In tight formation, armored Imperial prison ships dropped out of the Heighliner hold and fell toward the festering planet like an airborne funeral procession.
Even from space, Salusa Secundus looked gangrenous, with dark scabs and a filmy cloud layer like a torn shroud. According to official press releases, new convicts sent to Salusa had a sixty-percent mortality rate in the first Standard Year.
After the new cargo of prisoners and supplies had been shuttled down to guarded unloading points, Spacing Guild crewmen held the bay doors open long enough for another battered frigate and two unmarked fast lighters to emerge. Leaving no record of their passage, Dominic Vernius and his men proceeded to the planet through a gap in the satellite surveillance net.
Liet-Kynes sat in a passenger seat of the frigate, fingers pressed to the cool pane of the viewplaz. His eyes were as wide as those of a Fremen child on his first worm ride. Salusa Secundus!
The sky was a sickly orange, streaked by pallid clouds even in the noon brightness. Ball lightning bounced across the heavens, as if invisible titans were playing electrical ninepins.
Avoiding Imperial detection beacons, Dominic’s frigate skimmed across the puckered and cracked wastelands as it headed for its landing area. They crossed expanses of vitrified rock that sparkled like lakes, but were actually puddles of granite-glass. Even after so many centuries, only sparse brown grass pried upward through the blasted fields, like the clawed fingers of men buried alive.
Between one heartbeat and the next, Liet understood how his father had been so profoundly moved by the unhealed wounds of this forsaken place. He made a low sound in his throat. When Dominic turned toward him with a curious expression, Liet explained, “In ancient times the Zensunni people— the Fremen— were slaves here for nine generations.” Staring at the blistered landscape, he added in a quiet voice, “Some say you can still see their blood staining the soil and hear their cries carried on the wind.”
Dominic’s broad shoulders sagged. “Weichih, Salusa has endured more than its share of pain and misery.”
They approached the outskirts of a once-sprawling city that now looked like an architectural scar. Stumps of buildings and blackened milk-marble columns lay as detritus of the splendor that once held dominion here. Off in the scabrous hills, a new wall zigzagged around a portion of reasonably intact structures, the remains of an abandoned city that had survived the holocaust.
“That wall was meant to enclose the prison population,” Dominic said, “but after it broke down and the prisoners escaped, the functionaries and administrators sealed up the barrier again and lived inside it, where they felt protected.” He coughed out a snorting laugh. “Once the prisoners realized they were better off in a place where they were at least fed and clothed, they tried to break back in.”
He shook his shaved head. “Now, the toughest ones have learned to make their own lives out here. The others just die. The Corrinos imported dangerous beasts— Laza tigers, Salusan bulls, and the like— to keep the survivors in check. Convicted criminals are just . . . abandoned here. No one expects to leave.”
Liet studied the landscape with a Planetologist’s eye, trying to remember everything his father had taught him. He could smell a sour dampness in the air, even in this desolate place. “Seems to be enough potential, enough moisture. There could be ground cover, crops, livestock. Someone could change this place.”
“The damned Corrinos won’t allow it.” Dominic’s face darkened. “They like it this way, as a suitable punishment for anyone who dares to defy the Imperium. Once prisoners get here, a cruel game begins. The Emperor likes to see who toughens up the best, who survives the longest. In his Palace, members of the Royal Court place bets on renowned prisoners, as to who will survive and who won’t.”
“My father didn’t tell me that,” Liet said. “He lived here for years when he was younger.”
Dominic gave a wan smile, but his eyes remained dark and troubled. “Whoever your father is, lad, he must not know everything.” The weary exile guided the frigate above the rubble of the outer city, to a broken hangar where the roof had sagged into a spiderweb of rusted girders. “As the Earl of Ix, I prefer to be underground. No need to worry about aurora storms down there.”
“My father also told me about aurora storms.”
The frigate descended into the dark hole in the hangar— and kept going down into cavernous warehouse spaces. “This used to be an Imperial repository, reinforced for long-term storage.” Dominic switched on the ship’s running lights, splashing yellow beams into the air. A settling dust cloud looked like gray rain.
The two mismatched lighters swooped in beside the frigate and landed first. Other smugglers emerged from within the hidden base to lock down the craft. They unloaded cargo, tools, and supplies. The pilots of the small ships hurried over to stand by the frigate ramp, waiting for Dominic to emerge.
As he followed the bald leader down, Liet sniffed, still feeling naked without stillsuit or nose plugs. The air smelled dry and burned, tinged with solvents and ozone. Liet longed for the rough warmth of natural rock, like a comfortable sietch; too many of the walls around him were covered with artificial sheets of metal or plastone, concealing chambers beyond.
On a ramp that circled the landing zone, a well-muscled man appeared. He bounded down a stairway to the ground with a smooth and feral grace, though his body was lumpy and unwieldy-looking. A startling, beet-red inkvine scar marred his squarish face, and his stringy blond hair hung at an odd angle over his left eye. He looked like a man who had been broken and then reassembled without instructions.
“Gurney Halleck!” Dominic’s voice echoed in the landing chamber. “Come and meet our new comrade, born and raised among the Fremen.”
The man grinned wolfishly and came over with startling swiftness. He extended a broad palm and tried to crush Liet’s hand with his grip. He quoted a passage that Liet recognized from the Orange Catholic Bible, “Greet all those whom you would have as friends, and welcome them with your heart as well as your hand.”
Liet returned the gesture, speaking a traditional Fremen response in the ancient language of Chakobsa.
“Gurney comes to us from Giedi Prime,” Dominic said. “He stowed away on a shipment bound for my old friend Duke Leto Atreides, then switched ships on Hagal, moving through commercial hubs and spaceports, until he fell in with the right comrades.”
Gurney gave an awkward shrug. He was sweaty, his clothes disheveled from rigorous sword practice. “By the hells, I continued to dig myself deeper, hiding in more and more miserable places for half a year before I finally found these thugs . . . at the very bottom.”
Liet narrowed his eyes suspiciously, ignoring the good-natured banter. “You come from Giedi Prime? The Harkonnen world?” His fingers strayed toward his belt, where he kept his crysknife sheathed. “I have killed a hundred Harkonnen devils.”
Gurney detected the movement, but locked gazes with the bearded young Fremen. “Then you and I will be great friends.”
Later, when Liet sat with the smuggler band in the drinking hall of the underground base, he listened to the discussions, the laughter, the gruffly exchanged stories, the boastings and outright lies.
They opened expensive bottles of a rare vintage and passed around snifters of the potent amber liquid. “Imperial brandy, lad,” Gurney said, handing a glass to Liet, who had trouble swallowing the thick liqueur. “Shaddam’s private stock, worth ten times its weight in melange.” The scarred man gave him a conspiratorial wink. “We swapped a shipment from Kirana, took the Emperor’s personal goods for ourselves, and replaced them with bottles of skunk-vinegar. I expect we’ll hear about it soon.”
Dominic Vernius entered the hall, and all the smugglers greeted him. He had changed into a sleeveless jerkin made of maroon merh-silk lined with black whale fur. Floating like ghosts near him were several holo-images of his beloved wife, so that he could see her no matter which way he turned.
It was warm and comfortable inside the stronghold, but Liet hoped to spend time outside, exploring the Salusan landscape as his father had done. First, though, Liet had promised to use his Fremen skills to study the hidden base, to help disguise it and protect it from observers— though he agreed with Dominic that few people would bother to look for a hideout here.
No one willingly came to Salusa Secundus.
On the wall of his hideout mess hall, Dominic kept a centuries-old map, depicting the way this world had been in its glory days as the magnificent capital of an interstellar empire. Lines were drawn in gold metal, palaces and cities marked with jewels, ice caps made of tiger’s-breath opal, and inlaid seas of petrified Elaccan bluewood.
Dominic claimed (from his own imagination rather than any documentary evidence) that the map had belonged to Crown Prince Raphael Corrino, the legendary statesman and philosopher from thousands of years ago. Dominic expressed relief that Raphael—“the only good Corrino of the bunch,” as far as he was concerned— had never lived to see what had happened to his beloved capital. All of that fairy-tale magnificence, all the dreams and visions and good deeds, had been wiped away by nuclear fire.
Gurney Halleck strummed his new baliset and sang a mournful song. Liet listened to the words, finding them sensitive and haunting, evoking images of bygone people and places.
Each man took his own meaning from the song, and Liet noticed tears at the edges of Dominic’s eyes, while his gaze was directed at the holo-portraits of Shando. Liet flinched at the naked emotion that was so rare among the Fremen.
Dominic’s distant gaze was only partly focused on the bejeweled map on the wall. “Somewhere in Imperial records, undoubtedly covered with dust, is the name of the renegade family that used forbidden atomics to devastate a continent here.”
Liet shuddered. “What were they thinking? Why would even a renegade do such a terrible thing?”
“They did what they had to do, Weichih,” Johdam snapped, rubbing the scar on his eyebrow. “We cannot know the price of their desperation.”
Dominic sagged deeper into his chair. “Some Corrinos— damn them and their descendants— were left alive. The surviving Emperor, Hassik III, moved his capital to Kaitain . . . and the Imperium goes on. The Corrinos go on. And they took an ironic pleasure in turning the hellhole of Salusa Secundus into their private prison world. Every member of that renegade family was hunted down and brought here to suffer horrible deaths.”
The bristly-haired veteran Asuyo nodded gravely. “It’s said that their ghosts still haunt this place, eh?”
Startled, Liet recognized that the exiled Earl Vernius saw reminders of himself in that desperate, long-forgotten family. Though Dominic seemed good-natured, Liet had learned the depths of pain this man had endured: his wife murdered, his subjects crushed under a Tleilaxu yoke, his son and daughter forced to live in exile on Caladan.
“Those renegades long ago . . .” Dominic said with a strange light in his eyes, “they weren’t as thorough as I’d have been with the killing.”