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The best method of attack is to make a quick kill. Always be ready to strike your opponent's jugular. If you want to provide a performance, be a dancer.
--MOTHER COMMANDER MURBELLA,
rally before troop deployment
W
hen the Enemy came, the New Sisterhood would not fight every battle alone. Murbella refused to allow that. Though there was no central leadership in the disjointed civilizations of the Old Empire, she vowed that she would compel those civilizations to participate. They could not be allowed to sit on the sidelines when so much was at stake for humanity.
Under the instruction of her daughter Janess, as well as the veteran bashar Wikki Aztin, the Sisterhood's deadliest fighters were being trained, but Murbella needed access to powerful weapons, and a great many of them. Therefore, she went to Richese, the primary competitor of Ix.
After Murbella's small shuttle landed in the main Richesian commercial complex, the Factory Commissioner arrived to meet her. He was a short man with a round face, close-cropped hair, and a sincere-looking smile that he could mount on his face at will. Two women and three men accompanied him, all wearing identical smart-looking business attire. They carried projection pads and easily revised papers, contracts, price lists.
"The New Sisterhood wishes to do business with you, Commissioner. Please show me everything you have in the way of weaponry--offensive and defensive."
Beaming, the round-faced man reached forward to clasp her hand, which she reluctantly allowed him to shake. "Richese is glad to be of service, Mother Commander. We can manufacture anything from a dagger to a fleet of battleships. Are you interested in explosives, hand weapons, projectile launchers? We have defensive space mines that can be hidden by no-fields. Please tell me, what is your particular need?"
Murbella met him with a hard gaze. "Everything. We're going to need the whole list."
For thousands of years Richese and Ix had been technological and industrial rivals, each with their own areas of expertise. Ix had made its name doing groundbreaking research, producing creative designs and pioneering new technologies. Though many of their projects failed spectacularly, the successful ones generated sufficient profits to more than pay for the mistakes.
Richese, on the other hand, was better at imitation than innovation. They were more conservative in the risks they took, yet increasingly ambitious in their output and efficiency. By taking advantage of economies of scale, cutting profit margins, and pushing automated factory lines to the very limits of what the strictures of the Butlerian Jihad allowed, Richese was able to produce sought-after items in enormous quantities at low cost. Murbella selected them over Ix because the New Sisterhood needed huge numbers of weapons--as soon as possible.
The business complex where the Factory Commissioner always met his potential customers included lush landscaping with parks and fountains; the buildings were clean, stylized, and welcoming. Any unsightly industrial zones remained far from view. Walking down spacious hallways lined with showcases of items that Richese could produce on a moment's notice, Murbella felt as if she were wandering through an unending exhibit hall of marketing displays.
Giving her plenty of time to examine the merchandise, the Commissioner chattered as they walked from one display case to another. "Since the death of the Tyrant and the Famine Times, Richese has been called on to provide defensive armaments for any number of brushfire wars. You will be satisfied with what we can produce."
"If we survive the coming conflict, then I will be satisfied."
She studied body armor and ship armor, pseudoatomics, lasguns, projectile launchers, microexplosives, pulse cannons, blasters, poison dusts, shard-daggers, flechette guns, disruptors, mind scramblers, offensive X-probes, hunter-seeker assassination tools, deceptives, energizers, burners, dart launchers, stun grenades, even genuine atomics "for display purposes only." A holo-model of Richese's southern continents showed vast shipyards producing space yachts and military no-ships.
Murbella said, "I want all of those space yachts converted into warships. In fact, we need to commandeer all of your factory systems. You must completely devote your production lines to producing the weapons we need."
The attorneys and salespeople gasped, then consulted with each other. The Factory Commissioner seemed alarmed. "That is quite an astonishing request, Mother Commander. We do have other customers, you know--"
"None more important than we are." She fixed him with a cold glare. "We will pay for the privilege, of course--in melange."
The Commissioner's eyes lit up. "It has long been said that wartime is hard on people, but good for business. Doesn't the Guild have a standing order for all the spice your new desert belt produces?"
"I have severely restricted Guild purchases, though their demand remains high," Murbella said. The Richesian was already aware of this, of course. He was simply playing a game.
The hovering attorneys and sales representatives were mentally going through some preliminary calculations. After they were paid in melange, the Richesians could turn around and sell the spice to the desperate Guild for ten times the already steep value the New Sisterhood had placed on it. They would reap profits backward and forward.
Murbella crossed her arms over her chest. "We will need a military force such as humanity has never before seen, because we face an Enemy unlike any other."
"I've heard rumors. Who is this foe and when will they strike? What do they want?"
She blinked as a flicker of anxiety passed through her. "I wish I knew."
First, though, her fighting squads would face the rebel Honored Matres in their dispersed enclaves, and for that she needed armored 'thopters, assault ships, heavy groundcars, personal projectile launchers, pulse rifles, and even razor-sharp mono-blade knives. Many of the battles against the dissidents would involve close-in fighting.
"We can provide certain items immediately from our stockpiles, a few ships, some space mines. One warlord customer recently suffered from . . . um, an assassination. Therefore his completed order remains unclaimed, and we can offer you all of it."
"I'll take it with me now," she said.
THE MOTHER COMMANDER continued to train her troops, honing them into a razor-sharp weapon. Wearing a black singlesuit uniform, Murbella stood beside Janess on a suspensor platform that floated low over the largest training field. Below, in midday sunlight, her handpicked troops went through increasingly difficult personal combat routines, never resting, never tolerating the smallest mistake.
Upon hearing that Murbella's special squad had crushed the encampment of dissidents on Chapterhouse, her advisors had been shocked at the swift brutality, but the Mother Commander stood firm against the uproar. "I am not Bashar Miles Teg. He could have used his reputation to subtly manipulate the malcontents, and might have reached a compromise that skated past violence. But the Bashar is no longer with us, and I fear his clever tactics will not be effective against the Armageddon forces of the Enemy. Violence will become more and more necessary."
The women had found no effective counterargument.
After that first decisive battle, the Mother Commander's crack forces took a new name for themselves: Valkyries.
Murbella challenged her Valkyries to master a type of fighting that Janess had rediscovered in the archives: the techniques of the Swordmasters of Ginaz. By resurrecting that training discipline and arming her Sisters with skills that no one alive remembered, the Mother Commander intended to produce fighters better equipped than any before them to neutralize the entrenched Honored Matres.
At the moment, the squads were executing a complex maneuver in which they fought against mock enemy troops on the ground, attacking them in spinning star formations. Viewed from the high suspensor platform, the show was quite impressive as the five points of each star rotated and surged against the opposing force and sent them fleeing in disarray. It was something Murbella called the "choreography of personal combat." She could not wait to test it in battle.
Like her mother, Janess plunged into her work with fervor. She had even adopted the surname of her father, calling herself Lieutenant Idaho. It sounded right to her, and to Murbella. Mother and daughter were becoming quite a formidable force. Some Sisters jokingly claimed that they didn't need an army--those two were dangerous enough on their own.
Wearing a satisfied look, the Mother Commander reviewed the troop formations. Janess, too, was clearly proud of the trained fighters. "I will pit our Valkyries against any army the Honored Matres can raise against us."
"Yes, Janess, you will--and soon. First, we will conquer Buzzell."
Muad'Dib could indeed see the Future, but you must understand the limits of this power. Think of sight. You have eyes, yet cannot see without light. If you are on the floor of a valley, you cannot see beyond your valley. Just so, Muad'Dib could not always choose to look across the mysterious terrain. He tells us that a single obscure decision of prophecy, perhaps the choice of one word over another, could change the entire aspect of the future. He tells us "The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door."And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning "That path leads ever down into stagnation."
--from "Arrakis Awakening" by the
PRINCESS IRULAN
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