Navigators of Dune

33

The caves of his tribe’s new sietch were spacious and secure. Modoc was surprised that no other Freemen had discovered them, and they were made habitable in short order. His people resented being forced to move from their ancestral home, where generations had lived in harmony with the desert, but he thought they took offense too easily. The new sietch they had constructed was basically the same as the old one, in Modoc’s opinion, and the huge fees they collected from Josef Venport would grant his people many more luxuries.

His father, Naib Rurik, had been a bitter and unimaginative man, shunning improvements to his tribe’s standard of living. He had spurned outside offers of food, medicine, and equipment. Modoc had laughed when his weakling brother Taref talked about the wonders of the Imperium, but that had been primarily to curry favor with their father. At the time, the Naib’s own horizons had extended no farther than the walls of the caves and the surrounding desert, and he was not impressed by his son’s talk.

Taref had been cast out after allying with Josef Venport, but maybe there was something worthwhile in what his brother had babbled about after all. Yes, the desert people could claw out a rough existence by hoarding every last drop of moisture and extracting melange dust from the sands, but did life need to be so harsh and primitive? If offworlders offered modern luxuries, what sort of leader would force his people to keep suffering simply out of his own stubbornness? When water was offered, would a thirsty man rather drink pride?

So, although his people had been inconvenienced by having to abandon their sietch and build another one, their cisterns were now full of water purchased from the garden tanks in Arrakis City; their larders were stocked with packaged honey, preserved food, offworld meats, dried fruits, delicacies they had never before tasted — all because of the generous payment Venport had given them.

And now, Emperor Roderick was paying them even more to bring about Venport’s downfall! Modoc had accepted that mission as well. He saw no problem with his duplicity. This obscure offworlder conflict was not his war, nor was it any of his concern. He would profit from it and laugh at both sides.

Now, as his tribe members made their move on the spice bank, they were well armed with new weapons — purchased, ironically, with Venport’s own money. And they had enough explosives to complete their plan.

To be sure, their old sietch would not be an easy target, and the Directeur placed an extraordinarily high value on his stockpile. With the spice harvested by his crews, as well as what Venport’s raiders took from Imperial holding warehouses and black-market traders, Modoc estimated that more than a year’s worth of spice production was already stored in his tribe’s old caves.

But VenHold’s mercenary defense forces and advanced technology only made the place seem impregnable. The Directeur had obtained the best security systems and weaponry available in the Imperium. But in order to load the new spice bank swiftly, his foolish engineers had widened mountain passageways and defiles that had originally restricted access so that only a few Freemen could pass through at a time. Now, the ways into the sietch were broad thoroughfares.

Obvious vulnerabilities.

Modoc doubted if his raiders would have any trouble completing the mission. They were skilled warriors, and the Naib had inflamed their anger toward Venport by exaggerating any slight the business tycoon had committed against them. His people would fight for an enormous payoff, which they had already received from the Emperor, but also to punish the man who had taken over their sietch and driven them from their ancestral home.…

At midmorning, Modoc led his hundreds of handpicked commandos out onto the sands, knowing how long it would take them to cross the desert. He planned to arrive at dusk.

Secure in their stillsuits against heat and moisture loss, his spotters took up positions while experienced worm callers arranged themselves on the high dunes before pounding resonant spikes into the sands, hammering out a rhythmic, irresistible beat to summon the great sandworms.

All of his people had ridden the behemoths before, and each warrior was adept at mounting and guiding each manifestation of Shai-Hulud. The Freemen believed Shai-Hulud watched over their tribes and cared nothing for the invaders who now infested Arrakis like dune lice.

Their beliefs were reaffirmed when sandworms responded to the thumping call. Ripples across the open dunes indicated where the monsters traveled beneath. Spotters on the highest dune crests shaded their eyes in the midmorning sun and pointed at the approaching wormsign. The drummers continued pounding on the spikes, causing more worms to come.

Shai-Hulud was on their side.

When the first worm surfaced in an explosive spray of sand and spice, the Freemen had already surrounded the area. As Naib, Modoc was allowing the more ambitious warriors to do the difficult work. After all, he had created this opportunity that offered such great rewards.

When the first sandworm arose, desert fighters scrambled up its side with maker hooks, and inserted spreading wedges between the ring segments to separate them and expose sensitive flesh beneath. In this way they kept the worm from plunging back into the sands. As the giant creature rolled to avoid pain to its sensitive areas, the warriors added ropes and kept scaling the hard-crusted body, imposing their will on the much larger creature. When twenty fighters had climbed to its crest, they shifted their maker hooks down the curvature of the sandworm’s body, forcing it to turn in the direction they wanted. The worm opened its enormous mouth to show a cave filled with sharp crystalline teeth. They drove the creature out onto the sands, heading toward their old sietch.

When the second worm came, Modoc mounted with the next group of fighters.

In all, seven of the beasts surged along, coiled for violence but kept under control by their Freemen riders. The normally territorial creatures did not like being in close proximity to other worms, but Modoc could use their instinctive anger in a different way. The worms would lash out against any target the desert warriors designated — and Modoc planned to give them that target.

The sandworms arrived at the old sietch at sunset, when the shadows were long and Venport’s spice bank was preparing to lock down for the night. Though the sunlight was low and blinding near the horizon, the enormous worms could not be hidden as they stormed out across the desert. This would be an open attack, a full onslaught.

Modoc prepared his fighters as the worms reached the line of rocks. They guided the first creature toward a once-narrow defile that VenHold engineers had widened for access. As the worm approached, four demolition experts leaped off its back, carrying explosive packs. They landed on the sand and rolled, then rushed to the safety of rock, where they implanted the powerful canisters.

Inside the former sietch, VenHold security forces sounded emergency alarms and brought their weapons to bear on the intruders, but the desert commandos planted their bombs and slipped away into openings in the rugged rock formation. The nearly simultaneous blasts sent columns of fire and smoke into the sky, triggering a sustained rumble of avalanches as the cliff walls fell — widening the gateway to the desert.

Modoc drove his worm forward into the breach, and the other six followed. He knew how much spice wealth was contained inside the vaults, and though he had struggled with possibilities for more profit, he could not find a way that he and his people could seize it all for themselves and sell it back to the Imperium.

Emperor Roderick had ordered him to destroy Venport’s stockpile. He remembered a Zensunni proverb, “What is stolen once can be stolen again, but what is destroyed is gone forever.” They would take what they could, carrying it in packs on their backs as they fled, but they had to move swiftly through the desert.

As the behemoths plunged through the enlarged passageway into the sheltered basin, Modoc and his fighters were ready to let the collective Shai-Hulud do the destruction for them. These worms were a weapon against which Venport’s mercenary fighters could not defend.

The sandworms surged into the enclosed rocky arena fronting a curvature of cliffs that held the protected spice bank. Choosing their time carefully, the desert people slid down the crusty worm segments, dismounted, and raced toward the most protected rocks.

Venport’s mercenary force opened fire, cutting down some of the Freemen. Modoc saw ten of his fighters fall, but that was unavoidable. They were all heroes.

As the worms smashed into anything within reach, the Freemen dropped additional explosive packs along the bases of the cliffs, bigger ones this time, with activated timers.

Venport’s defenders didn’t have a chance.

Knowing what was to come, Modoc and his fighters jogged away and took shelter just before the additional explosions went off. A thunderous series of blasts shook the rocks and weakened the cliff faces. Trapped within the enclosed rock walls, the worms became thrashing, violent battering rams.

Modoc and his commandos backed off to watch the destruction, letting the sandworms do most of the work for them. The behemoths hammered themselves against the cliffs, breaking down the caves and crushing anything that moved. The Freemen would wait until the fury had run its course, with the sietch devastated, and then they would set new explosives to release the trapped sandworms from their enclosure, hoping all of them survived. He convinced himself that they would; it would take a lot more than rock walls to destroy Shai-Hulud.

After letting the worms out, the Freemen would slip in to kill any surviving defenders that hid in the deep tunnels. They would take all the water and blood they liked, and their treasure in spice would be far more than they could carry.

When Modoc took his people back to the new sietch, he wouldn’t even have to embellish the story of what had happened to make this day one of the most legendary in the history of his tribe.