DUNE APOSTATE
10101 AG
Arrakis.
Dune.
Desert planet.
As the shuttle doors slide open, the cool darkness of the hangar bay is filled with wind. The force of it presses your hair back against your skull. It is hot, an oven-breath of a wind, without moisture, and it stings of cinnamon. For a moment, the world beyond the doors is a horizontal slit of white light, narrow and golden, expanding as the doors retract into a frozen image out of a painting, a sky dry and dark, so dark that it is only tinged with blue. There is a pale colorless sun in that sky. Underneath it there is the desert.
It is many colors, the desert. Here it is red and there orange and there gold. It is moving, always moving, in fanlike clouds of bloodcoloured dust that rise to stretch up on the wind and sweep low across the sun. The white heat of that white sun on all that sand burns the eyes, burns the mind. It goes on forever in every direction, the desert, endless and inhospitable cubic miles of it.
This may be your first time setting foot on this planet, but it has never been far from the center of your world. Your employers are particular and exact. They guard every resource and hoard every advantage. And this, this dry world of sun and sand, this Arrakis, is the greatest resource in the known universe. It might be described as their foremost investment.
You might best be described as a protector of investments. A finder of advantage. Your unique responsibilities have taken you across all the worlds of mankind, from the watery grottos of Caladan to the teeming slums of Ecaz. Perhaps it was inevitable that they would bring you eventually -- inexorably -- to this place.
All of your pasts and all of your futures narrow to a single cold line. Right at the fine point of that line, at the crossing of the ways where everything you are and have been intersects with everything you may be:
Arrakis. Dune. Desert planet.
The doors have finished opening. A long landing plank extends out from the hangar. You walk slowly down it, raising your arm to your mouth and nose to hold back the worst of the dust. It is all around you now, nestling in your hair and your eyelashes and on your tongue and moving hot down your throat. The dust is everywhere on Arrakis, you have heard. The dust is Arrakis.
And you can smell it almost like cinnamon mixed in with the dust: the
spice. Melange. More addictive than sho-water, more euphoric than opium. The single most valuable product in existence. Sixty basketloads of it might barter for whole worlds. And this world, this dry nothing, is the only place where it may be found, locked in subterranean pockets hidden deep under the sand. A million inhabited worlds to the human race and yet there is nowhere else anything like it.
Only here.
Arrakis. Dune.
Desert planet.
The plank terminates suddenly at a small strip of concrete. A small group of figures is waiting for you at the bottom. Several are dressed in robes of white or brown that billow furiously in the wind. The foremost is a tall man with clothes of dark purple. Brass buttons rise to his neck. His lips are stained a pinkish red, as if by wine. He bends creakily, then rises to greet you. He almost shouts to be heard over the screeching wind.
"Welcome, most honorable Factor. My name is Israbore Thane. On behalf of the Siridar-Count, Lord Micotrin, I welcome you to Arrakis."
Your briefings have covered this man in detail. Israbore Thane. Human computer. You nod to him.
"I am called Essud." You have long lost the patience for theatrics. Perhaps this is why you are so comfortable with your employers. Of all their eccentricities, theatricality is not one of them.
The Mentat smiles thinly. If he is perturbed by your terseness, he hides it well. His face is long and sharp, with many curious slants of bone. A curling mustache shades his upper lip.
"House Micotrin recieves both the Guild and it's emissary with open arms. We will do our best to aid your investigation. As a courtesy, we of course extend you free run of Arakeen. As well, we will provide whatever accomodation you may need -- or assistance, should it come to that."
You 'understand', well as he does, that House Micotrin has no choice. In eight hundred years of duplicity, of war and kanly and bloodshed, the ancient and noble House of Micotrin has never been in more danger than at this precise moment, and no enemy they have ever faced in their long history, not even the Padishah Emperor, has threatened their existence as you do now. All their armies, all their shares won in blood and fire, all their worlds and fiefs and their many millions of subjects -- you hold it all in the palm of your hand.
Still, it would be impolite to remind him.
"I have not come alone," you announce. "The Guild has contracted outside assistance on this matter. They will require the same accommodations as myself."
You gesture behind you, to your odd companion...
[] ...a slender woman with razor cheekbones and mottled grey eyes. Her dark robes toss in the wind, and yet she does not blink. She is beautiful like the cold hull of a starship. Her mouth is a thin line. She says that her name is Philippa. Who she is is of little importance. What she is is obvious, and it is dangerous. She is a sister of the Bene Gesserit, and the Guild has not paid her in anything so base as coin.
[] ...a small, lean man with a shaved head and corded muscles for arms. He has a beard of brown whiskers, and dark eyes that drink in the world. His name, you have been told, is Gelph. He does not look like much, but you have been informed that he has studied for seven years at the schools of the sword on the planet Ginaz. As such, he is a Swordmaster, a killing weapon, and every and finger and muscle of him is capable of atrocity.
[] ...a woman with a round, mouselike face, who wears her hair shaved close to the scalp. Her large eyes are blue-in-blue, the sign of a spice addict, and her full lips are a shade of pinkish red. Her name is Surima Franglin, and like Israbore, she is a Mentat -- a human computer, capable of staggering mental calculations and immense cognitive feats of logic and prediction.
The Micotrin Mentat inclines his neck in a gesture that might be a bow. "Of course. Your associates will be cared for. Be sure of that. We had rather expected
more envoys, and took the liberty of setting aside a wing --"
You cut in mid-sentence. "We are all that is required. Now, the body." You are eager to get to work. "Where is it?"
The man has a habit of licking his tongue before he speaks. You notice it now, flicking between the narrow lips like a lizard hunting moisture. "We have stored it in the crypts beneath the Great Hall."
"Your doctors have not touched it, certainly?"
His mustache twitches, pretending startled offense. "Why, of course not. The corpse of a Navigator is Guild property. I hope you do not believe that House Micotrin would ever flout the Guild's wishes in such a manner." He draws out the words like notes on a baliset.
You smile, but it does not reach your eyes. "Of course not." Given the chance, you know, the man would dissect the corpse and sell it's secrets to the highest bidder.
This is, of course, exactly what you have been sent to prevent, among other things.
Your employers, the Spacing Guild, have a unique monopoly on interstellar travel, for is only through the gifts of their steersmen that man may safely travel the stars. The mutations of the spice melange, which enable the massive predictive calculuses necessary to thread the great Guild Heighliners of the guild across the gulf of space, have changed them irrevocably. To the rest of the body of humankind they are alien and enigmatic, eclectic mutants. They live their lives in the dark between the worlds, sealed into swirling tanks of concentrated melange, locked always and forever into the spice-trance.
Yet inhuman as they have become, even the Great Houses and the Emperor fear them. It is the Navigators who keep the machinery and capital of CHOAM churning, who facilitate all trade between the stars, who every day ferry untold thousands of people across a universe of a million worlds. No commerce, no war, no movement occurs if they do not will it.
They see the future, it is said, as narrow lines in the dark.
And now one of them has died.
It is a death shrouded in mystery and half-truth, but the fact is this: there is a dead Navigator on the planet Arrakis. All signs point to foul play. The Guild writhes with fury. They ache for a retribution rained from the stars.
You are this retribution. You are a Factor, an agent of the Spacing Guild. You have been sent to investigate the dead Navigator -- to find the cause and means of death, and afterwards to find the culprit and any conspirators they may have. To this end, you bear a Writ of Judgement, approved by the High Council of the Landsraad and cosigned by the Padishah Emperor Corrin XI. You may go where you wish, and interrogate, requisition, or imprison any parties or persons necessary for the execution of your charge. As stipulated in the Writ, no House, no army, no authority or law may stand in your way.
The Guild has forbidden all travel offworld. Whoever the murderer is, they remain here on Arrakis. You have five weeks to complete your investigation and produce the guilty party. Should you fail or be killed, the Guild Heighliners waiting in orbit will unleash an orbital barrage on Arrakeen, the planetary capital. Two million souls will perish, along with all of House Micotrin -- but the Guild will have it's justice.
All those pasts, all those futures, all those lives, narrow sharply to this moment and this place.
Arrakis. Dune. Desert planet.
And who are you? What skills do you possess, paid for and bought by the Guild, honed over a lifetime of service, that has brought them to thrust such a terrible duty on your shoulders? No one Factor is the same, but there are a few traits all share: intellect, ruthlessness, and a mastery of some aspect of mind or body which is nearly unrivaled in all the many worlds of mankind.
[] You are a doctor of the Suk School, studied at the great academy on the planet Yohn. You are a master of over six hundred medical disciplines and sub-fields, from neurosurgery to cardiopathy. You have operated on dukes and princes and even on Navigators themselves. You are perhaps one of a dozen living humans who have seen a Navigator in flesh, and one of maybe five who could claim to be an expert in their mutate biology. Of those five, you are the only one the Guild still employs. As a Suk doctor, you have undergone the mental and physical process of Imperial Conditioning which makes your kind so trusted. You cannot knowingly take a human life, even in self-defense -- and so you have often had to find alternate methods of coercion beyond the physical. You have never laid the killing stroke yourself, but you have implanted false muscles, slow-releasing toxins, subdermal means of control. You have done great work for the Guild — but such blatant disregard for the strictures of the school has only one punishment if discovered: Death.
[] You are, or were, one of the Sardaukar, the Emperor's Own. A warrior of unmatched skill and renown, you were born and raised on the hellworld of Selusa Secundus, reared as an instrument of death. You killed with your teeth before you could talk. By adulthood you were adept in every martial art known in the Imperium. It has been said that any ten men from across the known worlds could not hope to match a single one of the Emperor's Sardaukar in battle -- and that together, as a legion, you are unstoppable. That was in the past. You have abandoned your duty, your brothers, and your emperor. The Guild paid a world's ransom to employ you, and all records of your past have been scrubbed by your new masters, with false identities overlaid over false identities. Still, nothing is perfect. The Emperor has no mercy for traitors.
[] To most, you are an unassuming and quiet figure. A noble of some minor house hired by the Navigators for delicate matters, and trained, perhaps, at one of the more renowned schools of assassins. The truth of your existence is perhaps the most closely guarded secret the Spacing Guild has -- their ultimate advantage. You were bred in a vat, not a womb, and no small share of the universe would consider you an abomination. They bought you from the vile biologists of the Bene Tleilax for a moon's worth of the spice melange. You are a bioengineered superweapon -- a Face Dancer. You may take on any shape, any appearance. You may go anywhere, be anyone. Before you, no doors are barred, and no thing is safe.
[] At one point, you were a mercenary, a simple hired killer operating on behalf of the Guild. Under the purview of your masters, you were sent to the Planet Ix. There, the heretical mechanists of Ix sliced away your flesh and replaced it with cool steel. Miles of wire and servo run under your skin. Venom sacs pulse in your throat. Poison filters line your nasal passages. There are over twenty killing implements in your right hand alone. Perhaps the only untouched biological matter in your whole body is your brain -- perhaps. You are the Guild's finest weapon...and you are an abomination.
Man may not be replaced. If ever the truth of your body were found out, the Guild would deny knowledge of your existence. You would be destroyed, as all machines in the shape of men were destroyed in the Butlerian Jihad.
