Navigators of Dune

Erasmus had destroyed their relationship, and Anna had no one else. None of the scientists or laboratory workers were her friends. Even old Lady Orenna back on Salusa—the closest person Anna ever had to a mother—was dead. Anna had nothing left … only her despair, hopelessness, and bitter memories.

How many times could she be destroyed before it was enough? If this present crisis wiped out the whole Denali facility, it might be a blessing for her.

As the deafening alarms continued to ring, Anna staggered away with tears streaming down her face. Hot, wrenching sobs tore at her chest, but no one paid the slightest attention to her misery.

Eventually, she stumbled into an empty cymek hangar. Except for a few leftover walkers still patrolling the blasted landscape outside the domes, the cymek army was gone. Manford Torondo and his fanatics had destroyed the machines on Lampadas. Maybe the Butlerians had come to Denali now, and that was what the alarms were all about.

She knew the invaders would want to kill Erasmus, as they had killed so many other thinking machines. After what she’d been put through, she didn’t care if they tore Erasmus apart and dissected his gelcircuitry brain. The thought horrified her for a moment. If she saved him, maybe he would change, maybe he would apologize. A flare of hope shot higher within her, but crashed down again. She had been such a fool. She saw that clearly now. It was no mistake.

He was an evil robot, just as the Butlerians had always claimed, and she felt repulsed to have fallen in love with such a heartless, calculating monster. Erasmus had intentionally jabbed and twisted her feelings in order to create emotions for him to study, as if she were one of the specimens in his laboratory!

Alarms continued to shriek, and VenHold workers scrambled to defend Denali. Anna vowed she would never let anyone hurt her again, and couldn’t think of a pain greater than the raw and jagged ache that was tearing her apart from the inside. She had only one decision to make now, a choice that was hers and no one else’s.

Inside the cymek hangar she looked outside through the broad windows, at the swirling, greenish mists. In the darkness the drifting fog looked so peaceful, so soothing. It would embrace her if she came into contact with it. She would breathe the mist into her lungs and would drown in its lethal embrace.

She went to the airlock and closed herself inside. The cautionary interior alarm was drowned out by the racket in the domes.

Princess Anna Corrino ignored the warnings, opened the outer hatch, and staggered out into the poisonous air of Denali.

* * *

AS HE ASSESSED the newly arrived Imperial fleet and calculated their weapons versus the VenHold defenses available on the Navigator-guided ships in orbit, Erasmus realized that this facility was in serious trouble. Alarms continued to shriek. He had hoped for more time to work on developing effective new defenses, but the most interesting concepts were no more than design specs or, at best, untested prototypes.

His computer mind focused on the problem; Directeur Venport would want his assessment as soon as possible. Just like dear Gilbertus, Draigo Roget had helped him understand the overall political situation in the Imperium, explaining that Venport Holdings had more enemies than just Manford Torondo.

Erasmus had taken pleasure in seeing the Mentat’s clean and ordered thoughts—made possible, he knew, by the logic techniques he himself had developed for Gilbertus to share. The people on Denali were natural allies, thrown together to develop ways to fight the Butlerians, but now their enemy was the Emperor himself. And they would all have to fight together in order to survive.

Over the course of his existence, Erasmus had forged a number of unorthodox alliances; some had been effective, while others surprised him in the wrong way. The failures—particularly Serena Butler and the young Vorian Atreides—were usually caused by unpredictable human behavior. Their species frequently disregarded the straightforward statements they called promises. Emperor Roderick Corrino had broken a promise to Josef Venport, and now it looked certain that Denali would fall.

The Tlulaxa scientists had grown Erasmus a new body, as requested, but it had taken sweet Anna Corrino to show him the complexities and nuances of being human. Anna had helped him understand the odd and esoteric feelings caused by biological influences and chemical changes. After analyzing the young woman for a very long time, at last he thought he was beginning to understand.

Both before and during the Jihad, as a robot in a beautiful flowmetal body, he had studied hundreds of thousands of experimental subjects, building a database of observations. But those had always been external analyses, and now with this human form grown from the cells of Gilbertus, he could experience the sensations directly.