As the Dream Voyager finally entered the Ophiuchi B solar system as part of the long update run, Seurat attempted to contact the recently installed Omnius network on Giedi Prime. If General Agamemnon had conquered the hrethgir world, as promised, Vor knew they would find the standard machine-run citadel at the world’s business hub. It would be another great chapter for his father to include in his memoirs.
Vorian stood behind the robot captain, studying the instrument console as they approached. “I’ll bet there’s still a lot of organizing and restructuring to do down there.” He was excited at the opportunity to visit a world in the process of shifting from human unruliness to efficient machine rule. Omnius would need to install the best trustees, those most loyal to the thinking machines. Neo-cymeks would probably take care of the brunt of the subjugation work, and trustees would come in later, once the people were sufficiently tamed and accepting of their new situation.
But Vor also felt a little peculiar. The conquered hrethgir on Giedi Prime would look like him, though he would feel no kinship with them. Seurat, and others like him, are more like brothers to me.
At the command console, the robot attempted to lock an onboard signal onto a homing beacon from the citadel. “No contact yet. Perhaps all the systems are not yet installed on the surface, or Agamemnon caused too much damage during his conquest.”
Vor tended to the monitoring systems. “Damage can always be repaired, once conquest is assured.” Ahead, Giedi Prime was illuminated on its dayside by a pale yellow sun. As he stared, his brow furrowed with worry. “Something doesn’t seem quite right, Seurat.”
“Define your reservations, Vorian Atreides. I can take no action based upon a vague uneasy feeling.”
“Never mind. Just . . . be careful.”
The Dream Voyager skimmed the upper atmosphere, slicing through clouds and scattered particulates that the ship’s scoop system analyzed as copious smoke. Could the hrethgir have been so vicious and desperate that they had burned their own cities? What loathsome creatures!
His stomach lurched as onboard warning systems whined. Seurat promptly altered course, halting their descent and gaining altitude again. “It appears the scrambler field remains intact on Giedi Prime.”
“We almost flew into it!” Vor cried. “Does that mean—”
“Perhaps General Agamemnon did not succeed in his conquest. Giedi Prime is not as secure as we were led to expect.”
Irrationally confident that his father would not have failed, Vor ran a sequence of scans. “Instruments picking up League military equipment on the surface, evidence of recent massive explosions in Giedi City.” The words caught in his throat. “The central hub and the local Omnius have been obliterated! All robots and cymeks appear to be destroyed as well.”
“I am scanning their broadband reports . . . collating a summary.” Without alarm, the robot recounted his understanding of the portable scramblers, the powerful Sorceress of Rossak who had used mental powers to obliterate the cymeks, then the overwhelming force of the League Armada.
Then Seurat said in a maddeningly calm voice, “Vorian, a fleet of hrethgir ships is coming around from behind the planet. They appear to have been waiting for us in ambush.”
Outside, streaks of orange and blue tracer fire came close to hitting the update craft, and the Dream Voyager‘s automatic systems jolted into evasive maneuvers. League kindjals streaked in like wolves. “They’re barbarians,” Vor said. “Eager to destroy anything they don’t like.”
Seurat said, “We are under attack. And the Dream Voyager is not a combat-programmed vessel.” He continued to sound artificially jovial, facetiously this time. “Someday I will think of a joke about why it takes so many humans to short-circuit an Omnius.”
ALERTED TO THE approach of a single thinking-machine vessel, Tercero Xavier Harkonnen had moved his orbital battle group to the far side of the planet. Some wreckage of robot warships still tumbled in a dispersing swath; Omnius’s forces had been completely destroyed.
Xavier flew out in a personal kindjal, accompanied by a well-armed squadron. He saw the update ship roar on a steep trajectory toward the damaged main city, then swerve desperately upward as soon as the robot captain detected the scrambler fields. “Follow me! We can’t let it get away.”
Hungry for vengeance, his squadron hurled itself into the pursuit. At the same time, he signaled the ground-based military forces that he had an enemy craft in sight. Ahead, wavering in the crosshairs, the Dream Voyager surged forward, trying to evade Armada weapons fire and to escape back into space.
Abruptly, Xavier was startled to hear a human voice— or one that sounded human— coming over the comline. “Hey, break off your attack! This is a League ship. My name is Vorian Atreides. We have boarded a machine craft and taken control. Stop trying to shoot us down!”
Xavier tried to determine from the tenor if it really was a human voice, or only a clever machine copy. Thinking machines were not devious . . . unless there was a preserved cymek brain aboard. Some of the kindjals dropped back, uncertain.
“Stay on your guard,” Xavier said to his squadron, “but cease fire until we figure this out—”
Before he could finish his order, the suspicious ship looped and began firing its own weapons, minimal defensive volleys that nevertheless took the Armada fighters by surprise. One kindjal veered away, its engines damaged.
Xavier’s console screen showed the image of a human face with dark hair and shining fanatical eyes. A sleek, mirror-faced robot stood next to him, his flexible copperfilm body rippling as he operated the controls of the ship.
A human and a robot, working side by side? Xavier couldn’t believe it.
“Open fire!” he shouted. “Destroy that ship.”
“IT IS NOT wise to provoke them too much, Vorian,” Seurat said, maddeningly calm. “I would rather leave here posthaste.”
“I just gained us a few precious seconds, didn’t I? You wouldn’t have thought of using a bluff.” Vor couldn’t stop grinning. He had read similar words in the memoirs of Agamemnon and was glad to echo them.
As the Armada commander took evasive maneuvers and rallied his kindjal pilots, he hurled insults back at Vor on the comline. “You are a disgrace to humanity, a traitor!”
Vor laughed, proud of his place here. He quoted what he’d been taught all his life. “I am the pinnacle of humanity— a trustee of Omnius, the son of General Agamemnon.”
“I apologize for interrupting your grand speech, Vorian, but I am detecting more hrethgir ships,” the robot said. “More than we can evade. Therefore, I am breaking off engagement. Our responsibility is to protect the updates aboard. We have to make our report.”
Vor said grimly, “If the Giedi Prime– Omnius is already destroyed, we will never have an update of what it did during its months of operation here. We’ll never know what he accomplished.”
“A grievous loss,” Seurat said.
The robot guided the Dream Voyager toward orbit, farther from the deadly scrambler fields. The acceleration pressed Vorian back into his padded seat until he nearly lost consciousness. A squadron of human-operated ships closed in on their tail, and the update ship shuddered as an energy pulse hit the aft section.
Seurat dodged, and another volley of blows pounded the hull, damaging the armor plates. This vessel was not made to endure such punishment. Vor heard onboard systems hissing, automated routines making temporary repairs to the damaged parts. Another blast hit, even worse than the others.
“We are operating on reserves,” Seurat announced. Vor scanned the ship’s diagnostics himself, assessing the damage. The air in the cabin began to smell acrid and smoky.
The Dream Voyager lurched. More kindjals surrounded them, targeting their engines. An explosion jarred Vor to his bones.
“We cannot tolerate much more of this,” Seurat said. “Our engines are functioning at only a third of normal capacity, and I am flying as fast as I can.”
“Head into that high cloud,” Vor said, as an idea suddenly occurred to him. “The water vapor is thick enough to act as a projection surface.”
Listening to his enthusiastic copilot, Seurat steered into a giant, towering cloud. The damaged engines strained. More blows came from the pursuing kindjals.
Vor worked furiously at the controls, using the ship’s sophisticated systems to project virtual copies in its wake, electronic images of the Dream Voyager. He had hoped to use the scheme in a tactical game with Seurat . . . but this was a different sort of game. If it didn’t work, the already-damaged update ship would never survive.
Moments later a hundred illusory Dream Voyagers seemed to surge through the cloud, solido images reflected on the water vapor. Momentarily confused, the pursuing squadron chased decoys.
And the real prey limped away, its pilots stealing up into orbit and hoping to remain unnoticed until they could get out of range. . . .