Sandworms of Dune - Brian Herbert [154]
The Guildsman operated his weapons controls, barely bothering to choose targets. He launched ten more Obliterators, then another ten. None exploded, and the machine ships kept coming.
Her voice low, Murbella said, “Now fire all the standard projectiles we have. And once we deplete our conventional armaments, we’ll use our ships as battering rams. Whatever we have.”
“But why, Mother Commander?” Gorus said. “We should fall back and regroup. Plan some other way to fight. We must at least survive!”
“If we don’t win today, we don’t survive anyway. We may be outnumbered, but we can still wipe out part of the thinking-machine fleet. I will not simply abandon Chapterhouse!”
Gorus scrambled back to his feet. “To what purpose, Mother Commander? The machines can just replace themselves.”
As they spoke, more Obliterators filled space. So far, all had turned out to be duds.
“The purpose is to show them we can still fight. It is what makes us human, what gives us significance. History shall not record that we abandoned Chapterhouse and tried to hide from the final confrontation between humanity and the thinking machines.”
“History? Who will be left to record history?”
Within three minutes of each other, six small foldspace craft raced into the battle zone over Chapterhouse, reporting from the other clusters of ships. They transmitted urgent messages and demanded new orders from the Mother Commander. “Our Obliterators don’t function!”
“All navigation systems have shut down.”
“How do we fight them now, Mother Commander?”
She answered in a strong, steady tone. “We fight with everything we have.”
Just then, a fabulously bright flash blew across at least fifty of the Enemy vessels, vaporizing them in an expanding arc that sent a shudder through the decks of the more distant Guild vessels. Murbella gasped, then laughed. “See! One of the Obliterators still worked! Fire the rest of them.”
To her astonishment, space around them suddenly shimmered, cracked, and disgorged hundreds of giant ships. Not human defender vessels.
At first Murbella thought that the Enemy machines had sent yet another devastating fleet, but she quickly identified the cartouche on the curved hulls. Guild Heighliners! They spilled out of foldspace from every direction, surrounding the first massive wave of thinking-machine vessels.
“Administrator, why did you hold out on us?” Murbella’s voice was brittle. “There must be a thousand ships here!”
Gorus seemed just as astonished as she was.
A female voice thrummed across the commlines that linked Murbella’s defenders. “I am the Oracle of Time, and I bring reinforcements. Mathematical compilers corrupted many Guild vessels, but my Navigators control these Heighliners.”
“Navigators?” The white-haired Administrator gasped in consternation. “We thought they were all dead, starved for spice.”
The Oracle spoke in a powerful, lilting tone. “And my ships—unlike those made by the traitorous fabricators of Ix—command full armaments. Our Obliterators work as designed. We took them from old Honored Matre ships and hid them away for our own defenses. We intend to use them now.”
Murbella’s face flushed. She had suspected the rebel Honored Matres had possessed many more Obliterators than were found. So, the Navigators had been hiding them all along!
The Omnius invasion fleet shifted position in response to the Navigator reinforcements, but the machines could not comprehend the magnitude of the astonishing opponent they now faced. They did not react in time as the Oracle’s Heighliners spewed out dazzling sunbursts in a flurry of explosions like miniature supernovas. Each incinerating burst of light vaporized entire clusters of the overly complacent Enemy vessels.
Although the machine forces scrambled to defend themselves, their response was ineffective, as if their control functions had been disconnected. The evermind had modeled his plan repeatedly,