Navigators of Dune

The Imperial ships withdrew for just a moment, and it was enough time. The flagship’s Holtzman engines thrummed as Josef spun to face the Navigator tank. “Now, Grandmother.”

All the remaining VenHold ships vanished.

A person’s sense of balance is measured by how he handles the unexpected. The ability and will to survive in the face of unforeseen challenges is one of the most admirable of all human traits. Thinking machines cannot begin to understand it.

—GHAN MUMBAI, philosopher of the Jihad

Under the ruins of Corrin where he had made his new home, Vor awoke to the sound of screaming—many people in terrible agony. He was instantly alert. Had Valya Harkonnen come here with assassins?

The screams! As he bolted out of his sleeping chamber into a connecting tunnel, he experienced a bright flashback from the first century of the Jihad: There had been an explosion below decks during a space battle, and backwash fires had caused emergency bulkhead doors to seal the engine compartment. Vor and his fellow soldiers had tried unsuccessfully to free the trapped engineers, and they heard the screams of the men and women being roasted alive for ten of the longest minutes of his life.…

This sounded just as horrific.

His reflexes kicking in, Vor ran toward the screams with no thought for his own safety. He had survived countless challenges in his life, but merely surviving was not enough. Vorian Atreides had been programmed to help others.

In the dimly lit tunnels, numerous doorways led to sleeping compartments, and more of the ragtag scavengers began to emerge as he ran by. Vor didn’t answer their shouted questions, asking him what was going on, couldn’t take the time to reply. He just kept running toward the screams, his mind churning with his own questions. Had the Harkonnens launched a military attack on Corrin? Would they strike the entire settlement just to get at him?

But would Tula or Valya be so blatantly destructive? He didn’t think so. They would want to get me. Personally.

The screams continued outside, and it occurred to him that this might be a trap, designed to lure him out. He ignored the worry.

Ahead, a strange glow shimmered from where a stairway descended to the larger and deeper main tunnel. He peered down to see a river of silvery liquid gushing through the lower tunnel like flowing metal blood, a living substance that pulsed like a mindless amoeba … and frantic scavengers were caught in the powerful flow. Like drowning victims, they flailed their arms and yelled for help. Some wore protective suits, but most were vulnerable. The malicious quicksilver engulfed them. Even as they struggled to get away, the powerful flow seemed to fight back, pulling them under.

Choking on the thick, bitter tang in the air, Vor scrambled down the stairs to reach the trapped scavengers. Their resonance extraction operations had somehow broken down the flowmetal and left it unconstrained. Now it seemed to be on a mindless rampage.

A wiry woman in a protective suit floated toward him in the current, struggling to stay above the surface; her face was covered by a half-mask breather. Boxy equipment floated alongside her, a set of the resonance manipulators that Korla’s people used to extract flowmetal from the ruins. A deep mining team must have triggered this unexpected backlash, and Vor didn’t know how it would ever stop.

The desperate woman yelled something that was muffled by her mask. She reached out to Vor, and he grabbed hold of her gloved hand. Because she was coated with a film of flowmetal, his grip nearly slipped off, but he clenched tighter and used his other hand to grab her by the elbow. He hoisted her onto the stairway, where she shuddered, dripping silvery liquid and retching.

Another man fought against the thickening metallic flood, struggling to reach Vor. But a swell of the flowmetal reached up to engulf his head and sucked him under the shimmering, quivering surface. The man’s screams fell silent.

Two more scavengers were swept past in the flow, still struggling, followed by a dead woman floating facedown, all of them well beyond his reach. The flowmetal pulled the bodies along in a powerful current, lifted them up, and compressed around them like a tightening fist. The men cried out, but their voices were overwhelmed by the sound of cracking bones.

Heaving deep breaths on the precarious stairs, the woman Vor had rescued said, “We hit a big flowmetal vein, and our resonators started a cascade. It broke underground barricades and flooded out—much more than we could handle. Sometimes the damned stuff seems alive!”