storm. We will show them an Emperor’s wrath, then.” He pointed at Alia. “Give her body to the storm.”
As he spoke, Alia fled backward, feigning terror. “Let the storm have what it can take!” she screamed. And she backed into the Baron’s arms.
“I have her, Majesty!” the Baron shouted. “Shall I dispatch her now-eeeeeeeeeeeh!” He hurled her to the floor, clutched his left arm.
“I’m sorry, Grandfather,” Alia said. “You’ve met the Atreides gom jabbar.” She got to her feet, dropped a dark needle from her hand.
The Baron fell back. His eyes bulged as he stared at a red slash on his left palm. “You… you….” He rolled sideways in his suspensors, a sagging mass of flesh supported inches off the floor with head lolling and mouth hanging open.
“These people are insane,” the Emperor snarled. “Quick! Into the ship. We’ll purge this planet of every …. 91
Something sparkled to his left. A roll of ball lightning bounced away from the wall there, crackled as it touched the metal floor. The smell of burned insulation swept through the selamlik.
“The shield!” one of the Sardaukar officers shouted. “The outer shield is down! They ….”
His words were drowned in a metallic roaring as the shipwall behind the Emperor trembled and rocked.
“They’ve shot the nose off our ship!” someone called.
Dust boiled through the room. Under its cover, Alia leaped up, ran toward the outer door.
The Emperor whirled, motioned his people into an emergency door that swung open in the ship’s side behind the throne. He flashed a hand signal to a Sardaukar officer leaping through the dust haze. “We will make our stand here!” the Emperor ordered.
Another crash shook the hutment. The double doors banged open at the far side of the chamber admitting wind-blown sand and the sound of shouting. A small, black-robed figure could be seen momentarily against the light—Alia darting out to find a knife and, as befitted her Fremen training, to kill Harkonnen and Sardaukar wounded. House Sardaukar charged through a greened yellow haze toward the opening, weapons ready, forming an arc there to protect the Emperor’s retreat.
“Save yourself, Sire!” a Sardaukar officer shouted. “Into the ship!”
But the Emperor stood alone now on his dais pointing toward the doors. A forty-meter section of the hutment had been blasted away there and the selamlik’s doors opened now onto drifting sand. A dust cloud hung low over the outside world blowing from pastel distances. Static lightning crackled from the cloud and the spark flashes of shields being shorted out by the storm’s charge could be seen through the haze. The plain surged with figures in combat—Sardaukar and leaping gyrating robed men who seemed to come down out of the storm.
All this was as a frame for the target of the Emperor’s pointing hand.
Out of the sand haze came an orderly mass of flashing shapes—great rising curves with crystal spokes that resolved into the gaping mouths of sandworms, a massed wall of them, each with troops of Fremen riding to the attack. They came in a hissing wedge, robes whipping in the wind as they cut through the melee on the plain.
Onward toward the Emperor’s hutment they came while the House Sardaukar stood awed for the first time in their history by an onslaught their minds found difficult to accept.
But the figures leaping from the worm backs were men, and the blades flashing in that ominous yellow light were a thing the Sardaukar had been trained to face. They threw themselves into combat. And it was man to man on the plain of Arrakeen while a picked Sardaukar bodyguard pressed the Emperor back into the ship, sealed the door on him, and prepared to die at the door as part of his shield.
In the shock of comparative silence within the ship, the Emperor stared at the wide-eyed faces of his suite, seeing his oldest daughter with the flush of exertion on her cheeks, the old Truthsayer standing like a black shadow with her hood pulled about her face, finding at last the faces he sought—the two Guildsmen. They wore the Guild gray, unadorned, and it seemed to fit the calm they maintained despite the high emotions around them.
The taller of the two, though, held a hand to his left eye. As the Emperor watched, someone jostled the Guildsman’s arm, the hand moved, and the eye was revealed. The man had lost one of his masking contact lenses, and the eye stared out a total blue so dark as to be almost black.