Navigators of Dune

She felt she was on the verge of a revelation, an epiphany … possibly a specific warning.

Ever since she had rescued Josef from the Imperial Palace on Salusa Secundus after his role in the assassination was exposed, she had monitored the ongoing crisis in the Imperium, assessing second- and third-order consequences. But even with spice prescience, she experienced troubling blind spots that prevented her from seeing certain events and choices. Even prescience held imperfections, too much uncertainty, and for the sake of her Navigators, she needed to know.

This perch on the giant tower gave her a new perspective, from a cosmic standpoint. She gazed outward, and her mind extended beyond the limitations of human vision into the deepest tapestry of space-time. It was like a much larger version of the gas inside her tank and in an infinite variety of colors, with swirling nebulae and galaxies, so beautiful but challenging to her as well, for the difficulties they presented to her prescience.

She strained to envision all the way to the other side of the universe, and from there she peered back at herself with a powerful sense of reflective vision. From that infinite perspective, she gazed down upon Kolhar and her field of developing Navigators. Their tanks sparkled in the bright morning sun. Hundreds of Navigators, tank after tank, stretched across a wide, grassy field.

The universe is ours.

As her concerns knotted into questions that tangled into paradoxes, she needed this different vantage to help her find new solutions to serious problems.

Even though Josef had secured a stronger grip on Arrakis and had created the strategic spice bank, Norma was troubled by his recent rash of increasingly aggressive actions, which could well have unpleasant reactionary consequences. He had swept through the Imperial guard forces left behind on Arrakis, destroying Imperially sanctioned contract operations and seizing the profits for himself.

Norma agreed with the result of such actions … but not the provocative nature of the actions themselves. Roderick’s retaliations would cause more problems. Surely, Josef could see the danger. It did not require prescience to predict the Emperor’s response.

Josef considered himself invincible, but Norma could foresee possible disastrous consequences—and how they would affect her Navigators. Through a sudden spark of clarity, she recognized that they were all in the gravest danger!

But she couldn’t see the source of it. Was it the Emperor? Uncertain. She would have to monitor very closely.…

Money is the root of all control.

—HADITHA CORRINO, advice to her husband

As dawn light cast its soft glow over the city of Zimia, Emperor Roderick sat in his palace office, rubbing his eyes from lack of sleep. It had been a long night, but he needed the quiet time to attend to countless matters of state. His predecessor, Salvador, had delegated many of the decisions and details, often to his brother, but Emperor Roderick planned to keep a firm grasp on his government. The machinery of an empire has an infinite number of tiny gears.

And one of those large gears was going to crush Josef Venport. Roderick read a confirmation of action and exhaled a long, satisfied sigh. Even without the results of General Roon’s strike force, whatever had happened to it and all of the soldiers, Roderick had just secured a clear victory against his enemy, a different kind of attack that would bring VenHold to its knees. When he reread the document, he could already feel the Imperial treasury swelling with new wealth. And the Directeur could do nothing about it.

In an unprecedented move, Roderick had used his authority to seize control of all VenHold banks operating on Imperial planets. This one executive order would deprive the tycoon of significant assets, freezing much of his wealth. Venport’s commercial empire would suddenly find itself without cash to continue operations, to buy fuel or commodities, to hire traders, to pay the salaries of pilots and crew. The man undoubtedly had other sources of wealth and hidden funds in illicit accounts, but this would hurt him, and hurt him badly.

Far too much time had passed since the departure of the Kolhar strike force, and by now Roderick feared that General Roon had been defeated or otherwise lost—a crippling blow to the Imperial Armed Forces. But this seizure of assets was an even greater wound to the man who had murdered Salvador.

Roderick knew it wasn’t good enough, though. Directeur Venport’s fleet of fast spacefolders traveled throughout the Imperium with impunity; he still held Admiral Harte’s entire Imperial battle group hostage over Kolhar; and in a bold move Venport had just reasserted control over the lucrative spice operations on Arrakis, neutralizing the Imperial guardian ships and seizing the contract melange harvesting teams.