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More blasts glanced across the Ithaca's hull, grazing the ship as it yawed and rolled. Duncan steered with all of his skill.
The Holtzman engines were hot and the diagnostic boards showed numerous errors and system failures, but none were immediately fatal faults. Duncan pushed the vessel closer and closer to the loophole. The Enemy ships couldn't head them off, couldn't move fast enough to stop them.
More of the net broke away. Duncan could see it happening.
He forced his attention back to the engines, applying acceleration far beyond what the systems normally allowed. In his frantic repairs, Teg had not bothered with the niceties of fail-safes and protective limitations. With increased velocity, they pulled free of the enclosing cordon.
"We're going to make it!" Duncan said to the fallen Bashar, as if his friend could still hear him.
A giant torpedo-shaped Enemy vessel leapt forward. No human could possibly pilot a ship so swiftly, changing directions with g-forces that would snap bones like a handful of straw in a clenched fist. Burning its engines, the attacker exhausted all of its fuel in one burst of forward motion--throwing the craft directly into their path.
With his maneuvering already hampered, Duncan could not dodge in time. The no-ship was too huge, with too much inertia. Impossibly, the suicidal Enemy vessel scraped the lower hull of the Ithaca, knocking it off course, damaging the engines yet again. The unexpected impact sent the no-ship spinning. The Enemy rammer tumbled and exploded, and the shock wave knocked them farther off course, out of control . . . back into the remaining strands of the net.
Duncan uttered a curse in dismay and rage.
Unable to fold space, the no-ship dropped back, its engines whining. The bridge control panels blazed red, then went dim. A small internal explosion further damaged the Holtzman engines. The Ithaca hung motionless in space. Again.
"I'm sorry, Bashar," Duncan said, heartbroken. With nothing else to do, he knelt beside the husk of his friend.
A message formed on the primary screen on the bridge, a powerful transmission from the surrounding battleships. Even in his stunned sorrow, Duncan was surprised to see the true face of the Enemy at last.
The smooth flowmetal face of a sentient machine appeared on the screen. "You are our prisoners. Your vessel is no longer capable of independent flight. We will deliver you to the evermind Omnius."
Thinking machines!
Duncan struggled to understand what he was seeing and hearing. Omnius? The evermind? The Enemy, posing as a kindly old couple, were really thinking machines? Impossible! Thinking machines had been outlawed for thousands of years, and the last evermind had been destroyed in the Battle of Corrin at the end of the Butlerian Jihad.
Machines? Somehow allied with the new Face Dancers?
The Enemy ships pounced like hyenas on a fresh carcass.
Some people complain of being haunted by their past. Utter nonsense! I revel in it.
--BARON VLADIMIR HARKONNEN, the ghola
Trapped by the machine fleet, the Ithaca was held captive with its engines damaged and weapons burned out. Duncan could do nothing but wait and mourn his dead friend. Consequences and memories roared around him. He moved methodically, relying on Mentat focus to perform even simple actions.
Sheeana was beside him on the navigation bridge. Though she prided herself in Bene Gesserit purity, holding all emotions at bay, she seemed profoundly troubled as the two of them picked up Teg's body from where it lay crumpled on the deck. Duncan couldn't believe how fragile and lightweight the Bashar's remains were. He seemed to be made of spiderwebs and sinew, dried leaves and hollow bone.
"Miles gave his life for all of us," Duncan said.
"Two times," she said.
Her remark made Duncan think of all the lives of his own he had given for the Atreides. In a raspy voice, he said, "This time, the sacrifice was for nothing. Miles used up his entire life span to give us the repairs we needed, and I couldn't break us free. He shouldn't have done it."
Sheeana fixed a hard look on him. "He shouldn't have tried? We're humans. We have to try, no matter what the odds are. There are never any guarantees. Every action in life is a gamble. The Bashar fought to the last instant of his existence, because he believed there was a chance. I intend to do the same."
Duncan looked down at the sunken, mummified face of his friend, remembering all the determination and hard training the old Bashar had given him when he was a young ghola. Sheeana was right. Even though Duncan hadn't been able to free the Ithaca and let them escape, he and Miles had shown the Enemy that humans were unpredictable and resilient, that they were not to be underestimated. And it wasn't over yet. Instead of a simple capture, the thinking machines had been forced to sacrifice one of their largest battleships simply to stop them.
"We'll take him to one of the small airlocks," he announced. Since their every movement was now dictated by the Enemy ships that dragged them along, it was pointless to remain at the controls. "I have no intention of letting the thinking machines have him."
The remnants of the Bashar would fly alone into the cosmos. The rest of them might be trapped, to be used in thinking-machine experiments, or for whatever reason the old man and woman had been pursuing them over the decades. But not Miles. This act would be another small victory--and enough small victories could win an entire war.
They arrived at one of the chambers, which Duncan recognized as the same airlock he had used to jettison Murbella's last possessions, items that had clung to him like cobwebs until he forced himself to let go. They placed the tragically lightweight husk of Teg's body inside the chamber and sealed it. Duncan looked through the observation port, saying his last goodbyes.
"It isn't the ceremony I would have imagined for him. Last time, the Bashar had all of Rakis for his funeral pyre. But there's no time." Before he could have second thoughts, Duncan pushed the button that evacuated the airlock, opening the outside hatch so that the body tumbled out into the void. "We should summon everyone aboard the ship and prepare our defenses."
"What defenses?"
He looked at her. "Anything we can think of."
SHOULDERED FORWARD BY a hundred thinking-machine vessels, the battered no-ship was forced down into Synchrony, where shifting buildings moved aside to form an acceptable place for the captured craft to land. The now-visible Ithaca descended like a trussed wild animal, the trophy of big game hunters.
Baron Harkonnen thought it a glorious sight. From an extruded balcony in one of Om
nius's capricious high towers, he studied the vessel as it descended. The no-ship's configuration was unfamiliar to him, massive but not as intimidating as he'd imagined it would be. This design was much more organic and alien-looking than huge Guild Heighliners, deadly Sardaukar craft, House Harkonnen military vessels, or his own family frigates. It seemed to be convergent evolution, eerily similar to the flow-form curves of the thinking-machine structures.
Strange ship, strange passengers.
According to initial reports from the machine scouts who had seized the no-ship, many of those aboard were gholas from his own past, annoyances resurrected from history, exactly as Erasmus had suspected--Lady Jessica, another Paul Atreides, a minor Swordmaster named Duncan Idaho, and who knew how many others? Gholas coughed up and spat out like wads of phlegm.
A keyed-up Paolo stood beside him on the balcony, facing the makeshift spaceport that waited to accommodate the new vessel. "Will we kill them all, Grandfather? I don't want there to be another Kwisatz Haderach. I'm supposed to be the only one. I should take the ultraspice that Khrone delivered right now."
"I would have you do it if I could, dear boy, but Omnius won't permit that. Be patient. Even if there is another version of Paul Atreides aboard that no-ship, he's probably soft and compassionate. He doesn't have the advantage of being toughened by me." The Baron's full lips curled down in distaste. Paolo himself didn't realize just how much of his fundamental personality had been changed. "You will have no trouble defeating him."
"I have already visualized it," Paolo replied. "Real, prescient dreams--and now I understand what is going to happen."
"Then you have nothing to worry about."
The Omnius-formed buildings swayed like reeds, then embraced the battered no-ship as it landed, pulling the Ithaca down into a living metal cradle. The landing and lockdown process seemed interminable. Was it really necessary for so many structural braces to fold around the ship like claws? Considering the obvious damage to the engines, the captives could never find a way to launch the vessel again. However, Omnius had a penchant for doing things in a brute-force manner. The Baron could understand that.
