After Xavier and his battle group departed for Ix, Vor’s mind burned with alternatives. Brute force was a stale and old-fashioned tactic, but not at all the most effective way to defeat the thinking machines. His eyes twinkled impishly as his mind gave birth to possibilities, devising schemes that could prove more effective than all the warships in the Army of the Jihad.

This was more than a friendly competition with his fellow primero. Clever tricks could save countless lives. Human lives.

Without fanfare or much attention whatsoever, Vor commandeered a single-man scout ship. As usual, the jihadi officers were concerned. They warned him of the risks involved and insisted that he take along an escort of armed gunships. But Vor just laughed and brushed them off. They still did not know what he had done to the captive Omnius sphere, now hidden in his cockpit. No one knew. Yet.

Out in open space, Vor set course for a world he had never again expected to visit, and certainly not by choice: Earth. The birthplace of humanity. Now nothing more than a radioactive, charred ball.

Vor knew what he would find there… and still he went.

Though he had no reason to venture down to the surface, he took extra time to cruise above the stormy atmosphere, scanning the lifeless land masses below. The night-side continents were black, showing no signs of civilization, and as he circled around to the daylight side he noted swirling white clouds, murky oceans, and brown land masses with almost no smear of green.

He remembered the many times he had flown here in the Dream Voyager. Thumbing back through the internal ledger of his thoughts, he envisioned himself and the independent robot Seurat approaching the homeworld of humanity, the central planet of Omnius. The network of city lights, the grid of bright industry and civilization had always called out to Vor. But the beautiful glitter was now absent. It had been decades since the nuclear annihilation, and still the planet looked mostly dead. Perhaps one day Earth would again be habitable, but for now it was only a scar marking a wound that humans had dealt the thinking machines… and themselves.

Vor had spent his formative years here, studying his father’s memoirs, absorbing the cymek general’s distorted version of history. Then Serena Butler had shown him that his life was filled with distortions and outright lies. He had escaped. He had been reborn.

In his new life as a free human in the League of Nobles, Vor found himself fascinated with history. He read the records of ancient humanity and memorized details of the original Agamemnon, the ancient general who had fought in the Trojan War, as recorded in Homer’s Iliad.

In his studies Vor sought to differentiate between history and myth, between accurate information and legends. But sometimes even tales of questionable accuracy could provide interesting ideas. When studying the exploits of the first Agamemnon, he had become particularly intrigued by the account of the Trojan horse…

The League scientists would not have understood— or perhaps they would have run endless tests. But that was not a luxury they could afford during wartime.

Filled with nostalgia and renewed determination, Vor left Earth behind and headed for his real destination. Following a trajectory he had flown long ago during the Armada’s battle for Earth, he reached the fringes of the solar system. Back then, still a recent turncoat and not fully trusted, Vor had broken ranks to pursue an Omnius update ship that was attempting to escape. After deactivating its robot captain, he had left the craft adrift… for twenty-five years.

Now Vor searched for any trace of the long-inert vessel, scanning the regions into which it might have drifted among the frozen cometary debris far from the light of the Sun. “Don’t hide from me, Old Metalmind,” he said to himself. “Come out and play.”

Vor wished he’d had the foresight years ago to place a tiny locater beacon on the update ship, but now he used his skill with calculations and computers to determine possible orbits. Taking his time, he combed the sparse desert of deep space. Finally, not far from one of his orbital estimates, he detected the metal signature of the robotic vessel. “Ah, there you are.”

Grinning, Vor brought his ship alongside the other craft, maneuvering expertly to dock the two vessels. Back in the isolated labin Zimia, he had worked for many months, tampering with the captive Omnius, adding subtle loops, errors, and virtual land mines to its programming. The original silvery gelsphere sat beside him in the Jihad ship’s cockpit, stolen from the cybernetic lab. Now he would use the gelsphere to plant his corruptions on the Synchronized Worlds.

Unwittingly, his old comrade Seurat would do it for him.

Vor donned a breathing mask and opened the hatch to step into the frigid air of the paralyzed update ship. The copper-skinned robot pilot, deactivated when Vor used a scrambler on him, should still be on board.

At the time of this betrayal, Vor had felt uncomfortable. Seurat had been his faithful companion, a quirky but genuine friend on many voyages. Though Vor still held a soft spot in his heart for him, his dedication to the Jihad was even stronger, infused with a powerful sense of determination and the rightness of humanity’s cause. Despite his attributes, Seurat was a thinking machine, making him the sworn enemy of the human race… and of Vorian Atreides.

Aboard the craft, Vor felt like an intruder. The brutally cold air seemed to resist him, and he moved forward silently, afraid to disturb the tiniest detail. He could not leave any mark of his presence, neither a fingerprint nor a scuff. The update ship’s every interior surface sparkled with frost, humidity that had crystallized out of the motionless air, but he left no footprints on the corrugated metal deck as he moved across it.

In the cockpit he discovered the familiar humanoid shape of the captain with whom he had served, a robotic pilot who had taken countless Omnius update spheres from one Synchronized World to another. Seurat remained motionless, his mirrored, coppery face reflecting a distorted image of Vor looking down at him through the breathing mask.

“So, I see you’ve waited for me,” Vor said, driving away the nostalgia that flickered around the edges of his mind. “I didn’t leave you in a very dignified position, I fear. Sorry, Old Metalmind.”

He opened the secret storage compartment from which he had originally stolen the Omnius update a quarter century earlier. Removing the silvery gelsphere from the pack at his side, he replaced it in the empty waiting cradle, precisely where he had found it. Though the League scientists had already performed decades of interrogation and analysis, Vor had meticulously deleted all those memories. Even the tainted update itself wouldn’t know what had happened.

With a sly smile, Vor resealed the storage compartment, careful not to leave any evidence of his intrusion. The information inside would look totally legitimate, though it was modified in ways that no thinking machine could readily detect.

Briefly, he worried what would happen to the independent robot pilot, once Omnius discovered the destruction Seurat unwittingly carried. He hoped the mechanical captain would not be destroyed out of spite. Perhaps his memory core would be completely wiped. A sad end for a decent companion… but at least Seurat would forget all those atrociously bad jokes he used to tell.

Maybe Omnius would just put Seurat back to work, provided the evermind survived the chaos Old Metalmind would bring. Vor wished he could be there to watch….

Finally, he took great pleasure in restarting the systems he had deactivated in Seurat’s body. Vor wished he could stay and talk with his old chum and teach him how to play Fleur de Lys, or tell him some of the twisted Omnius jokes that jihadi soldiers exchanged in their crew quarters— but Vor knew that wasn’t possible. In a few days the robot would awaken, assuming his gelcircuitry systems gradually repaired themselves.

By then, Vorian Atreides would be long gone.

His mission complete, he returned through the hatch to his own ship. Though it would not be apparent for some time yet, he was convinced that he had just struck a devastating blow against the Synchronized Worlds.

After years of the bloody Jihad, it was finally time to let Omnius defeat himself. Vor could almost taste the irony….