Sandworms of Dune - Brian Herbert [144]
She looked around. “Confirm that the Obliterators are armed. Where are the explosions? Launch the second volley!”
Alarms began to ring. In a frenzy, Gorus ran from one station to another, shouting at the Guildsmen on the upper decks. A harried-looking Reverend Mother charged into the command center, skidding to a stop in front of Murbella. “Our Obliterators are doing nothing. They are all useless.”
“But they were tested! Our Sisters watched the manufacturing lines. How could they be faulty?”
Then, all at once, the one hundred Chapterhouse defender ships went dead in space, their engines shutting down, lights flickering. The thrum of station-keeping thrusters faded.
“What is happening?” Gorus demanded. “Sabotage? Were we betrayed?”
As if they had expected this all along, the machine ships closed in.
A Guildsman transmitted in a hollow voice over the speaking screen, “The artificial navigation systems no longer respond, Administrator. We are shut out of our own controls. Our ships are . . . nonfunctional.” Emergency lights lit the decks with an eerie glow.
“Did the machines figure out how to neutralize our systems?”
Gorus turned to Murbella. “No jamming, Mother Commander. They . . . they just don’t work. None of them.”
Suddenly the machine forces were upon them, a thousand vessels that would easily overwhelm the defenders. Murbella prepared to die. Her fighters could not protect themselves, or Chapterhouse, which she had sworn to guard.
But instead of attacking, the Enemy fleet cruised slowly past the defenders, taunting them in their impotence. The machines did not bother to open fire, as if the Sisterhood’s defenses weren’t even worth noticing!
Far behind them, just arriving at the distant edge of the solar system, came another wave of thinking machines, closing in on Chapterhouse. The same thing must be happening everywhere, at all of her carefully staged last stands across a hundred star systems.
“They knew! The damned machines knew our Obliterators wouldn’t work!” As if Murbella’s vessels were no more than a pebble on the path, the Omnius ships flowed around them on their way to the Sisterhood’s now-unprotected homeworld.
Not one of her new Guild war vessels had a living Navigator aboard; most of the Navigators and their Heighliners had disappeared. Every ship in her battle groups used Ixian mathematical compilers for guidance. Mathematical compilers! Computers . . . thinking machines.
The Ixians! Now her silent curse was directed at herself for overconfidence in the new Obliterators and her own ability to predict the Enemy’s tactics.
“Follow me, Administrator. I want to see these Obliterators for myself.” She grabbed Gorus’s arm hard enough to leave bruises.
Guided by emergency illumination, they rushed to the weapons deck where the armaments had been installed. Inside, rack upon rack held the burnished silver eggs of the planet-melters that Ix had manufactured. A distraught Guildsman intercepted them. “We tested the weapons, Administrator, and they were installed correctly. The firing controls are operational. We just launched dozens of Obliterators, but none of them detonated.”
“Why didn’t they function?”
“Because . . . because the Obliterators themselves . . .”
Murbella marched over to where the man had opened one casing at random. Beneath a complicated labyrinth of circuitry and delicate components, the Obliterator charge was fused into the shell of the mechanism, making the whole thing inoperable. The weapon had been neutralized.
“It is useless, Mother Commander,” said Gorus. “Sabotaged.”
“But I saw the tests myself. How can this be?”
“A timing mechanism may have shut everything down at a prearranged time, or the Enemy fleet might have sent out a deactivating signal. Some devious trick that we could not have anticipated.”
Murbella stood appalled, guilty of the same error she had been so certain