Sandworms of Dune - Brian Herbert [84]
“These have grown in the open desert,” Stilgar said. “Shai-Hulud wants this planet.”
“Not if I can help it,” Var said. But as if to defy him, directly below the flyer an immense head surfaced and quested around, trying to track the conflicting sources of vibrations.
Long tubes protruded from the front and rear of the flyer. The commandos gripped their gun mountings, nozzles that could be turned and aimed. The flyer swooped low. “Fire when ready, but conserve what you can. The water’s deadly enough.”
The fighters shot high-pressure streams from their hoses, blasting the sandworm below. The drenching bursts were more effective than artillery shells.
Taken by surprise, the creature writhed and twisted its round head back and forth, convulsing. Hard ring segments split apart to reveal softer pink flesh between, and water burned like acid into the vulnerable parts. The worm rolled on the wet sand, in obvious agony.
“They are killing Shai-Hulud,” Stilgar said, sickened.
Liet was also stunned, but said, “These people have to defend themselves.”
“That’s enough! It is dead—or soon will be,” Var shouted. The small force reluctantly shut off their hoses, looking with hatred upon the dying worm. Unable to dig deep enough to escape the poisonous moisture, the mortally wounded creature continued to squirm as the flyer circled over its death throes. Finally the beast gave a great final shudder and stopped moving.
Stilgar nodded, his expression still grim. “There are necessities to life in the desert, hard decisions to be made.” He had to accept the clear fact that this worm did not belong here on Qelso. No sandworm did. On the way back to the settlement, they encountered a second worm, drawn by the vibrations of their flyer’s engines. The commandos emptied their water reservoirs, and the second worm perished even more quickly.
Liet and Stilgar sat together in uncomfortable silence, wrapped up in what they had seen and the fight they had agreed to join. “Even though she doesn’t have her memories back yet,” Liet said, “I’m glad my daughter Chani did not see this.”
Though the mood of the fighters was upbeat aboard the flyer, the two young men, remembering Arrakis, murmured Fremen prayers. Stilgar was still contemplating what they had seen and done when Var yelled a strangled-sounding alarm.
Suddenly strange ships swarmed around them.
You see only harshness, devastation, and ugliness. That is because you have no faith. Around me I see a potential paradise, for Rakis is the birthplace of my beloved Prophet.
—WAFF of the Tleilaxu
When he first glimpsed Rakis, the bleak ruins brought dismay to Waff’s heart. But when Edrik’s Heighliner deposited him and his small team of Guild assistants there, he experienced the joy of setting foot on the desert planet again. He could feel the holy calling deep inside his bones.
In his previous lifetime he had stood on these sands, face to face with the Prophet. With Sheeana and Reverend Mother Odrade, he had ridden a great worm out to the ruins of Sietch Tabr. His ghola memories were corrupted and uncertain, riddled with annoying gaps. Waff could not recall his final moments as the whores closed in around the desert planet, deploying their awful Obliterators. Had he run for hopeless shelter, looking behind him like Lot’s wife for a last glimpse of the doomed city? Had he seen explosions and walls of flame searing the sky, sweeping toward him?
But the cells of another Waff ghola had been grown in an axlotl tank in Bandalong as part of the usual process. The secret council of the kehl had planned for the serial immortality of all Tleilaxu Masters long before anyone had heard of Honored Matres. The next thing he knew, Waff was awakened to his past life during a grand guignol stage show as the brutal women murdered one of his twins after another until just one of them—him—reached a sufficiently desperate crisis to break through the ghola barrier and reveal his past. Some of it, at least.
But not until now had Waff actually seen the Armageddon that the whores had wrought