Navigators of Dune

From her tank, Norma approved of the large, protected stockpile. Her sealed chamber appeared just inside the narrow defile and the open area that led to the cave warrens. When Josef explained the continuing plans, she listened in silence, absorbing the data.

In order to gain ready access to the modified sietch, his engineers had blasted open a cave roof and torn down several rock walls. Right now, two cargo fliers cruised through the dusty air carrying large loads of packaged melange, some of it stolen from black marketeers. Other supplies had been moved into the sietch from other VenHold stockpiles.

The cargo fliers hovered over the open area while spice-laden pallets dropped out of their belly compartments. Suspensor packs lowered the deliveries to the ground, stirring up a burst of sand. Josef no longer had to worry about Imperial patrols, and although someone might notice all this activity, the only possible prying eyes now belonged to desert nomads or poachers, and Josef would install enough security to be proof against that.

“This is excellent progress. So much spice for my Navigators,” Norma said in her otherworldly, wistful voice. “Enough to create hundreds more.”

“With this stockpile, we’ll have enough to last for years—for my purposes, and yours.”

“The universe is ours,” Norma agreed.

VenHold now had so much spice it would take weeks to load everything into the secure chambers, but he could see that the situation was well in hand here. It was time to go back to Kolhar, to make sure the defenses would stand against any Imperial attack. By overthrowing the Emperor’s spice operations here, he might have provoked Roderick into making a hasty move. “We need to go home, Grandmother. Our place is back on our homeworld until the end of this dispute.”

Her voice took on a strange, alarming tone. “Yes. We must hurry.”

Her comment gave him an uneasy feeling. He wondered if Norma had seen something through her spice-enriched prescience, something she had not told him yet.…

The human mind is more difficult to reprogram than a thinking machine. There is a limit to how much effort we should expend in trying to retrain the Orthodox Sisters. Our patience is not infinite. We may have to kill them.

—MOTHER SUPERIOR VALYA, in a session with her inner circle

Mother Superior Valya meant to build the Sisterhood into something far more powerful than it had been in the past, but first she needed to be absolutely confident she could rely on her people. At Valya’s feet, an unconscious woman lay on the floor of the windowless cell, bleeding from her ears.

For weeks, Sister Esther-Cano had undergone rigorous reeducation, but had resisted every step. Valya and her subordinates had isolated the defiant Sister with barely enough food and water to stay alive. Esther-Cano had been commanded repeatedly to admit that Dorotea’s misguided Orthodox beliefs had caused the devastating schism in the Sisterhood, and to admit that there had never been any hidden computers. Though Valya knew the last part wasn’t true, since she herself had stored them in ultra-secure underground chambers, she wanted to force Sister Esther-Cano to utter the words.

Yet the beaten woman remained pathologically stubborn.

Valya had interrogated Esther-Cano for two hours that afternoon, improvising original methods when the traditional ones had failed. There would be no crude and clumsy torture implements such as the Scalpel interrogators used. No, this prisoner was an accomplished Truthsayer and a Reverend Mother, but Esther-Cano had no defense against the manipulative power of Voice that Valya had mastered.

Testing her abilities, Valya showed that she could overcome Esther-Cano with mere words. Sharpening her verbal weapons, the Mother Superior attacked her subject with vocal jabs that subdued her and turned her into a bleeding wreck on the floor. Valya had not laid a finger on the other woman, but her soft hypnotic Voice had convinced Esther-Cano that the sound was tremendously loud, rather than the whisper that it really was, and the mere suggestion of noise had actually destroyed the inside of her ears. Amazing and unexpected! When Esther-Cano returned to consciousness she would realize that she was completely deaf.