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"If we don't win today, we don't survive anyway. We may be outnumbered, but we can still wipe out part of the thinking-machine fleet. I will not simply abandon Chapterhouse!"
Gorus scrambled back to his feet. "To what purpose, Mother Commander? The machines can just replace themselves."
As they spoke, more Obliterators filled space. So far, all had turned out to be duds.
"The purpose is to show them we can still fight. It is what makes us human, what gives us significance. History shall not record that we abandoned Chapterhouse and tried to hide from the final confrontation between humanity and the thinking machines."
"History? Who will be left to record history?"
Within three minutes of each other, six small foldspace craft raced into the battle zone over Chapterhouse, reporting from the other clusters of ships. They transmitted urgent messages and demanded new orders from the Mother Commander. "Our Obliterators don't function!"
"All navigation systems have shut down."
"How do we fight them now, Mother Commander?"
She answered in a strong, steady tone. "We fight with everything we have."
Just then, a fabulously bright flash blew across at least fifty of the Enemy vessels, vaporizing them in an expanding arc that sent a shudder through the decks of the more distant Guild vessels. Murbella gasped, then laughed. "See! One of the Obliterators still worked! Fire the rest of them."
To her astonishment, space around them suddenly shimmered, cracked, and disgorged hundreds of giant ships. Not human defender vessels.
At first Murbella thought that the Enemy machines had sent yet another devastating fleet, but she quickly identified the cartouche on the curved hulls. Guild Heighliners! They spilled out of foldspace from every direction, surrounding the first massive wave of thinking-machine vessels.
"Administrator, why did you hold out on us?" Murbella's voice was brittle. "There must be a thousand ships here!"
Gorus seemed just as astonished as she was.
A female voice thrummed across the commlines that linked Murbella's defenders. "I am the Oracle of Time, and I bring reinforcements. Mathematical compilers corrupted many Guild vessels, but my Navigators control these Heighliners."
"Navigators?" The white-haired Administrator gasped in consternation. "We thought they were all dead, starved for spice."
The Oracle spoke in a powerful, lilting tone. "And my ships--unlike those made by the traitorous fabricators of Ix--command full armaments. Our Obliterators work as designed. We took them from old Honored Matre ships and hid them away for our own defenses. We intend to use them now."
Murbella's face flushed. She had suspected the rebel Honored Matres had possessed many more Obliterators than were found. So, the Navigators had been hiding them all along!
The Omnius invasion fleet shifted position in response to the Navigator reinforcements, but the machines could not comprehend the magnitude of the astonishing opponent they now faced. They did not react in time as the Oracle's Heighliners spewed out dazzling sunbursts in a flurry of explosions like miniature supernovas. Each incinerating burst of light vaporized entire clusters of the overly complacent Enemy vessels.
Although the machine forces scrambled to defend themselves, their response was ineffective, as if their control functions had been disconnected. The evermind had modeled his plan repeatedly, setting up contingency options for likely turns of events. But Omnius had not foreseen this.
"Thinking machines have long been my sworn enemies," the Oracle said in her ethereal voice.
While Murbella looked on with great satisfaction, precisely targeted Obliterators wiped out countless Enemy ships. If only the Honored Matres had simply turned their stolen weapons against the thinking machines when they'd had the chance, long ago! But those women had never stood together against a common foe. Instead, they hoarded their stolen weapons and used the destructive power against each other, against rival planets. What a waste!
The overlapping detonations, each strong enough to scorch a planet, struck the front line of machine ships. A dozen Heighliners raced deeper into the Chapterhouse system to chase Enemy vessels that had already reached planetary orbit.
"We will do what we can at your other front-line planets," the Oracle said. "Today we hurt the Enemy."
Almost before she could absorb what was happening around her, Murbella saw that the initial wave of thinking-machine forces had been reduced to nothing more than scattered debris. As far as she could tell, the Enemy battleships never got the chance to launch a single shot against the defenders of humanity.
Some of the Heighliners winked out, folding space to go to the other crippled last-stand defenders. There, they would deliver their Obliterators and speed off to further encounters with the Enemy. All across the front lines, at every flashpoint where Murbella had placed her groups of fighters, the Oracle's Navigators struck, and vanished again. . . .
Murbella snapped to Administrator Gorus. "Get me a comchannel! How do we talk to your Oracle of Time?"
Gorus was stunned by the events around him. "One does not request an audience with the Oracle. No living person has ever initiated contact with her."
"She just saved our lives! Let me talk with her."
With a skeptical expression, the Administrator made a gesture toward another Guildsman. "We can try, but I promise nothing."
The gray-robed man fiddled with the commline until Murbella shouldered him aside. "Oracle of Time--whoever you are! Let us join forces to eradicate the thinking machines."
A long silence was Murbella's only response, not even static, and her heart sank. Gorus gave her a superio
r look, as if he had known to expect this all along. Murbella saw a second wave of thinking-machine ships race in, now that the initial attack had been thwarted. And these would not tauntingly hold their fire. "More machines are coming--"
"For now, I must move on." As the Oracle spoke, Heighliners began to disappear like soap bubbles popping. "My main battle is on Synchrony."
"Wait!" Murbella cried. "We need you!"
"We are needed elsewhere. Kralizec will not be consummated here. At long last, I have found the no-ship that carries Duncan Idaho, and the secret location of Omnius. I must now go there to end this by destroying the evermind. Forever."
Murbella reeled as the unexpected information hit her. The no-ship found? Duncan was alive!
Within moments the last of the Heighliners vanished into foldspace, leaving the Mother Commander and her ships alone to face the next wave. The thinking machines kept coming.
We have our own goals and ambitions, for good or ill. But our true destiny is decided by forces over which we have no control.
--"The Atreides Manifesto,"
first draft (section deleted by Bene Gesserit committee)
A door in the machines' grand cathedral flowed open like a waterfall of metal, parting to reveal two figures that stepped forward in tandem.
It had been hours since Baron Vladimir Harkonnen had murdered Alia, yet his wide lips still struggled to contain his satisfaction. His spider-black eyes glinted. Dr. Yueh glared at the Baron, his personal bete noire.
Paul did not need ghola memories to recognize the Baron's companion--a lean young man, barely more than a boy, but whipcord strong with muscles tuned from constant training. The eyes were harder, the features sharper, but Paul knew the face that stared back at him from the mirror.
Beside him Chani gave a strangled cry, but the sound changed to a growl in her throat. She recognized the younger Paul, and also saw the terrible difference.
A cold sense of inexorability froze Paul's blood as everything became clear. His prescient vision in the flesh! So, the thinking machines had grown another ghola of Paul Atreides to be their pawn, a second potential Kwisatz Haderach for their private use. Now he understood the recurring dreams of his own face laughing triumphantly, consuming spice, the peculiar image of himself stabbed and dying, bleeding out his life's blood on a strange floor. Just like the one on which he stood now, in this vaulted chamber.
