His eyes were wide and panicked as if he thought she could offer him protection. His spectacles had fallen off. "Face Dancer!" he panted, staggering toward her. "He's killing Bene Gesserits!"
Garimi spun toward the intercom panel to contact Sheeana--and the Rabbi struck. His deadly blow came close to her neck, but she sensed the movement and turned at the last possible moment. The side of his fist drove down on her shoulder instead. She slid from her chair, and the Rabbi dove at her again.
Garimi launched a kick up at him from the deck, aiming for one of the old man's knobby and uncertain knees, but he sprang away like a coiled panther. The Rabbi let out a feral yowl as Garimi leapt to her feet again and assumed a defensive stance. Her lower lip curled. "Clever, Rabbi. Even now that I know what you are, I can hardly smell any Face Dancer stink on you."
With a yank and a twist, the Rabbi uprooted an anchored chair and swung it at her. She ducked and reached up to grab the chair as it whistled over her head. Tearing it out of his hands, her pull was enough to knock him to the floor.
When the Rabbi rose to his feet again, he shifted his body to mimic the form of a ferocious Futar. His body bulged with muscles, his teeth became sharp and elongated, and his claws slashed the air. Garimi stumbled back to get out of his killing reach and hammered her hand down on the intercom. "Sisters! Face Dancer on the navigation bridge!"
The Futar lunged, and his sharp, newly grown claws ripped her robes. Using wild and frantic punches intended more to hurt her foe than protect her own life, Garimi shattered his ribs. With an outraged kick that employed the full force of her heel, she smashed his left femur out of its hip socket.
But the Futar rolled as he collapsed, spun in a blur, and before she could feel a moment of victory, he snapped Garimi's neck. She dropped with barely a sigh. In a purely spiteful gesture, he ripped out her throat before calmly reshaping his body to his blank Face Dancer state. He wiped blood from his face with one sleeve.
More broken than even his own shape-shifter abilities could easily heal, the Rabbi crawled and then limped to the Ithaca's main controls. He heard running feet in the corridor, so he sealed the navigation bridge, applied emergency locks, and activated a mutiny-defense protocol.
In the years he had maintained his disguise, the Face Dancer had covertly sampled the skin cells of Duncan Idaho, Sheeana, and Bashar Miles Teg. Now his hands flowed into the proper identification prints so that the no-ship's highly secure controls responded to him. The sealed doors would stand against any intrusion. Eventually the Bene Gesserits would find a way to break in, but by that time he would have completed his mission.
His thinking-machine masters would be alerted. And they would come.
Long ago, he had studied how to operate the Holtzman engines. Estimating the coordinates as best he could, not worried about the lack of a Navigator, the Face Dancer folded space and plunged the Ithaca across the galaxy. The ship tumbled out into a different stellar region, not far from Omnius's advancing forces. He reconfigured the ship's comsystems and triggered a locator beacon. His superiors knew the signal.
The thinking machines would respond swiftly. Already the Face Dancer could sense the hungry, invisible tachyon net coming closer. This time there would be no escape. The no-ship would be completely trapped.
Even small opponents can be deadly.
--Bene Gesserit Analytical Report on the Tleilaxu Problem
By the time Duncan, Sheeana, and Teg reached the navigation bridge, the thick hatches were sealed and locked. Impregnable. The bridge had been designed to remain secure against even an army.
Within moments, other Sisters followed, having first raced to the armory and obtained hand weapons: poisonous needle guns, stunners, and a high-powered lascutter. None of those devices would be sufficient. Rushing forward, the ghola children joined the crowd outside the sealed bridge, among them Paul, Chani, Jessica, Leto II, and young Alia.
Duncan could feel the change when the no-ship lurched through foldspace. "He's at the controls, moving us!"
"Garimi is dead, then," Sheeana concluded.
"The Face Dancer is going to take us directly to the Enemy," Teg said.
"Now is the time to use Scytale's poison gas to kill the Face Dancer." Sheeana turned to two of the Sisters standing in the corridor. "Find the Tleilaxu and take him to our guarded cabinet. Get one of the canisters, and we will flood the air on the bridge with the gas."
"No time for that," Duncan said. "We've got to get in there!"
Alia sounded eerily cool and intelligent as she announced, "I can get inside."
Duncan looked at the girl. To him, the echo-memories evoked by this child were unsettling. The original Duncan had never known her as a youngster--he had been killed by Sardaukar while Jessica was barely pregnant. But he did have vivid memories of an older Alia as his lover, in another life. But that was all history. Now it might as well be myth or legend.
He bent down to talk to her. "How? There isn't much time."
"I'm small enough." With a flick of her eyes, the little girl indicated the narrow air-exchanger vents leading into the command deck. She was far more diminutive than even Scytale.
Sheeana was already removing the grate. "There are baffles, filters, and bars in the way. How will you get through?"
"Give me a cutter. And a needle gun. I'll get the door open for you as soon as I can. From the inside."
When Alia had what she needed, Duncan hoisted the girl up to where she could squirm inside the tiny tunnel. Not yet four years old, she weighed very little. Jessica stood watching, looking more mature than she had been only a few days earlier, but even seeing her "daughter" placed into such a dangerous situation, she did not protest.
Cold and intent, the child clamped the cutter between her teeth, tucked the needle pistol into her small shirt, and began to creep through the vent. The distance between the chambers was not far, but each half meter was a battle. She exhaled, making herself as small as possible so that she could wriggle ahead.
Outside, the others began pounding on the sealed door as a distraction. They used heavy cutters that sparked and fumed, screeching through the dense, armored barricade a millimeter at a time. The Face Dancer would know they'd need hours to cut through into the navigation bridge. Alia was confident the Face Dancer would not expect an ambush from her.
She encountered the first barricade, a set of plasteel bars interwoven with a filtration grid. The dense mat was coated with neutralizing chemicals, and charged with a faint electrostatic film to scrub all drugs and poisons from the air that passed into the bridge. With the filter in place, Scytale's toxic gas would not have worked, even if they'd been able to release it.
Elbows digging into her sides, Alia took the cutter from her teeth and with jerky wrist movements sliced away the bars. Gently, she set the screen in front of her, careful not to make a noise, and crawled over it. The sharp edges scratched her chest and legs, but Alia cared nothing for the pain.
Similarly, she passed through a second grid, and then found herself at the last opening, from which she could observe the Face Dancer through the grille. His appearance flickered occasionally, sometimes reverting to the old man's shape, sometimes becoming a Futar, but primarily the Face Dancer wore a blank, skull-like visage. Even before she saw the torn body of Garimi on the deck, Alia knew not to underestimate this opponent.
With the tip of the glowing cutter, she sliced the tiny fasteners that held the last screen in place. Moving as silently as she could, she held the plate where it was and squirmed to free the needle gun from her shirt. She tensed, then drew a deep breath, waiting for the right moment.
I will have only a brief instant of surprise, so I must use it to full advantage.
The Face Dancer was working the controls, probably transmitting a signal to the mysterious Enemy, presumably more of his own kind. Every second she delayed would place the Ithaca in greater danger.
Suddenly the Face Dancer jerked his head up and snapped his gaze toward the
grille. Somehow he had sensed her. Now, without hesitating, Alia shoved the loosened screen toward him like a projectile. He dodged out of the way, reacting just as she had expected. Still lying prone in the ventilation shaft, she extended the needle gun in front of her and fired seven times. Three of the deadly needles found their target: two in the Face Dancer's eyes, another in the artery on his neck.
He spasmed, thrashed, and fell lifeless. Wriggling out of the air shaft, Alia dropped to the floor, recovered her balance, and glanced to verify that Garimi was indeed dead, before casually walking to the door. With her nimble fingers she disarmed the internal security measures and unsealed the hatch from the inside.
Duncan and Teg stood there holding weapons, afraid of what might emerge. The little girl met them with a placid expression. "Our Face Dancer is no longer a problem."
Over Alia's shoulder they could see the inhuman form sprawled next to an overturned chair. Small trickles of blood leaked from the dart wounds in his eyes, and he wore a full crimson collar of blood around his neck. On the floorplates lay the mangled Garimi.
Sheeana narrowed her gaze. "I see that you are a born killer."
Alia was unruffled. "So I've been told. Didn't you bring the ghola children back for our abilities? This is what I do best."
Duncan hurried to the no-ship's controls to assess what the false Rabbi had done. He extended his senses and was dismayed to see the deadly strands of the shimmering net suddenly appear and intensify all around them. Unbreakable. The trap was bright enough, powerful enough, that everyone could see it.
Teg rushed to a scanner station. "Duncan! Ships approaching--a lot of them! The Face Dancer has brought us right to the doorstep of the Enemy. We're tagged, and the net has locked onto us."
"After all these years, we are caught in the strands." Duncan swept his gaze across all of them. "At least, we're about to find out who our Enemy really is."
Our shared humanity should, by definition, make us allies. In sad fact, however, our very similarities often appear to be vast differences and insurmountable obstacles.
--MOTHER COMMANDER MURBELLA,
address to the New Sisterhood
Given the critical shortage of time, the thousands of newly equipped Guildships could not undergo thorough shakedowns and test runs. The mass-produced Obliterators were loaded aboard the heavily armored vessels that had been built at Junction as well as seventeen satellite shipyards. Crews made preparations to go to the front lines.
Fresh from conscription across hundreds of at-risk planets, novice commanders received only minimal training, barely sufficient to stand against the Enemy at numerous vulnerable points as humanity tried to draw its line in space. Murbella knew that despite their determination and bravery, and no matter how much training and practice they received, most of the human fighters would be annihilated.
In the months after the plague had run its course on Chapterhouse, the Mother Commander had opened her doors to displaced refugees from any evacuated planet. At first they were frightened to settle on the once-quarantined world, but then they had begun to stream in. With so few options available to them, the ragtag groups accepted the Sisterhood's offer of sanctuary in exchange for performing vital labors in the war effort. Politics and old factions had to be set aside. Now every life was devoted to preparing for the last stand against the oncoming forces of Omnius.
From Buzzell, Reverend Mother Corysta sent the incredible news that the giant seaworms wreaking havoc with soostone operations also produced a kind of spice. Murbella immediately suspected some kind of Guild experiment. It could not be a natural occurrence. Corysta suggested that the worms be hunted and harvested, but the Mother Commander could not think that far ahead. A new source of spice mattered only if the human race survived the Enemy.
Mother Commander Murbella called a grand war council for delegates of the front-line planets that were in imminent danger of attack by thinking-machine forces. Despite their indignation, every one of them had undergone cellular testing to root out hidden Face Dancers. Murbella took no chances; the insidious shape-shifters could be anywhere.
In the Keep's grand meeting room, she strode down the length of the elaccawood table to her designated seat. Using her Bene Gesserit powers of close observation, she studied those assembled, all of them driven here by desperation. Murbella tried to view these representatives in their various costumes and uniforms as military leaders, essentially generals in the last great battle for humanity. The people in this room would guide the thrown-together clusters of ships and make a thousand defiant stands. But were they the quality of heroes the human race needed?
When she turned to face the delegates, Murbella saw the uneasiness in their eyes and smelled fear-sweat in the air. The vast Enemy fleet surged forward like a flame front across the map of the galaxy, rolling over star system after star system, heading inexorably toward Chapterhouse and the remaining worlds at the heart of the Old Empire.
After moving among the various embattled worlds and studying their preparations, Murbella had secured alliances with these planetary leaders, warlords, commercial conglomerates, and smaller units of government. Leto II's vision of the Golden Path had fragmented humanity so that they no longer followed a single charismatic leader, and now Murbella had to repair that damage. Diversity might once have been a path to survival, but unless the numerous worlds and armies could stand together against the far greater foe, they would all perish.
If the Tyrant's prescience was so formidable, how could he not have foreseen the existence of the great machine empire, no matter how far away it was? How could the God Emperor not have known that another titanic conflict awaited humankind? She felt a faint shudder. Or had he, and everything was playing out exactly as the Tyrant planned?
After considerable effort, she had won a critical internal battle when the various leaders agreed that the strongest defense came from a unified plan--her plan--rather than a hundred independent and hopeless defensive battles. To get her message across, she'd had to cut through the stubborn tentacles of various planetary bureaucracies. Nothing was easy in this war.
Feeling the burdens of her position, Murbella rapped a large spherical stone on the table, producing a loud, echoing boom that called the meeting to order. "You all know why you're here. We must make our last stands, a thousand of them across space. Many of us will die--or all of us will die. There are no alternatives. The only questions are how soon we will die, and how it will happen. Do we choose to die free and fighting to the last . . . or defeated and running?"
The room resounded with a cacophony of voices, accents, and languages, though she had insisted that they all speak the common Galach tongue. She used Voice to cut through the clamor. "The machines are coming! If we cooperate and do not retreat in the face of our foe, we just might have the means of stopping them dead in their tracks."
She noted Guild officials and Ixian engineers in the audience. Given the short delivery schedule, some of the warship construction had been unavoidably slapdash, but her handful of Bene Gesserit inspectors and line supervisors had overseen the operations.
"Our weapons and ships are now ready, but before we proceed I have one question for all of you." She skewered the leaders with her gaze. If she'd still been an Honored Matre, her eyes would have blazed orange. "Do you have the resolve and courage to do what is necessary?"
"Do you?" bellowed a bearded man from a very small planet in a remote system.
Murbella rapped her sonic stone again. "My New Sisterhood will bear the brunt of the initial clash against the thinking machines. We have already fought them in one star system after another, destroying many of their ships, and we survived their plagues here on Chapterhouse. But this war will never be won on individual battlefields." She gestured, and Janess worked the controls. "Look at this, all of you."
Startling the assemblage, a large holographic projection appeared, filling the open space of the Keep's great meeting room with detailed maps of the galaxy's numerous sol
ar systems. An advancing blot indicated the thinking machines' conquests, like a tidal wave drowning every system in its path. The darkness of defeat and extermination had already blackened most of the known systems in the regions of the Scattering.
"We have to focus our efforts. Because they don't use foldspace engines, the Enemy proceeds from system to system. We know their path, and therefore we can put ourselves directly in their way." Murbella stood amidst the simulated stars and planets. Her finger darted from point to point, the glowing stars and habitable planets that lay in the Enemy's path. "We've got to hold the line--here, and here, and everywhere! Only by combining all of our ships, commanders, and weapons can we hope to halt the Enemy." She swept her hand through the shimmering images that were just ahead of the encroaching thinking machines. "Any other choice would be cowardice."
"Do you call us cowards?" the bearded man roared.
A merchant stood. "Surely we can negotiate--"
Murbella cut him off. "The thinking machines do not want a particular world. Nor are they searching for gems, spice, or any other goods. There is nothing we can offer them to sue for peace. They do not compromise, and will keep pursuing us no matter where we run." She looked at the blustering man and said, "By fleeing conflict today, you could survive for a time. But there'll be no escape for your children or grandchildren. The machines will slaughter them, down to the last infant. Do you value your life over theirs? Then, yes, I do call you cowards."
Despite the murmurs in the hall, no one else spoke out. On the giant star display, a line of tiny fireworks erupted along the interface line between the machine-conquered territories and the vulnerable human planets.
Murbella's gaze moved across the audience. "Each of us is responsible for stopping the Enemy from crossing this line. Failure means death for the human race."
True loyalty is an unshakable force. The difficulty is in determining exactly where a person's allegiance lies. Often that bond is only to oneself.