Navigators of Dune

38

After Norma tore the VenHold fleet away from certain victory, Josef stood on the Navigator deck raging against her, demanding that she return to Salusa so his warships could get back to the space battle. “We were winning! We could have broken the Emperor’s will and smashed the barbarians.” He could barely keep his voice from becoming a roar. “The victory would have stood for all time.”

But she simply contemplated in the murky spice gas of her tank, refusing to respond as she made the mental calculations and folded space to Arrakis. “Our spice bank is under attack.”

“What do you mean?” Josef was startled by this remark, because he had left substantial forces in place at the desert planet, and he couldn’t imagine any military force that could pose a meaningful threat to his spice stockpile.

Norma was powerful, capricious, incomprehensible, but Josef wanted her to be angry at the same enemies he was. How would he ever recover from this debacle now, after fleeing the battlefield? Emperor Roderick — and worse, the half-Manford — probably assumed the retreat indicated weakness or cowardice. The savages would crow that they had chased away his entire fleet just by puffing up their chests.

“My priority is Arrakis,” Norma finally answered, her voice coming to him across the speakerpatch on the tank. She sounded distant, as if she were ahead of him in space and he had not yet caught up. “We must get there in time.” As she spoke, they arrived, and the shimmers of folded space pulled away to reveal the normal universe again: a yellow sun and a cracked, waterless planet like a copper coin in space.

Josef stared down at Arrakis, and Norma peered out of her tank. “I fear our stockpile is already lost.” Her voice was bleak.

As a captain of industry, Josef was able to hold the big picture in his mind, but he could also compartmentalize his thoughts and focus on one matter at a time. His guarded spice bank held years’ worth of profits — so much melange that it could fund VenHold operations for a very long time. “That’s not possible! We neutralized the Imperials on Arrakis, and we had the best security. Who is attacking us?”

Norma fell silent.

As the ships went into orbit, Josef called to his communications chief, “Give me a full planetary scan. I want to know if there are enemy battleships and troop carriers here. Any sign of an attack?” Norma had often admitted that her prescience was unreliable. He clenched his fists. If she had pulled his entire fleet from Salusa Secundus because of a hallucination …

The communications chief tried to establish contact with the hidden spice bank, but she finally shook her head. “No response from our facility, Directeur, but there are several sandstorms in the vicinity. They could be garbling transmissions. Can’t tell if there is an enemy battle group here.”

Josef spoke over the main comm across all the ships that the Navigators had moved. “My grandmother brought us here from Salusa for reasons she considered sufficient.” He had to bite down hard on the words. “We expected to capture the Imperial capital — but now we’re at Arrakis. The matter may be urgent. I want twenty armored landing vessels to accompany me down to the spice bank, and eighty more at the ready in case I call for reinforcements.”

With knots of anger inside him, Josef left the piloting deck, not sure whether he wanted Norma to be right or wrong. He dreaded the answer either way.

FLANKED BY ARMORED landers as he approached the spice bank from the air, Josef could see a smoldering blot of destruction around what had once been a sheltered sietch. Though a passing storm swept dust and sand through the air, he saw lingering plumes of smoke, and felt sick.

Norma was right. Something terrible had indeed happened down there.

The troop transports descended like a flock of carrion birds. The pilots issued ominous reports as they approached the line of mountains, but Josef barely heard them. He looked through the windowport, thinking of the tall black cliffs, the labyrinth of caves and tunnels … it was all gone. Thousands of Freemen had lived there unmolested for ages, but now, after only a month of active operation, the VenHold spice bank had not only been raided, it had been destroyed.

The armored landers had to circle in the increasing storm winds, but Josef demanded they find a place to set down. He ordered all personnel to arm themselves, but he could already see that the battle was over. Norma had withdrawn them from their victory at Salusa because of this, and now they had arrived too late. The sand had been terribly churned up here, and he noticed a large break in the rock formation, forming a wide path that led out into the desert.

This was just the aftermath, the scar. There would be no more fighting to save the spice stockpile — just bloodstains and grief. The melange was gone.

He disembarked with his security troops, stomping across the sand. They picked their way around boulders the size of houses. Soot stains, sand turned into glass. The devastation was so great that the enclosed cliffs looked as if they had been bombarded from space.

“What caused all this destruction?” he demanded. None of his security troops offered an answer.

Inside the reeking, smoky sietch, he found smashed security walls, a number of torn bodies sprawled on the churned sand, along with destroyed weapons and ruptured crates of melange strewn about as if by a gleeful child.

A few fires were still burning, giving off the greasy smoke of oil and plastics. On rock faces he saw the scars of projectile explosions, but not nearly enough for this amount of damage. Such wild destruction had not been caused by traditional weaponry or explosives. It seemed primal, wanton … and highly effective.

His main spice stockpile was gone, leaving only the much smaller reserves on Kolhar and Denali.

Norma had transported herself down from the Navigator deck of the flagship and now her tank appeared there, resting on a pile of rubble. She drifted in her rich bath of orange vapor, and ripples of tangible distress emanated from the tank, an emotional reaction that Josef had never seen from her before. “So much spice. Many Navigators will be damaged from lack of spice.”

Josef looked around, his anger slashing like a machete as he analyzed the signs, focused on the wide path leading out into the desert. “This was a ground assault. Someone attacked us from the desert.” Momentarily forgetting about the abandoned victory on Salusa, his troops fanned out through the rubble, searching for survivors, records, evidence, but everything was destroyed.

“Years of profits … gone.” Josef made a vow for all to hear. “I will track down the spice thieves. We’ll find what they stole, take it back, and make them pay.”

“No,” Norma said. “It was not stolen. These were not bandits. Our stockpile was obliterated. That was the message they meant to send.”

Judging by the cinnamon-brown residue and all the smashed containers in evidence among the rubble, Josef realized she was probably right. “But this was enough wealth to buy a dozen planets. Who would just … wreck it? And why?”

“My prescience is unclear on this matter, but I know the spice is gone.”

Josef’s stomach knotted as the answer came to him. He could think of no one else who might even conceive of such a thing. It was a powerful, violent message, designed to cripple him. Josef looked around at the disaster site, smelled the smoke, and the rich, bloody scent of spilled melange.

“Roderick … Emperor Roderick did this.”