AllFreeNovel
Share Us
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.
