Blood covered her hands, and when it dried in the hot desert air, Mapes regretted the waste of water. But that couldn’t be helped—these men needed to die. They were Harkonnens.
In the heat of the deep desert, a huge spice harvester throbbed and thrummed as enormous treads crawled along the crest of a dune. Intake machinery chewed up the sand and digested the powder through a complex interplay of centrifuges and electromagnetic separators. The harvester vomited out a cloud of exhaust dust, sand, and debris that settled onto the disturbed dunes behind the moving machine, while the bins filled up with the rare spice melange.
The droning operation sent pulsing vibrations beneath the desert, sure to call a sandworm … and very soon. The noise also drowned out the sounds of Fremen violence inside the great machine.
In the operations bridge of the moving factory, another Harkonnen worker tried to flee, but a Fremen death-commando, a Fedaykin, ran after him. Disguised in a grimy shipsuit, the attacker had predatory and sure movements, not at all like the morose sand crew the Harkonnens had hired.
Though small and brown-skinned, young Mapes had fit in among the regular workers, as had her companions, but she didn’t laugh or joke with the sand crew, didn’t try to make friends with people she knew she would have to kill. Nevertheless, she and her companions were hired by uninquisitive company bosses. Too many crews had been lost as it was, some through desertion, others through accidents and catastrophic loss in the field. Mapes knew that part of those losses were intentional—thanks to freedom fighters like herself.
Her companion Ahar, a muscular man of few words but great dedication, slammed the doomed worker against a metal bulkhead and raised his crysknife—a milky crystalline blade ground from the discarded tooth of a giant worm—and drove the point deep into the man’s throat. The victim gurgled, but did not scream as he slid to the deck. Ahar had used an instinctive Fremen killing blow, one that brought quick and silent death, but wasted no more blood than was necessary.
Alas, today the commandos would not reclaim the water of these victims for the tribe. They had to kill the crew, destroy the spice harvester, and escape like dust devils in the wind. There was no time.
Mapes gripped her own knife, a razor-sharp weapon made of simple plasteel. Possessing a crysknife was a sacred honor, and her comrades in the sietch had not yet deemed her worthy of one, though she had already participated in more than a dozen raids.
Mapes was a firebrand, but Fremen women did not usually join the Fedaykin, the special death commando squads that were historically formed to avenge particular wrongs—and the very existence of these offworld oppressors on Dune was wrong. The Fedaykin had accepted Mapes in part because of her skill and tenacity, but primarily due to her legendary mother. Some saw Mapes as a new Safia, and they were willing to let her prove herself.
Now, the young woman pursued her second victim inside the noisy operations bridge. Five workers lay dead already, smearing the dusty metal of the deck with their blood. Although she was smaller than her target, the spice worker was afraid. She collided with him and knocked him against the bank of controls. He defended himself like one who had never been in a fight before. He flailed his hands to drive her off, and she slashed open his palm with the edge of her knife. He gasped and doubled over, more in horror than in pain.
“Why? Why are you doing this?” he bleated. “We paid your wages! We just harvest the spice.”
“You are Harkonnens,” she said. “All Harkonnens must die.”
The man swiped at her with his bleeding hand, flinging droplets of red through the air like precious rain. “Not a Harkonnen! Never even met Dmitri Harkonnen! Just an offworld hire brought in to work the machinery. My contract is up in six months.” He stared at his dead comrades on the deck. “None of us are Harkonnens.”
“You work for the enemy, therefore you are the enemy.” Without further conversation, she stabbed him and shoved him aside, then turned to work the controls. She shut down the main engines, and the lumbering factory ground to a halt in a valley between dunes. The intake scoop and the turbine blades creaked and froze silent; the gray-tan exhaust plume dissipated.
Increasingly urgent voices came over the outside commline. “Wormsign spotted. Range, four minutes, twenty seconds. Prepare for retrieval.”
Mapes considered just ignoring the call, but decided to continue the deception. She flicked on the comm. “Acknowledged. Preparing evacuation parties. Send in the carryall.”
Hearing a yell behind her, Mapes whirled as a uniformed factory worker threw himself at her with desperation in his eyes. She raised her blade to defend herself, but his feet stuttered and stumbled on the deck. Behind him, another man plunged a crysknife into his back, pushed deeper, harder, until the worker crumpled.
She saw the rakish, handsome face of her rescuer, and her heart swelled. “Thank you Rafir, my love. I will reward you later when we are back home in the sietch.”
Her partner, heart of her heart, took charge of the Fedaykin band, who were now the only survivors on the operations bridge. “Hai ha—time to go! Our enemies are dead, and Mapes shut down the machinery. And a worm comes!”
The other Fremen took this as good news and cheered. “Shai-Hulud!”
“Shai-Hulud,” Mapes responded. The monstrous sandworm would do the rest of the work for them, cleansing the sands.
Leaving the dead behind with a whispered regret of wasted water, Mapes, Rafir, and their companions emerged from the roof access hatch to the open, dusty air, and climbed down rungs along the great factory’s hull. The smell of acrid cinnamon—potent, fresh melange—filled the air. An exposed spice vein formed a rusty stain across the sand, worth millions of solaris to offworlders. Now that fortune would all go back into the sands of Dune where it belonged.
Outside, three groundcars rolled along the powdery surface, exterior teams rushing back toward the harvester for extraction and rescue along with the cargo. The commline was scratchy with static caused by the disturbed sand and dust, and the voices were tinged with fear. “A worm is coming. Less than three minutes! Why didn’t you sound the return call?”
An overlapping voice bellowed, “Chief, why aren’t you responding?”
A third said, “Carryall’s coming. I see it in the air. We can make it back to the harvester pickup point, but just barely.”
Climbing down the hot rungs, Mapes looked down at Rafir. They exchanged a smile as sharp as a crysknife’s edge. Reaching the soft ground, Mapes stripped out of the despised company uniform and tossed it into the hot desert wind. ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
