Navigators of Dune

From blow after blow, Vor saw red static around his vision. His head rang as she smashed her open palms against his temples, but they were not mortal blows. In the roar inside his ears, he could hear the Corrin scavengers shouting, calling for him to beat her. He was certain Valya intended to kill him. If he just allowed it, he could end this feud. He’d had a long life, and he was weary in so many ways.

Valya slammed him down to the rubble, threw herself on top of his prone form, pummeling him. He used all his skills to block her repeated attempts at a deathblow, but his energy was waning. Pain erupted from a dozen different injuries, any one of them nearly crippling.

On one side, Willem was shouting in dismay.

Valya knew the most lethal places to strike a human body. She was hurting him intentionally, trying to make him suffer, short of killing him. Finally, he sensed her whole body change, and she coiled for the final deathblow. She would strike like a sledgehammer and cave in his skull.

And Vor was ready for it.

Truth and honor are the allies of the righteous.

Desperation and deceit are the allies of the morally weak.

—ANARI IDAHO

Emperor Roderick’s sudden salvo took the crews aboard the damaged VenHold ships by surprise. Kinetic projectiles slammed against enhanced shields, and even though they failed to penetrate, the avalanche of explosive shells overloaded some of the shield generators that had been under repair since the battle of Lampadas.

As the barriers wavered, Emperor Roderick sat on his command bridge, flanked by Truthsayer Fielle and Admiral Harte. “Continue the bombardment on those ships. Their systems will fail soon, if we can keep firing.” He turned to Harte. “With our inventory of projectiles, how long can we sustain the barrage at this intensity?”

The Admiral asked a young officer on the bridge, who responded, “We planned for this, Sire. Our ships carry weaponry that is disproportionate to their model. We can continue at this constant rate for seven hours. I cannot say whether that will be sufficient.”

“We will have our answer sooner than seven hours.” The Emperor felt an angry ache inside that sharpened his focus into an executioner’s blade. Anna … such an innocent, naïve girl. He couldn’t believe Venport would be so foolish as to kill her preemptively; therefore, something else must have happened. An accident? An illness? Some other tragedy? It didn’t really matter. In any case, she was dead. Roderick knew that his sister had often been her own worst enemy.

While he could never forgive Venport for assassinating his brother, Salvador’s stupid actions had brought about his own demise. Anna, though, was merely a pawn—a flighty girl with absolutely no understanding of the web tangled around her. Venport had taken her hostage for his own purposes, and now she was dead.

For that, Roderick vowed to obliterate the Directeur and everything he cherished.

The VenHold defenders fought back against the Imperial forces, launching a high-powered retaliation, but Roderick remained grimly determined. His fleet pressed onward. Occasionally, one of Harte’s ships withdrew, but only if it had suffered so much damage that it could no longer function properly. Still, the rest of the Imperial fleet kept firing. He had learned that type of relentlessness from the Butlerians.

“Continue bombardment. Maintain maximum shields.” Their invisible defenses were a complex, flickering pattern in which sections of overlapping Holtzman shields dropped to allow the launch of projectiles, then resealed the gaps with nanosecond timing.

Soon, some of the VenHold vessels—particularly the undamaged commercial ships that had come here at Norma Cenva’s call—became adept at finding and predicting those nanosecond weaknesses, and a few projectiles managed to slip through and seriously damage two Imperial ships. Other shields were failing as well.

That only made Roderick angrier.

Admiral Harte turned to the Emperor. “If I might suggest, Sire—the laboratory domes on the surface are far more vulnerable to bombardment than these warships.” His voice grew harder. “And since you no longer need to worry about protecting an innocent hostage, dropping suborbital explosives would destroy, or certainly imperil, Venport’s operations. That is his weakness.”

Roderick felt sickened. “That would bring a swift and decisive end to this, but I want Venport in shackles, dragged before my throne on Salusa. We can’t just obliterate him from orbit, as satisfying as that might be. He should be convicted and punished appropriately in front of the entire Imperium, in a very public and painful execution.” He nodded slowly, knowing how much Salvador would have enjoyed that. “Bombard only the landing facilities and the outlying domes. Those will be hangars and supply depots. Let him know that we can take him out at any time, unless he surrenders.”