into the security area. The Count carried his tool kit and this time feigned a look of aggrieved distress, as if he had been given an impossible work assignment. The impostor marched him along, gruffly acknowledging other guards on the higher levels. They succeeded in finding an unoccupied operations chamber behind the Navigator’s tank.
The spice compartment was, as expected, empty. Quickly, Fenring removed the canisters of super-compressed amal pellets, dense tablets of synthetic spice shaped exactly like their melange counterparts. In such a potent form, the spice would be vaporized to create a rich gas, thick enough that a Navigator could feel its full effects and envision safe paths through foldspace.
Fenring sealed the container into the spice-supply compartment, then applied a counterfeit approval label. It might cause some confusion when the spice-stockers found the chamber already loaded, but they would not think too hard upon finding an excess of melange. With luck, no one would complain.
The conspirators slipped back out. Within an hour, they had departed from the Heighliner yards and moved to the next stage of their plan.
“I hope the vessel in orbit will be just as easy to break into, hmmm?” Fenring said. “We need two test ships, to be absolutely sure.”
The Face Dancer looked at him. Zoal’s ability to mimic the guard’s features was eerie. “It may take a bit more finesse, but we’ll get in.”
* * *
Afterward, weary but exhilarated from completing the second half of their mission, they stood under the cloudy skies and twinkling lights of the Junction spaceport. They hid among piled dump boxes at the edge of the loading zone; Fenring wanted to avoid conversation with Guild workers who might ask too many questions.
He could easily have hired a mercenary or a professional commando to complete this covert mission, but Fenring liked to perform dirty work himself, when it interested him. This kept his abilities honed and provided him with pleasure.
During a moment of guarded peace, the Count soothed himself with thoughts of his lovely wife, Margot. He was anxious to return to the Imperial Palace, where he would see and learn what she’d been up to. She should have arrived on Kaitain several days ago.
Zoal interrupted his reverie. “Count Fenring, I must compliment you on your skills. You have done your part well.”
“A compliment from a Face Dancer, hmmm?” Pretending to relax, Fenring leaned against a corroded metal dump box that would soon be hauled up to a Heighliner. “Thank you.”
Seeing a blur, he instinctively jerked to one side just as a flash came toward him, a knife thrown with deadly accuracy. Even before the point of his first weapon missed its target and clanged against the metal cubicle, the Face Dancer snatched another blade hidden in his uniform.
But Count Hasimir Fenring was more than equal to the challenge. His senses and reactions tuned to an extremely high level, he drew his own knives and dropped into a fighting stance, his expression feral. “Ahhh, I thought you were supposed to be untrained in bladework?”
The Face Dancer wore a hard, predatory expression. “I have also been trained to lie, but apparently not well enough.”
Fenring held his knife. He had more experience in assassin’s work than this shape-shifter could ever imagine. The Tleilaxu have underestimated me. Another mistake.
In the dim light of the spaceport, Zoal’s features flickered and shifted once more. His shoulders became broader, his face narrow, his eyes overlarge, until Fenring was looking into a nightmarish reflection of himself, but in the Face Dancer’s clothing. “Soon I will play a new role as Imperial Spice Minister and boyhood friend of Shaddam IV.”
The entire plot fell into place for Fenring, how this Tleilaxu creature would mimic him, passing himself off as a confidant of the Emperor’s. Although Fenring doubted Zoal could fool Shaddam for long, the shape-shifter needed only to get close to the Emperor for a few moments in private— where he could kill him and then take over the Golden Lion Throne, as ordered by Ajidica.
Fenring admired the audacity. Considering the botched decisions Shaddam had made of late, perhaps this simulacrum might not be an altogether unwelcome alternative.
“You’d never fool my Bene Gesserit wife. Margot notices the subtlest details.”
Zoal smiled, an uncharacteristic usage of Fenring’s ferretlike facial features. “I believe I am up to the challenge, now that I have observed you closely.”
The Face Dancer lunged, and Fenring parried with one of his own knives. Their daggers clashed again, and the combatants used their bodies as weapons, slamming each other