The Heighliner emerged from foldspace at the wrong point and plummeted into the atmosphere of Wallach IX.

Navigator error.

As large as a comet, the ship crashed into the envelope of air, scraping and roaring. Its outer hull turned molten from the friction. The passengers didn’t even have time to scream.

For centuries, the Bene Gesserit planet had been guarded by security screens that could vaporize any unauthorized vessel. The immense craft was already doomed by the time it struck the first overlapping energy-defense shield.

The out-of-control Heighliner sizzled in the atmosphere, its metal skin ripped away like the soft layers of an onion. Shrapnel smoked through the air and slammed into the landscape like a cannonade, leaving Heighliner components strewn across a thousand-kilometer swath.

The Navigator had no chance to send a distress signal or offer any sort of explanation before the whole craft was obliterated.

As data from the defense shield poured in, identifying the doomed ship, Mother Superior Harishka composed a high-priority message to be sent to Junction. Unfortunately, its delivery would have to await the next Heighliner, by which time the Spacing Guild might already know about the disaster.

In the meantime, within hours of the early-morning crash, Sister Cristane was dispatched with a team of Acolyte workers to the wild, poorly charted site. The Sisters converged on a mountainous region where the largest section of the Heighliner had impacted.

Her dark eyes squinting against the frigid whiteness, Cristane surveyed the collision scars on the winter-etched mountainside. Snow and ice had melted around clumps of slag and twisted wreckage. Wisps of steam still curled up from the largest metallic masses. Using cutters and welders, her work crew might find a few scraps of bodies fused into the debris, but Cristane didn’t know if it would be worth the effort. There could be no survivors here.

All her life, she had been trained to respond to emergencies, but now she could do nothing more than observe. This Heighliner had been doomed the moment it emerged from foldspace.

Cristane was not yet a Reverend Mother, so she didn’t have the multigenerational memories her superiors experienced. But during their meeting to plan a response to the crash, Mother Superior had claimed that in thousands of years, none of the Sisters-within had ever witnessed an accident like this.

Historically, Navigators had made a few minor miscalculations, but serious mishaps were extremely rare— only a handful had been recorded since the formation of the Spacing Guild, well over ten thousand years ago. During the final battle of the Butlerian Jihad, there had been much risk using the first foldspace ships, before the prescient qualities of melange had been discovered. But since that time, the Guild had a sterling safety record.

The implications of this tragedy would have repercussions throughout the Imperium, for centuries to come.

When the guild inspection and recovery team arrived two days later, the men descended upon Wallach IX in swarms. Thousands of workers brought in heavy equipment. Laborers set about cutting up the wreckage and whisking away samples for analysis. The Sisters wanted to keep their secrets, and so did the Guild, which left behind no scraps of their vessel for any outsider to inspect.

Cristane sought out the man in charge of Guild operations. Square-bodied in his pale green singlesuit, he had close-set eyes and wide lips. Studying him, she saw how overwhelmed he was by the tragedy. “Do you have any suspicions, sir? Any explanation for this?”

He shook his head. “Not yet. It will take time to analyze everything.”

“What else?” Despite her youth, the commando Sister carried herself well, with authority. She spoke with enough inflection of Voice that the man answered reflexively.

“This was one of only two vessels in the Dominic Class, constructed during the last days of House Vernius, with an impeccable safety record.”

Cristane regarded him with her large eyes. “Do you have any reason why this Heighliner design might suddenly have become unreliable?”

The Guildsman shook his head, yet could not resist the command of Voice. His face contorted as he tried not to reply. But he lost the effort. “We have not yet had time to assess the details. I… should reserve further comment at present.”

As the effects of Voice wore off, he seemed flustered at what he had revealed. He fled Cristane’s presence.

The commando Sister ran the possibilities through her mind. She watched as armies of laborers dismantled the Heighliner piece by piece. Soon all of the tangible wreckage would be gone, leaving only ugly scars on Wallach IX.