House Atreides - By Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson Page 0,17

sophisticated Ixian machine.

He could send a signal, and the probes would obliterate the other man’s mind, leave him a vegetable. An unexpected power surge . . . a most terrible accident . . . How ironic if Elrood were to use an Ixian scanner to kill the Earl of Ix.

Oh, how he wanted to do it! But not now. The time wasn’t right, and there could be embarrassing questions, maybe even an investigation. Such vengeance required subtlety and planning. In that way, the surprise and ultimate victory would be so much more satisfying.

Elrood switched off the monitor, and the screen darkened.

Standing beside the blocky throne, Chamberlain Aken Hesban didn’t ask why his Emperor was smiling.

The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.

—PARDOT KYNES, Ecology of Bela Tegeuse,

Initial Report to the Imperium

Over a razor-edged horizon the shimmering atmosphere was filled with pastel colors of sunrise. In a brief instant the clean stillness of Arrakis allowed warm light to flood over the wrinkled landscape . . . a sudden deluge of brightness and rising heat. The white sun lurched above the horizon, without much precursor glow in the arid air.

Now that he had finally arrived on the desert world, Pardot Kynes drew a deep breath, then remembered to put the face mask over his nose and mouth to prevent extreme moisture loss. His sparse, sandy hair blew in a light breeze. He had only been on Arrakis four days, and already he sensed that this barren place held more mysteries than a lifetime could ever unravel.

He would have preferred to have been left to his own devices. He wanted to wander alone across the Great Bled with his instruments and logbooks, studying the character of lava rock and the stratified layers of dunes.

However, when Glossu Rabban, nephew of the Baron and heir apparent to House Harkonnen, announced his intention to go into the deep desert to hunt one of the legendary sandworms, such an opportunity was too great for Kynes to ignore.

As a mere Planetologist in the entourage, a scientist instead of a warrior, he felt like the odd man out. Harkonnen desert troops brought along weaponry and explosives from the armored central keep. They took a troop transport led by a man named Thekar, who claimed to have once lived in a desert village, though he was now a water merchant in Carthag. He had more of a Fremen look to him than he admitted, though none of the Harkonnens seemed to notice.

Rabban had no specific plan for tracking one of the huge sinuous beasts. He didn’t want to go to a spice-harvesting site, where his crew might disrupt the work. He wanted to hunt down and kill such a beast by himself. He just brought along all the weaponry he could imagine and relied upon his instinctive talent for destruction. . . .

Days earlier, Kynes had arrived on Arrakis by diplomatic shuttle, landing in the dirty though relatively new city. Eager to get started, he had presented his Imperial assignment papers to the Baron himself. The lean, red-haired man had scrutinized Kynes’s orders carefully, then verified the Imperial seal. He pursed his thick lips before he grudgingly promised his cooperation. “So long as you know enough to stay out of the way of real work.”

Kynes had bowed. “I like nothing better than to be alone and out of the way, m’Lord Baron.”

He’d spent his first two days in the city purchasing desert gear, talking to people from the outlying villages, learning what he could about the legends of the desert, the warnings, the customs, the mysteries to explore. Understanding the importance of such things, Kynes spent a substantial sum to obtain the best stillsuit he could find for desert survival, as well as a paracompass, water distilleries, and reliable note-keeping devices.

It was said that many tribes of the enigmatic Fremen lived in the trackless wastes. Kynes wanted to talk with them, to understand how they squeezed survival from such a harsh environment. But the out-of-place Fremen seemed reticent within the boundaries of Carthag, and they hurried away whenever he tried to talk with them. . . .

Kynes didn’t much care for the city himself. House Harkonnen had erected the new headquarters en masse when, four decades earlier, Guild manipulations had given them Arrakis as a quasi-fief to govern. Carthag had been built with the rapidity of inexhaustible human labor, without finesse or attention to detail: blocky buildings constructed of substandard materials for ostentatious purposes or functionality. No elegance