Sandworms of Dune - Brian Herbert [20]
He looked past her, not blinking. “That is within my capabilities.”
“Did you commit this terrible act and cover your tracks?”
Now his gaze met hers. “No.”
“Did you have any reason to prevent Gurney Halleck, Serena Butler, or Xavier Harkonnen from being born?”
“I did not.”
Now that Duncan faced her and a Truthsayer, Sheeana could have asked him questions about their personal relationship to witness his reaction. He would not be able to lie to her or pretend. But she feared his answers. She didn’t dare ask.
“He speaks the truth,” said Calissa. “He’s not our saboteur.”
Duncan remained in the room when Bashar Miles Teg came for questioning. Calissa displayed images of the horrific scene from the birthing chamber. “Are you in any way responsible for this, Miles Teg?”
The Bashar stared at the images, looked up at her, turned his gaze to Duncan. “Yes.”
Sheeana was so startled that she struggled to think of another question.
“How so?” Duncan asked.
“I am responsible for security aboard this no-ship. Clearly, I failed in my duty. If I had done a better job, this atrocity never would have occurred.” He glanced at the troubled Calissa. “Since you asked me in the presence of a Truthsayer, I couldn’t lie.”
“Very well, Miles. But that isn’t what we meant. Did you commit this sabotage or authorize it? Do you know anything about it?”
“No,” he answered emphatically.
Dozens of private chambers were set up, where the interrogations could continue unabated. They asked every one of the ghola children, from Paul Atreides all the way to nine-year-old Leto II, and the Truthsayers detected no criminal falsehoods.
Then the Rabbi and all of the Jews.
And every other passenger aboard the no-ship.
Nothing. Not a single person seemed to be connected with the murderous incident. Duncan and Teg used their Mentat skills to check and recheck the lists of people aboard, yet they could find no errors. No one had evaded questioning.
Sitting across from Sheeana in the otherwise empty interrogation room, Duncan steepled his fingers. “There are two possibilities. Either the saboteur is capable of deceiving a Truthsayer . . . or someone we don’t know about is hiding aboard the Ithaca.”
IN WELL ORGANIZED teams, the Bene Gesserit blocked off, then sectioned the no-ship’s decks, methodically moving from cabin to cabin and chamber to chamber. But it was a formidable task. The Ithaca was the size of a small city, more than a kilometer long and hundreds of decks high, each filled with passages, chambers, and hidden doors.
While trying to guess how someone else might have sneaked aboard, unknown to them, Duncan remembered discovering the mummified remains of Bene Gesserit captives the Honored Matres had tortured to death. That sealed chamber of horrors had gone undetected during the whole time Duncan had been held prisoner inside the ship on the Chapterhouse landing field.
Could someone else—an unknown Honored Matre, perhaps?—have remained hidden aboard for all that time? More than thirty years! It did not seem possible, but the vessel had thousands of work bays, living quarters, corridors, and storage lockers.
Another possibility: During the escape from the planet of the Handlers, several Face Dancers had crashed small fighters into the no-ship’s hull. Mangled bodies had been pulled from the wreckage of those ships . . . but could it all have been a ruse? What if some had actually survived those kamikaze crashes and slipped away? Perhaps one or more Face Dancers were lurking in the untraveled passages of the no-ship, looking for ways to strike.
If so, it was imperative to find them.
Teg had already installed hundreds more surveillance imagers at strategic locations, but that was only a stopgap measure at best. The Ithaca was so large that even the best security equipment had thousands of blind spots, and there simply weren’t enough personnel to monitor the imagers already in place. It was an impossible task.
Still, they tried.
As Duncan accompanied a group of five searchers, he was reminded of a beating party