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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.
