He came closer and picked up the sealed dagger with shaking hands, tilting it so that light glistened off the wet blade. The cells of Muad'Dib! The possibilities astounded him.
Khrone said, "Now you have another ghola project to work on, along with raising Baron Harkonnen. Back to Tleilax with you both--for as many years as it takes." More Face Dancers came into the room. "When the time is right, we will have a much more useful purpose for the Baron."
The Honored Matre defenses on Buzzell are minimal. We can simply stroll in and take over. Another symptom of their arrogance.
--BASHAR WIKKI AZTIN,
military advisor to Mother Commander Murbella
T
he first new armored vessels arrived from Richese exactly as Murbella had ordered, sixty-seven warships designed for space combat and troop transport, heavily loaded with weaponry. The Mother Commander had also paid the appropriate bribes in spice for a Guildship to transport them directly and unexpectedly to Buzzell. It was the first of what she hoped would be many conquests over the renegade Honored Matres.
The weapons shops of Richese, thrilled with the enormous order for armaments, worked overtime to create military equipment of every possible design and efficacy. When the outside threat did arrive in the Old Empire, they would not find the human race unprepared or undefended.
First, however, the restructured Sisterhood had to quash the destructive resistance here at home. We must clean the slate before the real Enemy arrives.
In deep consultation with Bellonda, Doria, and Janess, Murbella had chosen this first campaign carefully. Now that her Valkyries had eradicated the malcontents on Chapterhouse, the well-trained women were ready for another target. Buzzell was perfect, both for its strategic and its economic importance. The Honored Matres were haughty and overconfident, making their defenses vulnerable. Murbella intended to show them no mercy.
She did not know the precise disposition or distribution of Honored Matre defenses around Buzzell, but she could guess. Sitting inside their ships lurking within the hold of the great Guildship, all of her Valkyries were ready to be deployed.
As soon as the Guildship emerged from foldspace, its lower doors yawned open. The women neither asked for nor received further instructions, since they knew what to do: Find priority targets and destroy them. Sixty-seven vessels, all equipped with cutting-edge weapons technology, poured out and opened fire with projectiles and targeted explosives that began shredding the fifteen large Honored Matre frigates stationed in orbit. The Honored Matres had no time to react--and barely enough time to bellow their outrage over the commsystems. In ten minutes, the bombardment turned every single vessel into lifeless, floating scrap metal. Buzzell was now undefended.
"Mother Commander! A dozen unaligned ships are flying away from the atmosphere. A different design . . . they don't appear to be combat craft."
"Smugglers," Murbella said. "Soostones are valuable, so there will always be smugglers."
"Shall we destroy them, Mother Commander? Or seize their cargoes?"
"Neither." She watched the tiny ships flitting away from the ocean world. If the smugglers had proved to be a significant drain on the soostone wealth, the Honored Matres would never have let them survive. "We have a more important target down there. We'll oust the Honored Matres and negotiate with the smugglers afterward."
She led the warships to their formal conquest of the few specks of habitable land on the vast, fertile ocean.
Buzzell had long been used as a Bene Gesserit punishment planet where the Sisterhood discarded those who had disappointed them, women who had failed the ancient order in some manner. The ocean world wasn't much to look at, but the rich, deep sea was home to shelled creatures, called cholisters, that produced elegant gems.
Soostones. Noble women flaunted them; collectors and artisans paid inflated prices for them.
Like Rakis, she thought. Ironic, that the worst places produce the items of greatest value.
The Honored Matres' inexorable search for wealth had drawn their attentions to Buzzell years ago. After the whores overran the islands on the vast oceans, they had killed most of the disgraced Bene Gesserit Sisters and forced the survivors to harvest soostones for them.
Now, assisted by orbital surveillance, Murbella easily determined which were the main inhabited landmasses barely poking above the waves. The New Sisterhood would recapture the nerve centers of soostone activity from the Honored Matres. Soon, Buzzell would have different leaders.
The Richesian battle craft landed around the primary soostone-processing encampment. Such a great number of vessels overwhelmed the tiny landing area and most were forced to rely on inflatable pontoons, raft piers, and simple suspensor fields on the water. Ships encircled the rocky island like a noose.
As it turned out, apart from the frigates in orbit, barely more than a hundred of the whores held the facilities of Buzzell in their iron grip. When the Valkyries arrived, the Honored Matres who lived on this island in the finest (though still spartan) buildings, rushed out, fully armed. Though they fought viciously, the women were greatly outnumbered and outmatched. Murbella's fighters easily assassinated half of them before the rest capitulated. The losses were expected.
The Mother Commander strode out into the biting, salty air to begin surveying the sparse world she had just conquered.
When the fighters rounded up the surviving Honored Matres, Murbella discovered nine women who clearly did not belong among them, downtrodden yet proud in tattered black robes. Bene Gesserit. Only nine! Buzzell had been a punishment planet for well over a hundred Sisters . . . and only nine had survived the whores.
Murbella stalked back and forth, looking at the gathered women. Her Valkyries stood in formation behind her, their black singlesuit uniforms embellished with sharp black spikes, used as ornamentation and as weapons. The Honored Matres looked defiant, murderous--exactly as Murbella expected. The captive Sisters averted their eyes, having spent so many years in the yoke of oppressive mistresses.
"I am your new commander. Who among you claimed to lead these women?" She swept a whipsaw gaze across them. "Who will be my underling here?"
"We are not underlings," one sinewy Honored Matre sneered, spoiling for a fight. "We don't know you, nor do we recognize your authority. You act like an Honored Matre, but you have the smell of witches about you. I don't think you are either."
So Murbella killed her.
The Honored Matre leader had persecuted Sisters here for years. Her kicks and blows were swift, but insufficient in the face of Murbella's combined training. With a broken neck, snapped ribs, and blood oozing from burst eardrums, the arrogant woman dropped dead to the black stones of the reef settlement.
Murbella never broke a sweat. She turned to the others. "Now, who speaks for you? Who will be my first underling?"
One of the other Honored Matres stepped forward. "I am Matre Skira. Ask your questions of me."
"I will know about the soostones and your operations here. We need to know how to extract profits from Buzzell."
"The soostones are ours," Skira said. "This planet is--"
Murbella dealt her a blow across the chin so swiftly that it sent the woman reeling backward before she could raise a hand to defend herself. Looming over her like a bird of prey, Murbella said, "I ask again: Explain the soostone operations to me."
One of the downtrodden Bene Gesserits broke from her line. A middle-aged woman with ash-blonde hair, she had a worn face that must once have been strikingly beautiful. "I can explain it to you."
Skira scuttled like a crab onto her elbows trying to get to her feet. "Don't listen to that cow. She's a prisoner, fit for beating and nothing else."
"I am called Corysta," the blonde said, ignoring Skira.
Murbella nodded. "I am Mother Commander of the New Sisterhood. Mother Superior Odrade herself chose me as her successor before she was killed in the Battle of Junction. I have unified Bene Gesserits and Honored Matres to stand against our common, dea
dly Enemy." She nudged Skira with her foot. "Only a few renegade Honored Matre enclaves such as this remain. We will either assimilate them or grind them to dust."
"Honored Matres are not so easily defeated," Skira insisted.
Murbella looked down her nose at the woman on the ground. "You were." She focused on Corysta. "You are a Reverend Mother?"
"I am, but I was exiled here for the crime of love."
"Love!" The wiry Skira spit the word out, as if expecting agreement from her conqueror. She began to talk about Corysta in a derisive, hard-edged voice, calling her a baby stealer and a criminal to both the Bene Gesserits and the Honored Matres.
Murbella gave the Sister a quick, appraising glance. "Is that true? Are you a notorious stealer of babies?"
Corysta kept her eyes averted. "I could not steal what was already mine. No, I was the victim of theft. I nurtured both children out of love, when no one else would."
Murbella made up her mind on the spot, knowing she had to learn quickly. "In the interests of speed and efficiency, I will Share with you." That way, she could gather all the information from Corysta in an instant.
The other woman hesitated only for a moment, then bowed her head and leaned forward so that Murbella could touch her, brow to brow, mind to mind. In a flood, the Mother Commander drew in everything she needed to know about Buzzell and far more than she had wanted to learn about Corysta.
All of the other woman's experiences, her daily life, her knowledge, her painful memories and intense loyalties to the Sisterhood, became part of Murbella, as if she had lived them herself.
In the interior vista, she saw through Corysta's eyes as she worked alongside other slaves at a sorting and cleaning table on a dock near the edge of the rugged reef. A breeze carried the biting odors of the sea to her nostrils. The morning sky was typically dreary and overcast. White gulls hopped along the fauxwood dock, looking for crustacean fragments and tiny morsels of meat that might fall off during the processing operations.
A scaly, intimidating Phibian overseer walked up and down the sorting line, his body reeking of rotted fish. He watched the work and periodically checked to make certain that none of the Bene Gesserit slaves had stolen anything. Corysta wondered where she could possibly go if she did try to steal a soostone fragment.
She had been in exile on Buzzell for almost two decades, first cast out by the Sisterhood as a young woman, then trapped as a slave to the whores from the Scattering. Corysta had been sentenced to Buzzell for what the Bene Gesserits called a "crime of humanity." She had been ordered to breed with a spoiled, petulant nobleman who pranced about in a different outfit every time she saw him. Following the orders of her Breeding Mistresses, Corysta had seduced the fop--whom she could not imagine loving--and had manipulated her internal chemistry to ensure that the resulting child would be a daughter.
From the moment of conception, the daughter had been destined for the Bene Gesserit order. Corysta had known that intellectually, but not in her heart. As the child grew in her womb, Corysta began to have misgivings, especially when the baby started to move and kick. Alone with herself, she got to know her daughter before she was born and began to imagine raising the girl as her own, being a traditional mother to her, a practice that was forbidden in the Sisterhood. In spite of the strictness of the various breeding programs, there had to be room for exceptions, for some degree of love. Each day, Corysta talked soothingly to the baby in her womb, uttering special blessings. Gradually, she began to think about escaping from her oppressive obligations.
One night as she sang mournfully to her unborn child, Corysta made the fateful decision to keep her baby. She would not turn the little girl over to the Breeding Mistresses, as ordered. Corysta fled into seclusion, giving birth alone in an unlit shelter, like an animal. A stern Breeding Mistress named Monaya discovered where she was and stormed in, accompanied by a black-robed squadron of enforcers. After knowing only a few hours of her mother's love, the newborn daughter was taken away, and Corysta never saw her again.
She hardly remembered the subsequent journey to Buzzell, where she was abandoned with the other discarded Sisters to remain for the rest of her life in the "penance program." During all the years Corysta spent here on patches of black land no larger than a prison yard, surrounded by oceans, she never stopped thinking about her lost daughter.
Then the Honored Matres had swept in like savage carrion birds, slaughtering thousands of Bene Gesserit exiles on Buzzell. Only a handful of Sisters were spared to be put to work as slaves.
Whenever the rank iodine smell announced the presence of the Phibian overseers, Corysta worked faster to sort the precious stones by color and size. Behind her, the damp amphibious man moved on, breathing heavily from gills that worked to suck oxygen from air instead of seawater. Fearing punishment, Corysta never looked at the Phibian.
In her first year of captivity she fumed, wishing she could find some way to get her child back. As time passed, she lost all hope of that and began to accept her circumstances. For years she lived from moment to moment, only rarely picking at the mistakes of her past like someone worrying at a loose tooth. The deep waters of Buzzell became the limits of her universe.
She and her fellow survivors did not actually dive for the deep water stones; Phibians did that. Genetically modified hybrids created out in the Scattering, the human-amphibian creatures had bullet-shaped heads, lean and streamlined bodies, and slick green skin that shone with oily iridescence. Corysta was fascinated by them, and feared them.
Then, years ago, Corysta had rescued an abandoned Phibian baby from the sea, concealing and tending it in her simple hut for months. She nurtured her "Sea Child" back to health, but then, in a cruel echo of her earlier experience, Honored Matres had snatched the hybrid baby from her.
Having heard of her previous experience, the whores taunted Corysta, calling her "the woman who lost two babies." They openly ridiculed her, while her fellow exiled Sisters quietly admired her. . . .
SHAKEN, MURBELLA WITHDREW from contact with the disgraced Sister, to find that only a moment had passed. In front of her, Corysta blinked back at her in amazement at the flood of news and information. Sharing went both ways, and now the punished Bene Gesserit woman knew everything the Mother Commander knew. It was a gamble Murbella had been willing to make.
Considering how swiftly her Valkyries had succeeded in securing all vulnerable points, Murbella was certain that the New Sisterhood could easily run the operations here. She would leave a defensive force in orbit, convert or kill the remaining Honored Matres, and get back to work. She glanced around for Phibian guards, but they had all vanished into the deep water with the arrival of the Valkyries. They would return. Sharing with Corysta had told her all she needed to know.
"Reverend Mother Corysta, I appoint you overseer of the Sisterhood's soostone operations. I know that you are aware of many flaws, as well as the ways the work process could be improved."
The woman nodded, her eyes shining with pride that Murbella had entrusted her with these new responsibilities. Red-faced with rage, Matre Skira was barely able to control herself.
"If any other Honored Matres prove to be a problem, you have my permission to execute them."
TWO DAYS LATER, satisfied with the changes under way and ready to return to Chapterhouse, Murbella walked back through the weathered settlement at dusk. She passed between locked soostone holding sheds and a hodgepodge of living quarters and administrative buildings. Glowglobes surged on inside the buildings, as night swiftly fell under a coppery orange blanket of sunset.
Four Honored Matres emerged from the deep shadows of an equipment shed and the doorway of a dark building. Though they crept forward, clearly intending to be stealthy, Murbella spotted them immediately. Their violent intent rose from them like noxious fumes.
Tingling and ready for a fight, she regarded them with disdain. The four women stalked forward, confident in their numbers, though Honored Matres rarely managed to fight efficiently
as a team. Combat with several of them would simply be a brawl.
The Honored Matres rushed her. In a blur of motion, Murbella kicked and spun repeatedly, cutting through all four of them. A choreographed synthesis of Bene Gesserit combat methods and Honored Matre fighting tricks, overlaid with a pattern of Duncan's Swordmaster techniques--any one of her Valkyries could have done the same.
In less than a minute, the attackers lay dead. Another group of angry Honored Matres boiled out of the equipment sheds. Murbella prepared for a grander fight and laughed aloud. She could feel her body singing with the call of combat. "Will you make me kill all of you? Or should I leave one alive as a witness, to discourage further nonsense? Who else will try?"
Two more did, and two more died. Confused, the rest of the Honored Matres hung back. To be sure that her message had sunk in, Murbella taunted them. "Who else will face me?" She pointed to the fallen bodies. "These six have learned the lesson."
No one accepted the challenge.
THIRTEEN YEARS AFTER
ESCAPE FROM CHAPTERHOUSE
On a moment's notice a friend can become a competitor, or a dangerous enemy. It is essential to analyze the probabilities at all times, to avoid being taken by surprise.
--DUNCAN IDAHO,
Mentat observation
T
he Rabbi hurried down the corridor with a scroll under his arm, muttering, "How many more will you create?" He had built his arguments, compiling proofs from Talmudic writings, but the Bene Gesserits were not impressed. They could quote as many obscure prophecies back at him and baffle him with mysticism that went far beyond his own.
As Duncan Idaho strode past the spry, bespectacled man, the Rabbi was too preoccupied even to notice him. The sight of him in the corridor outside the med-center and the ghola creche had become commonplace over the years. Several times a week the Rabbi looked in on the axlotl tanks, praying over the woman he had known as Rebecca and peering in at the group of strange, tank-incubated children. Though entirely harmless, the poor fellow seemed out of touch, clinging to a reality that manifested only in his mind and in his guilt. Even so, Duncan and the others tried to show him the respect he deserved.