Given enough training, any Mentat could become a capable killer, an efficient and imaginative assassin. Piter de Vries, though, suspected that his own dangerous nature had to do with the original twisting that enhanced his powers and made him what he was. His proclivity for cruelty, his sadistic enjoyment of the suffering of others, had been designed into his genetic blueprint by the Tleilaxu.

Thus, House Harkonnen was the perfect home for him.

Inside a high room of the Harkonnen Residency at Carthag, de Vries stood before a mirror framed with lacy swirls of oil-black titanium. Using a cloth dipped in fragrant soap, he scrubbed around his mouth, then leaned close to examine the permanent sapho stains. He powdered his pointed chin with makeup, but left the lips bright red. His ink-blue eyes and frizzy hair gave him the wild appearance of unpredictability.

I am too valuable to be used as a mere clerk! But the Baron didn’t always see it that way. The fat fool often misused de Vries’s talents, wasting his valuable time and energy. I am not an accountant. He slithered into his personal study, filled with antique furnishings, racks of shigawire spools and filmbooks. Filmledgers were scattered across his desk, covering the varnished blood-grain.

Any Mentat was overqualified to perform mere bookkeeping chores; de Vries had worked on ledgers before, but never enjoyed it. The tasks were too rudimentary, insultingly simple. But secrets must be kept, and the Baron trusted few people.

Infuriated by the Fremen raid on the Hadith melange hoard and several other hidden stockpiles, the Baron had instructed de Vries to check all Harkonnen financial ledgers to make certain they were in order, that they contained no evidence of the illegal spice stockpiles. All evidence must be expunged, to avoid the attentions of an inquisitive CHOAM auditor. If the stockpiles were discovered, House Harkonnen could well lose its valuable Arrakis fief— and more. Especially with the Emperor’s newly announced hard-line stance against spice hoarding. What is Shaddam thinking?

De Vries sighed and resigned himself to the task.

To make matters worse, the Baron’s thick-skulled nephew, Glossu Rabban, had already gone through the records (without permission) and removed evidence with all the finesse of a dull gravedigger’s shovel; the Beast’s baby brother Feyd-Rautha could have done a better job. Now the books were badly out of balance, leaving de Vries with more work than before.

Far into the evening, he hunched over his desk. He drowned his subconscious in the numbers, absorbing data. With a magnetic scriber, he made changes, altering the first level of discrepancies, smoothing over the too-obvious mistakes.

But a tugging, peripheral thought kept pulling him out of his near trance: a drug-induced vision he had experienced nine years ago, when he’d seen strange, unspecified trouble on the horizon for House Harkonnen… inexplicable images of the Harkonnens abandoning Arrakis, the blue-griffin banner taken down, to be replaced by the green-and-black of House Atreides. How could the Harkonnens possibly lose their spice monopoly? And what did the damnable Atreides have to do with it?

De Vries needed more information. It was his sworn duty. More important than this miserable clerical work. He pushed the ledgers away, then went to his private pharmacopoeia.

He let his fingers select bitter sapho juice, tikopia syrup, and two capsules of melange concentrate. He did not regulate the amounts he gulped. A pleasant, sweet-burning cinnamon essence exploded in his mouth. Hyperprescience, the verge of an overdose, a doorway opening.…

He saw more this time. Information he needed— Baron Harkonnen, older and even heavier, being escorted by Sardaukar troops to a waiting shuttle. So, the Baron himself would be forced to leave Arrakis, not some later generation of Harkonnens! The disaster would occur soon, then.

De Vries struggled to learn additional details, but swimming particles of light fuzzed his vision. He increased the dosage of drugs just enough to return the pleasurable sensation, but the visions did not come back, even as the chemicals rose up like a tidal wave.…

He awoke to find himself in the muscular arms of a pungent-smelling man with broad shoulders. His eyes came into focus a moment before his mind did. Rabban! The burly man hauled him along a rock-walled corridor, underground, beneath the Harkonnen Residency.

“I’m doing you a favor,” Rabban said, feeling the Mentat stir. “You were supposed to be working on the accounts. My uncle won’t be pleased to learn what you’ve done to yourself. Again.”

The Mentat could not think clearly, struggled to speak. “I have learned something much more import—”

In midsentence, de Vries was swung first to one side, then to the other, then with a splash he landed in water— water, of all things, here on Arrakis!

Fighting the fog of drugs, he thrashed and dog-paddled to where Rabban knelt on a stone lip at the edge. “Good thing you can swim. I hope you haven’t soiled our cistern.”

Furious, de Vries crawled out and lay gasping on the stone deck, dripping puddles that would have been worth a fortune to any Fremen servant.

Rabban smirked. “The Baron could always replace you. The Tleilaxu would be only too happy to send us another Mentat grown from the same tank.”

Spluttering, de Vries tried to recover. “I was working, you idiot, trying to enhance a vision that concerned the future of House Harkonnen.” Soaked but trying to maintain his composure, the twisted Mentat pushed past the burly man and marched along the cool underground passages, then up stairs and ramps to the Baron’s private suite. He pounded on the door, still dripping. Breathing hard, Rabban followed close behind.

When the Baron came to the door, floating forward with hastily strapped-on suspensors, he looked irritated. His thick, reddish eyebrows knitted on his pasty face as he scowled; the Mentat’s disheveled appearance did not seem to help. “What’s the meaning of coming to me at this time of night?” He sniffed. “You’re wasting my water.”

A mewling, bloody form lay broken on the far side of the Baron’s reinforced bed. De Vries saw a pale hand twitching; Rabban pushed closer for a better view. “Your Mentat has drugged himself again, Uncle.”

A lizard tongue darted across de Vries’s stained lips. “Only in the line of duty, my Baron. And I have news. Important, disturbing news.” Quickly, he described the drug-induced vision he had experienced.

The Baron puffed his fat cheeks. “Damn all the trouble. My own stockpiles are under constant attack by those infernal Fremen, and now the Emperor is rattling his sword, threatening dire consequences for anyone who keeps a private cache. Now my own Mentat seeks out visions of my downfall! I grow weary of it.”

“You don’t believe his hallucinations, do you, Uncle?” Rabban’s gaze flicked uncertainly between the two men.

“Fine, then. We must prepare to suffer losses and replace what we have lost.” The Baron looked over his shoulder, anxious to get back to his playmate before the boy died on the floor. “Rabban, I don’t care what you have to do. Get me more spice!”

Dressed in his stillsuit, Turok stood in the hot control room of a spice harvester. The huge machine groaned and creaked while it scooped material from a rich desert pit and deposited it into an onboard hopper. Screens, fans, and electrostatic fields separated melange from sand grains and purified the product.

Exhaust dust belched out of the harvester’s stacks and rear pipes as heavy treads hauled the mammoth machine across an exposed spice vein. Flakes of pure melange fell into armored containers; the detachable cargo hold was ready to be whisked away at the first sign of an approaching sandworm.

Fremen like Turok occasionally volunteered to work on harvester crews, where they were valued for their desert skills. They were paid in cash, no questions asked. In doing so, Turok learned valuable information about city workers and spice crews. And information was power— so said Liet-Kynes.

Nearby, the harvester captain stood at a panel, studying screens projected by a dozen external cameras. A nervous man with a gritty beard, he worried that the spotter craft might not spot wormsign in time to save the old machine. “Use those strong Fremen eyes to keep us safe. That’s what I pay you for.”

Through the dusty window, Turok studied the hostile landscape, the undulating dunes. Despite the absence of movement, he knew the desert teemed with life, most of it hiding from the day’s heat. He kept an eye out for deep tremors. Around the control room, three crewmen also peered through scratched and pitted windows, but they didn’t have Fremen eyesight or training.

Suddenly Turok spotted a long, low mound on the distant sand, forming, growing. “Wormsign!” Using the Osbyrne direction finder by the window, he determined the exact coordinates and called them out. “The spotter craft should have signaled us five minutes ago.”

“I knew it, I knew it,” the captain moaned. “Damn them, they still haven’t called it in!” He got on the comsystem and demanded a carryall, then broadcast to his men out on the sand. They scrambled into rover vehicles and rushed back to the uncertain refuge of the harvester.

Turok watched the sand-mound racing toward him. Shai-Hulud always came to spice operations. Always.

He heard a throbbing in the sky overhead, saw dust swirling around the harvester as a carryall descended. The harvester shook while the crew scrambled to make connections, locking down cables and linkage hooks.

Out on the sand, the worm raced closer, hissing through the dunes.

The harvester shuddered again, and the captain cursed over the comsystem. “This is taking too long. Get us out of here, damn you!”

“Problem with the link-up, sir,” a calm voice said over the speaker. “We’re disconnecting you from the hopper and taking it by cargo-sling. You’re on your own.”

The captain screamed at the betrayal.

Through the window, Turok saw the worm’s head emerge from the sand, an ancient creature with sparkling crystal teeth and simmering flames in its gullet. The head quested one way and another as it picked up speed, a torpedo launched toward a target.

While the rest of the crew scurried about, dependent on nonfunctional rescue equipment, Turok dived into a ragged escape chute that emptied him onto the sand away from the worm. The sharp odor of freshly exposed melange burned his nostrils. He saw that his stillsuit had torn.

Struggling to his feet, Turok ran across the powdery slopes and watched the carryall lift off with the spice hopper in a sling. None of the workers had been rescued, only the spice.

Pumping his strong legs and keeping his balance on loose sand, Turok ran for his life. The other, water-fat workers would never make it.

He climbed a high dune, trying to gain distance, then stumbled along the rill. The vibrations of the monstrous harvester would mask his rhythmic footsteps for a time. He tumbled and rolled down a slipface, into the valley between dunes, then scrambled to escape the slow maelstrom as the worm circled and rose to devour its prey.

Turok heard the roar behind him, felt the crumbly ground slip. Still, he struggled in the loose sand and ran. He did not look back as the helpless spice harvester and crew fell into the cavernous gullet of Shai-Hulud. He heard the screams of men, the crunch of metal.

A hundred meters away he saw a rock formation. If he could only reach it.

Baron Harkonnen lay supine on a massage bed, his flabby skin hanging over the sides. Water misters sprayed his back and legs, making him sparkle like a perspiring Sumyan wrestler. Two pretty young men— dry-skinned and rangy, but the best he could find in Carthag— kneaded ointments into his shoulders.

An aide rushed in. “I’m sorry to interrupt, my Lord Baron, but we lost an entire harvester crew today. A carryall arrived in time to off-load the cargo— a full hopper— but could not rescue the men.”

The Baron half sat up, feigning disappointment. “No survivors?” With a casual wave of his hand, he dismissed the aide. “Speak to no one about this.”

He would order de Vries to record the loss of the machine and personnel, along with all of the spice. Naturally, the carryall crew would need to be eliminated as witnesses, and the aide who had brought him the message. Perhaps these two young men also knew too much, but they would never survive the private exercises he planned for them anyway.

He smiled to himself. People could be replaced so easily.