From deep within his widely distributed citadels of power, the Omnius evermind watched over Earth. His mobile and stationery watcheyes recorded every facet of the bold human attack. He saw the tide of battle turn.

Omnius studied the trajectories of the thousands of spacecraft that came in, counted the numbers that his robotic defenders destroyed.

Even so, some of the atomics got through.

With a separate subset of calculational routines, Omnius maintained a tally of the thinking-machine vessels he had lost. Individually, those robot ships were expendable and could easily be replaced from stock materials and designs. Fortunately, Seurat’s update ship had broken through the descending masses of hrethgir vessels and escaped outward into the solar system. His important thoughts and decisions would be distributed among the Synchronized Worlds.

In spite of the sheer computational ability devoted to the question, Omnius still had not found a solution to the crisis by the time the first atomic warheads detonated above him. Nuclear air bursts sent out electromagnetic pulses that scoured the air and surface of Earth. Waves of energy spread, and in a flash obliterated every gelcircuitry network and thinking-machine mind, as if they were gasoline-soaked tissue paper touched by a spark.

Earth-Omnius was in the midst of an important thought when the shockwave consumed him.

IN THE PAST, the wisecracking robot captain had carried no private weapons. Vor, however, carried an electronic scrambler, a short-range circuitry-damaging device designed for hand-to-hand combat against thinking machines.

“So, you’ve come back to join me, after all,” Seurat said. “Bored with your humans already? They aren’t as fascinating as I am, are they?” He simulated a raucous laugh that Vor had heard many times before. “Did you know that your father considers you a traitor? Perhaps you now feel guilty for deactivating me, stealing the Dream Voyager and—”

“None of that, old Metalmind,” Vor said. “This is another game you have lost. I can’t allow you to deliever that update.”

Seurat chuckled again. “Ah, humans and their silly fantasies.”

“Nevertheless, we persist in our hopeless causes.” Vor raised the electronic scrambler. “And sometimes we win.”

Seurat said, “You were my friend, Vorian. Remember all the jokes I told you? In fact, I have a new one. If you make a cymek out of a mule’s brain, what do you—”

Vor fired the electronic scrambler. Static arcs thrashed out like thin ropes, wrapping around Seurat’s flexible body core of organic-polymer skin and reinforced fibers. The robot shuddered, as if from a seizure. Vor had adjusted the settings so that the burst shut down Seurat’s systems, but did not destroy his brain core. That would have been tantamount to murder.

“The joke is on you, old friend,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

While Seurat remained frozen at his captain’s station, Vor searched the update ship until he found the sealed gelsphere, a complete reproduction of every thought Earth-Omnius had recorded just before the Armada attack.

Holding the shimmering compact data sphere, Vor took one last look at his stricken robot friend, then left the crippled update ship, sealing it behind him. He could not bring himself to destroy it. In any case, the ship was no longer a threat to humanity.

In his kindjal, Vor pulled away, leaving the thinking-machine vessel to drift in the vacuum of space, powerless and lost. It would wander far away from Earth and into the deep freeze of the solar system, to be lost forever in the cometary cloud.

IN THE AFTERMATH, while Earth glowed with simmering atomic fires, Segundo Harkonnen gathered the mismatched remnants of his assault force. They had suffered tremendous losses, much higher than they had anticipated.

“It will take months just to scribe the names of those who sacrificed their lives here, Cuarto Powder,” Xavier said to his adjutant. “And much longer to mourn them.”

“All enemy ships and facilities are destroyed, sir,” Powder responded. “We have accomplished our objective.”

“Yes, Jaymes.” He felt no elation over the victory. Only sadness. And anger toward Vorian Atreides.

When Agamemnon’s son finally returned from deep space, the segundo dispatched a squadron of kindjals to escort him back under heavy guard. Seething, he shut down the Holtzman shields so the kindjals could bring in Vorian’s ship. Many of the fighter pilots wanted to shoot him down as soon as his ship came within range, but Xavier forbade it. “We’ll put the bastard on trial for desertion, perhaps treason.”

Segundo Harkonnen strode into the docking bay on the ballista’s lowest level, to the inside deck where the ships were being brought in with slide cranes and extruding hooks, all manually controlled by human operators.

The lean, dark-haired Vorian stepped boldly out of his battered vessel, looking surprisingly triumphant. The audacity of the man! Uniformed pilots surrounded Vor and brusquely checked him for weapons. The turncoat appeared irritated by their roughness, and protested when they took a package away from him, along with his sidearm.

Amazingly, his face lit up as soon as he saw Xavier. “So Earth-Omnius is destroyed? The attack was a success?”

“No thanks to you,” Xavier said. “Vorian Atreides, I order you confined to the brig for the duration of our return to Salusa Secundus. There, you will face a League tribunal for your cowardly actions.”

But the young man did not look frightened. With an expression of disbelief, he pointed to the package that one of the guards had. “Perhaps we should show the tribunal that as well?”

Vor’s gray eyes were wary, but he grinned as Xavier unwound the plazwrap and popped open the seal to reveal a metallic ball that seemed made of gelatinous silver.

“It’s a complete copy of Omnius,” Vor said. “I intercepted and neutralized an update ship that was about to escape.” He shrugged. “If I had allowed it to get away, all the other everminds would have received the complete intelligence of this attack. In exchange for all of our dead, Omnius would have lost nothing, and the other Synchronized Worlds would know about our Holtzman shields and our tactics. This entire operation would have been pointless. But I stopped the update ship.”

Xavier looked at Vor, stunned. The surface of the orb was pliable to his touch, as if made of living tissue. The League had never imagined such a boon. This alone was worth the gigantic attack on Earth. The horrific loss of life. If Vor was telling the truth.

“I’m sure League intelligence officers will have a field day with this,” Vor said, beaming. “Not to mention”— he added with a quirk of his eyebrow—”what a valuable hostage Omnius will make for us.”

THE BATTERED SHIPS of the unified Armada departed from the solar system, which was now devoid of murderous thinking machines.

Vor took one last look at wounded Earth, remembering the lush blue-and-green landscape and wispy clouds. This had once been a fabulously beautiful world, the birthplace of the human race, a showpiece of natural wonders.

But by the time Xavier ordered the fleet to set course for home, the planet was nothing more than a radioactive slag heap. It would take a long time for anything to ever live there again.