Dune: House Atreides Read online

  The ground crew captain called back, broadcasting on a general frequency since the Baron had shut down his own receiver. “Sir, our probes indicate that the temperature is rising deep below— a dramatic spike! Something’s going on down there, a chemical reaction. And one of our ground-roving teams just broke into a swarming nest of sandtrout.”

  The Baron growled, furious with the man for communicating on an unencrypted channel. What if CHOAM spies were listening? Besides, no one cared about sandtrout. The jellylike creatures deep beneath the sand were as irrelevant to him as flies swarming around a long-abandoned corpse.

  He made a mental note to do more to this weakling captain than just remove him from the work crews and deny him a bonus. That gutless bastard was probably handpicked by Abulurd.

  The Baron saw tiny figures of scouts tracking through the sands, running about like ants maddened with acid vapor. They rushed back to the main spice factory. One man leaped off his dirt-encrusted rover and scrambled toward the open door of the massive machine.

  “What are those men doing? Are they abandoning their posts? Bring us down closer so I can see.”

  The pilot tilted the ornithopter and descended like an ominous beetle toward the sand. Below, the men leaned over, coughing and retching as they tried to drag filters over their faces. Two stumbled on the shifting sand. Others were rapidly battening down the spice factory.

  “Bring the carryall! Bring the carryall!” someone cried.

  The spotters all reported in. “I see no wormsign.”

  “Still nothing.”

  “All clear from here,” said a third.

  “Why are they evacuating?” the Baron demanded, as if the pilot would know.

  “Something’s happening,” the crew captain yelled. “Where’s that carryall? We need it now!”

  The ground bucked. Four workers stumbled and pitched facefirst onto the sand before they could reach the ramp to the spice factory.

  “Look, m’Lord!” The pilot pointed downward, his voice filled with awe. As the Baron stopped focusing on the cowardly men, he saw the sand trembling all around the excavation site, vibrating like a struck drumhead.

  The spice harvester canted, slipped to one side. A crack opened in the sands, and the whole site began to swell from beneath the ground, rising in the air like a gas bubble in a boiling Salusan mudpot.

  “Get us out of here!” the Baron shouted. The pilot stared for a fraction of a second, and the Baron swept his left hand with the speed of a cracked whip, striking the man hard on the cheek. “Move!”

  The pilot grabbed the ’thopter controls and wrenched them into a steep ascent. The articulated wings flapped furiously.

  On the terrain below, the swollen underground bubble reached its apex— then burst, hurling the spice harvester, the mobile crews, and everything else up off the surface. A gigantic explosion of sand sprayed upward, carrying broken rock and volatile orange spice. The mammoth factory was crushed and blasted to pieces, scattered like lost rags in a Coriolis storm.

  “What the devil happened?” The Baron’s dark eyes went wide in disbelief at the sheer magnitude of the disaster. All that precious spice gone, swallowed in an instant. All the equipment destroyed. The loss in lives hardly occurred to him, except for the wasted costs of crew training.

  “Hang on, m’Lord,” the pilot cried. His knuckles turned white on the controls.

  A hammer-blast of wind struck them. The armored ornithopter turned end over end in the air, wings flailing. The engines whined and groaned, trying to maintain stability. Pellets of high-velocity sand struck the plaz windowports. Dust-clogged, the ’thopter’s motors made sick, coughing sounds. The craft lost altitude, dropping toward the seething maw of the desert.

  The pilot shouted unintelligible words. The Baron clutched his crash restraints, saw the ground coming toward them like an inverted bootheel to squash an insect.

  As head of House Harkonnen, he had always thought he would die by a treacherous assassin’s hand . . . but to fall prey to an unpredictable natural disaster instead— the Baron found it almost humorous.

  As they plunged, he saw the sand open like a festering sore. The dust and raw melange were being sucked down, turned over by convection currents and chemical reactions. The rich spice vein of only moments before had turned into a leprous mouth ready to swallow them.

  But the pilot, who had seemed weak and distractible during their flight, became rigid with concentration and determination. His fingers flew over sky rudder and engine throttle controls, working to ride the currents, switching flow from one motor to another to discharge dust strangulation in the air intakes.

  Finally the ornithopter leveled off, steadied itself again, and cruised low over the dune plain. The pilot emitted an audible sigh of relief.

  Where the great opening had been ripped into the layered sand, the Baron now saw glittering translucent shapes like maggots on a carcass: sandtrout, rushing toward the explosion. Soon giant worms would come, too. The monsters couldn’t possibly resist this.

  Try as he might, the Baron couldn’t understand spice. Not at all.

  The ’thopter gained altitude, taking them toward the spotters and the carryalls that had been caught unawares. They hadn’t been able to retrieve the spice factory and its precious cargo before the explosion, and he could blame no one for it— no one but himself. The Baron had given them explicit orders to remain out of reach.

  “You just saved my life, pilot. What is your name?”

  “Kryubi, sir.”

  “All right, then, Kryubi— have you ever seen such a thing? What happened down there? What caused that explosion?”

  The pilot took a deep breath. “I’ve heard the Fremen talking about something they call a . . . spice blow.” He seemed like a statue now, as if the terror had transformed him into something much stronger. “It happens in the deep desert, where few people can see.”

  “Who cares what the Fremen say?” He curled his lip at the thought of the dirty, nomadic indigents of the great desert. “We’ve all heard of spice blows, but nobody’s ever actually seen one. Crazy superstitions.”

  “Yes, but superstition usually has some kind of basis. They see many things out in the desert.” Now the Baron admired the man for his willingness to speak out, though Kryubi must know of his temper and vindictiveness. Perhaps it would be wise to promote him. . . .

  “They say a spice blow is a chemical explosion,” Kryubi continued, “probably the result of a pre-spice mass beneath the sands.”

  The Baron considered this; he couldn’t deny the evidence of his own eyes. One day maybe someone would understand the true nature of melange and be able to prevent disasters like this. So far, because the spice was seemingly inexhaustible to those willing to make the effort, no one had bothered with a detailed analysis. Why waste time on tests, when fortunes waited to be made? The Baron had a monopoly on Arrakis— but it was also a monopoly based on ignorance.

  He gritted his teeth and knew that once they returned to Carthag he would be forced to blow off some steam, to release his pent-up tensions on “amusements,” perhaps a bit more vigorously than he had earlier intended. He would have to find a special candidate this time— not one of his regular lovers, but someone he would never have use for again. That would free him of restraint.

  Looking down, he thought, No longer any need to hide this site from the Emperor. They would record it, log it as a find, and document the destruction of the crew and equipment. No need to manipulate the records now. Old Elrood would not be pleased, and House Harkonnen would have to absorb this financial setback.

  As the pilot circled around, the surviving spice crew assessed their damages on the ground, and over the comlink reported losses of men, equipment, and spice load. The Baron felt rage boiling within him.

  Damn Arrakis! he thought. Damn the spice, and damn our dependence on it!

  We are generalists. You can’t draw neat lines around planetwide problems. Planetology is a cut-and-fit science
.

  —PARDOT KYNES, Treatise on the Environmental Recovery of Post-Holocaust Salusa Secundus

  On the Imperial planet Kaitain, immense buildings kissed the sky. Magnificent sculptures and opulent tiered fountains lined the crystal-paved boulevards like a dream. A person could stare for hours.

  Pardot Kynes managed to catch only a glimpse of the urban spectacle as the royal guards marched him at a rapid clip into the Palace. They had no patience for a simple Planetologist’s curiosity, nor any apparent interest in the city’s wonders. Their job was to escort him to the tremendous vaulted throne room, without delay. The Emperor of the Known Universe could not be kept waiting for mere sight-seeing.

  The members of Kynes’s escort wore gray-and-black uniforms, impeccably clean and adorned with braids and medals, every button and bauble polished, every ribbon straightened and pressed. Fifteen of the Emperor’s handpicked staff, the Sardaukar, surrounded him like an army.

  Still, the splendor of the capital world overwhelmed Kynes. Turning to the guard closest to him, he said, “I’m usually out in the dirt, or tromping through swamps on a planet where nobody else wants to be.” He had never seen, or even imagined, anything like this in all of the rugged and out-of-the-way landscapes he had studied.

  The guard made no response to this tall, lean off-worlder. Sardaukar were trained to be fighting machines, not conversationalists.

  “Here I’ve been scrubbed clean down to the third layer of my skin and dressed like a noble.” Kynes tugged at the thick corded fabric of his dark blue jacket, smelled the soap and scent of his own skin. He had a high forehead, with sparse, sandy hair combed straight back.

  The escort hurried up a seemingly endless waterfall of polished stone steps, ornately highlighted with gold filigree and creamy, sparkling soostones.

  Kynes turned to the guard on his left. “This is my first trip to Kaitain. I’d wager you don’t even notice the sights anymore, if you work here all the time?” His words hung on a wistful smile, but again fell on deaf ears.

  Kynes was an expert and well-respected ecologist, geologist, and meteorologist, with added specialties in botany and microbiology. Driven, he enjoyed absorbing the mysteries of entire worlds. But the people themselves often remained a complete mystery to him— like these guards.

  “Kaitain is a lot more . . . comfortable than Salusa Secundus— I grew up there, you know,” he continued. “I’ve been to Bela Tegeuse, too, and that’s almost as bad, dim and bleak with two dwarf suns.”

  Finally Kynes faced forward, consenting to mutter to himself. “The Padishah Emperor called me from halfway across the galaxy. I wish I knew why.” None of these men ventured to offer any explanations.

  The entourage passed under a pitted archway of crimson lava rock that bore the ponderous oppression of extreme age. Kynes looked up, and with his geological expertise recognized the massive rare stone: an ancient archway from the devastated world of Salusa Secundus.

  It puzzled him that anyone would keep such a relic from the austere planet where Kynes had spent so many years, an isolated prison world with a ruined ecosystem. But then he recalled, feeling like a fool for having forgotten it, that Salusa had once been the Imperial capital, millennia ago . . . before the disaster changed everything. No doubt House Corrino had brought this archway here intact as a reminder of their past, or as some sort of trophy to show how the Imperial family had overcome planet-destroying adversity.

  As the Sardaukar escort stepped through the lava arch and into the echoing splendor of the Palace itself, fanfare rang out from brassy instruments Kynes could not name. He’d never been much of a student in music or the arts, not even as a child. Why bother, when there was so much natural science to absorb?

  Just before passing beneath the jewel-sparkling roof of the immense royal structure, Kynes craned his neck upward to gaze once more at the clear sky of perfect blue.

  On the trip here, inside a cordoned-off section of the Guild Heighliner, Kynes had taken the time to learn about the capital world, though he had never before applied his planet-understanding skills to such a civilized place. Kaitain was exquisitely planned and produced, with tree-lined boulevards, splendid architecture, well-watered gardens, flower barricades . . . and so much more.

  Official Imperial reports claimed it was always warm, the climate forever temperate. Storms were unknown. No clouds marred the skies. At first, he thought the entries might have been mere tourist propaganda, but when the ornate Guild escort craft descended, he had noted the flotilla of weather satellites, climate-bending technology that— through brute force— kept Kaitain a peaceful and serene place.

  Climate engineers could certainly strong-arm the weather to what someone had foolishly decided was optimal— though they did it at their own peril, creating an environment that led, ultimately, to malaise of the mind, body, and spirit. The Imperial family would never understand that. They continued to relax under their sunny skies and stroll through their well-watered arboretums, oblivious to an environmental catastrophe just waiting to unfold before their covered eyes. It would be a challenge to stay on this planet and study the effects— but somehow Kynes doubted that was why Emperor Elrood IX had summoned him here. . . .

  The escort troops led him deeper into the echoing Palace, passing statuary and classic paintings. The sprawling audience chamber could well have been an arena for ancient gladiatorial events. Its floor stretched onward like a polished, multicolored plain of stone squares— each one from a different planet in the Imperium. Alcoves and wings were being added as the Empire grew.

  Court functionaries in dazzling raiment and brilliant plumage strutted about, showing off fabrics that had been spun with threads of precious metal. Carrying documents, they conducted inexplicable business, hurrying to meetings, whispering to each other as if only they understood what their true functions were.

  Kynes was an alien in this political world; he would rather have the wilderness any day. Though the splendor fascinated him, he longed for solitude, unexplored landscapes, and the mysteries of strange flora and fauna. This bustling place would give him a headache before long.

  The Sardaukar guards ushered him across a long promenade beneath prismatic lights, taking sharp, rhythmic footsteps that sounded like weapons fire; Kynes’s stumbles provided the only dissonance.

  Ahead on a raised dais of blue-green crystal sat the translucent Golden Lion Throne, carved from a single piece of Hagal quartz. And on the dazzling chair perched the old man himself— Elrood Corrino IX, Imperial ruler of the Known Universe.

  Kynes stared at him. The Emperor was a distressingly gaunt man, skeletal with age, with a ponderously large head on a thin neck. Surrounded by such incredible luxury and dramatic richness, the aged ruler appeared somehow insignificant. But with a twitch of his large-knuckled finger, the Emperor could condemn entire planets to annihilation, killing billions of people. Elrood had sat upon the Golden Lion Throne for nearly a century and a half. How many planets were in the Imperium? How many people did this man rule? Kynes wondered how anyone could tally such a staggering amount of information.

  As he was led to the base of the dais, Kynes smiled uncertainly at Elrood, then swallowed hard, averted his gaze, and bowed low. No one had bothered to instruct him in the proper protocol here, and he’d had little use for manners and social niceties. The faint cinnamon odor of melange touched his nostrils from a mug of spice beer the Emperor kept on a small table beside his throne.

  A page stepped forward, nodded to the leader of the Sardaukar guard escort, and turned, booming out in Galach, the common language, “The Planetologist Pardot Kynes!”

  Kynes squared his shoulders and tried to stand straight, wondering why they had made such a loud and portentous introduction when the Emperor obviously knew who he was— else why summon him here? Kynes wondered if he should say hello, but decided instead to wait and let the Court determine the flow of events.

  “Kynes,” the old Emperor said in a reedy, scratchy voice that suff
ered from too many years of issuing firm commands, “you come to me highly recommended. Our advisors have studied many candidates, and they’ve chosen you above all others. What do you say to that?” The Emperor leaned forward, raising his eyebrows so that his skin furrowed all the way to the top of his cranium.

  Kynes mumbled something about being honored and pleased, then cleared his throat and asked the real question. “But, sir, what exactly have I been chosen for?”

  Elrood cackled at that and sat back. “How refreshing to see someone more concerned with satisfying his own curiosity than with saying the right thing, or pandering to these stupid clingers and buffoons.” As he smiled, Elrood’s face turned rubbery, the wrinkles stretching back. His skin had a grayish, parchment tone. “The report says you grew up on Salusa Secundus, and you wrote definitive, complex reports on the ecology of the planet.”

  “Yes, Sire, uh, Your Majesty. My parents were bureaucratic functionaries, sent to work in your Imperial prison there. I was just a child and went along with them.”

  In truth, Kynes had heard rumors that his mother or father had displeased Elrood somehow, and that they had been transferred in disgrace to the punishment planet. But young Pardot Kynes had found the wastelands fascinating. After the tutors were finished with him, he’d spent his days exploring the blasted wilderness— taking notes, studying the insects and weeds and hardy animals that had managed to survive the ancient atomic holocaust.

  “Yes, yes, I understand that,” Elrood said. “After a while your parents were transferred to another world.”

  Kynes nodded. “Yes, Sire. They went to Harmonthep.”

  The Emperor waved a hand to dismiss the reference. “But later you returned to Salusa, of your own free will?”

  “Well, uh, there was still much more for me to learn on Salusa,” he answered, stifling an embarrassed shrug.

  Kynes had spent years by himself in the outback, piecing together the mysteries of the climate and ecosystems. He had suffered many hardships, endured much discomfort. He had even been pursued once by Laza tigers and survived. Afterward, Kynes had published an extensive treatise about his years there, opening remarkable windows of understanding to the once-lovely, now-abandoned Imperial capital planet.