bridge, the thick hatches were sealed and locked. Impregnable. The bridge had been designed to remain secure against even an army.
Within moments, other Sisters followed, having first raced to the armory and obtained hand weapons: poisonous needle guns, stunners, and a high-powered lascutter. None of those devices would be sufficient. Rushing forward, the ghola children joined the crowd outside the sealed bridge, among them Paul, Chani, Jessica, Leto II, and young Alia.
Duncan could feel the change when the no-ship lurched through foldspace. “He’s at the controls, moving us!”
“Garimi is dead, then,” Sheeana concluded.
“The Face Dancer is going to take us directly to the Enemy,” Teg said.
“Now is the time to use Scytale’s poison gas to kill the Face Dancer.” Sheeana turned to two of the Sisters standing in the corridor. “Find the Tleilaxu and take him to our guarded cabinet. Get one of the canisters, and we will flood the air on the bridge with the gas.”
“No time for that,” Duncan said. “We’ve got to get in there!”
Alia sounded eerily cool and intelligent as she announced, “I can get inside.”
Duncan looked at the girl. To him, the echo-memories evoked by this child were unsettling. The original Duncan had never known her as a youngster—he had been killed by Sardaukar while Jessica was barely pregnant. But he did have vivid memories of an older Alia as his lover, in another life. But that was all history. Now it might as well be myth or legend.
He bent down to talk to her. “How? There isn’t much time.”
“I’m small enough.” With a flick of her eyes, the little girl indicated the narrow air-exchanger vents leading into the command deck. She was far more diminutive than even Scytale.
Sheeana was already removing the grate. “There are baffles, filters, and bars in the way. How will you get through?”
“Give me a cutter. And a needle gun. I’ll get the door open for you as soon as I can. From the inside.”
When Alia had what she needed, Duncan hoisted the girl up to where she could squirm inside the tiny tunnel. Not yet four years old, she weighed very little. Jessica stood watching, looking more