Humans were foolish to build their own competitors— but they couldn’t help themselves.
— ERASMUS,
philosophical datanotes
Though designed as an update ship for the thinking machines, the Dream Voyager was a timeless vessel, streamlined and beautiful, no less serviceable now than when Vor had served Omnius. Almost a century ago, Vor had first flown the black-and-silver ship with Seurat. He had escaped Earth in the Voyager, rescuing Serena Butler and Iblis Ginjo, and he still used it whenever he wasn’t required to be on the bridge of a military ship. In an odd way, it made him feel at peace.
Now he flew the Dream Voyager, comfortable at the controls. After fighting the Jihad for nearly a full century, he had far more discretion on his missions than any other officer. When he’d told Leronica he was leaving Salusa again, she had simply smiled stoically, accustomed to his restlessness. In part he was running from further uncomfortable encounters with his sons during their long visit in Zimia, but he was also heading out to find his other descendants. In the final accounting, that must be considered a good thing.
Since making his decision, Vor had dug up details of his past travels and service in the Jihad. But records were often corrupted and incomplete, especially on worlds that had been harassed by the thinking machines. There had been quite a few eager women, all of them wanting to do their part to strengthen the much-pummeled human race. If they had never informed him about their children so many years ago, he would have difficulty following the clues and tracking them down now.
As a starting point, however, he did know he had one daughter by Karida Julan on Hagal. Long ago, when she’d told him, Vor had sent plenty of credits to support the child and her mother. Since finding Leronica, though, he’d had no further contact.
Too often, Vor had blithely abandoned his connections and obligations. He was beginning to see a pattern in his life, that he made swift and far-reaching decisions without thinking through the consequences. If only he could find his daughter by Karida— the last name he knew was Helmina Berto-Anirul— perhaps he could do something right for a change.
Following up on the leads, Vor found to his dismay that Helmina had been killed in a groundcar accident seven years ago. She had, however, left behind a daughter of her own, born late in Helmina’s life: Raquella, Vor’s granddaughter. According to a credible report, Raquella was now living on Parmentier, a recaptured Synchronized World governed by Rikov Butler.
Vor made up his mind to meet her before it was too late. The Jihad Council and Quentin Butler were happy to have him go to Parmentier to deliver political documents and receive updates from Rikov. This fit quite well with his own agenda.
He pushed the old update ship to the maximum acceleration he could tolerate. The Dream Voyager was painfully slow in comparison with the military and merchant spacefolders, but on the long journey he had plenty of time to rehearse his first meeting with his granddaughter.
In her late teens, Raquella had married a jihadi soldier who’d died in the war less than a year later. Afterward, she studied medicine and dedicated herself to helping the war-injured and those suffering from the deadly diseases that still afflicted humanity. Now twenty-nine, she had spent years with the respected doctor and researcher Mohandas Suk. Were they lovers? Perhaps. Suk was himself the grandnephew of the great battlefield surgeon Rajid Suk, who had served Serena Butler during the early fervor of the Jihad. Vor smiled. Like himself, his granddaughter did not have low aspirations!
As the Dream Voyager finally approached the outer orbital lanes, a surprising message blared across his comline: “I am planetary governor Rikov Butler. By my order, Parmentier is under strict quarantine. Half of our population has succumbed to a new plague, possibly developed by the thinking machines. Extremely high mortality rate, as great as forty to fifty percent— and the secondary deaths and chaos are impossible to quantify. Depart before you are infected. Carry our warning throughout the League of Nobles.”
Concerned, Vor opened the channel. “This is Supreme Commander Vorian Atreides. Give me further details on your situation.” He waited, anxious.
Instead of answering him, though, Rikov’s voice repeated the same words. A recording. Vor transmitted his request once more, searching for a reply. No one responded. “Is anybody there?” Is anybody alive?
His instruments picked up a blockade of orbiters in place, primarily to stop ships from escaping. They bristled with weapons, threatening but silent. The nearest station looked like a fat beetle, a large, round habitat with brightly illuminated ports encircling its equator line. Messages and warnings were broadcast in the leading galactic languages over all the comlines, threatening to destroy anyone who attempted to leave the infected planet.
Vor hailed the nearest station repeatedly, but no one answered. He had always been doggedly persistent once he made up his mind to pursue a goal. Now that he knew of the crisis here, he needed to see Rikov Butler. And since he knew Raquella was also here, he wouldn’t turn around without seeing her.
One of the other stations finally responded to his call. A haggard-looking woman came on the screen. “Go back! You are forbidden from landing on Parmentier— we are under strict quarantine because of the Omnius Scourge.”
“Omnius has always been a scourge to human existence,” Vor said. “Tell me about this plague.”
“It’s been raging down there for weeks, and we’ve been sent to these stations to enforce a strict quarantine. Half of us are sick. Some of the stations are abandoned.”
“I’ll take my chances,” Vor said. He had always been impulsive— to his friend Xavier’s frequent dismay. The life-extension treatment Agamemnon had given him a century ago protected him from disease; he had not suffered so much as a minor cold in all those years. “A quarantine is designed to keep people from getting out, not getting in.”
The haggard woman cursed at him, called him a fool, then signed off.
First he docked against the empty blockade station. They could send all the warnings they wanted, but he had never been good at following orders. The Dream Voyager matched hatches and activated the standard-configuration access doors. Vor once again identified himself, waited in vain for a reply, then opened the locks intent on finding out more about the plague on the surface of Parmentier.
As he drew the first whiff of what should have been reprocessed and sterilized air, a shudder went down his spine. After many decades of war, he had developed an almost extrasensory ability to detect when something was not right. He powered on his personal shield and made sure his combat knife was readily accessible at his side. He identified the all-too-familiar, unmistakable odor of death.
A warning message blared across the facility’s speaker system: “Code One! Full Alert! Proceed to safe rooms immediately!”
The message repeated itself into empty space, then fizzled and stopped. How many others had ignored the command, or not moved quickly enough? It appeared that the healthy men and women aboard the station had fled, hoping to outrun the plague. He doubted any of them had had access to long-range spacecraft that would have taken them to other League Worlds. Fortunately.
His boots clicked on the hard polymer deck. Behind a guard station counter he found two bodies on the floor, a man and a woman in brown-and-black uniforms. Parmentier Home Guard. Crusty, dried fluids covered their skin; blood and excrement had dried on the deck as well. Without touching the victims, he estimated that they had been dead for several days, perhaps a week.
A private room behind the counter had walls of surveillance monitors. Every screen showed essentially the same thing: empty corridors and rooms with a few human bodies strewn about. While diminished crews remained alive on other stations, this facility was empty. He had already guessed that the surface communication systems were either down or unattended. This scene confirmed it. With nothing more to be done on the orbiting ghost ship, Vor returned to the Dream Voyager.
Vor hoped his granddaughter had found a safe place. With millions of people at stake, how could he worry about one woman he had never even met? If she was a doctor, working with Mohandas Suk, Raquella’s services were needed more than ever down there. He smiled to himself. If she truly had Atreides blood in her veins, then she was probably in the thick of things….
Landing in the city of Niubbe, built on the foundations of an old Omnius industrial complex, Vor was greatly reassured to find people alive, though many of them looked like the walking dead, as if they might collapse at any moment. Many muttered to themselves and seemed disoriented or angry. Others appeared to be crippled, their tendons ruptured, unable to walk or stand. Some bodies lay along the streets, piled up like cordwood. Haggard-looking retrieval teams in large groundvans picked up the bodies and hauled them off, but the public work crews were obviously overwhelmed by the scale of the epidemic.
First he went to the governor’s mansion. The large house was empty, but not ransacked. He called out over and over, but heard no answer. In the master suite, he found two bodies, a man and a woman— no doubt Rikov and Kohe Butler. He stared for a long moment, then made a cursory search of the other rooms, but found no one else, no sign of their daughter Rayna or the servants. The mansion echoed with his footsteps and the buzzing of flies.
In a slum at the center of the city he tracked down a pink brick building with patches of ivy on the exterior walls, a place called the Hospital for Incurable Diseases. Apparently, in the resettlement of Parmentier, Mohandas Suk and Raquella had established a hostel and research center; Vor had read about it in his brief summary.
If she was still alive, Raquella would be there.
Donning a breather, more to block out the stench than because it offered him protection, Vor strolled into the hospital’s cluttered reception area. Though the building was fairly new, it had been used hard and poorly maintained in recent weeks as hordes of hopeless patients swept in like an invading army.
After passing an unmanned admittance desk, he searched one floor after another. The medical wards were as crowded and miserable as the slave pens the robot Erasmus had once kept on Earth. People injured from an incomprehensible rash of ruptured tendons lay helpless like broken dolls; even the ones who had recovered from the symptoms of the disease remained unable to care for themselves or to assist any of the others who were sick or dying.
All the medical personnel wore breathing masks as well as transparent films over their eyes, like an airtight blindfold to protect against exposure through the wet membranes. A few of the doctors looked ill, despite their precautions. Vor wondered how long the Scourge’s incubation period was, how many days these medical practitioners could keep tending the sick before they themselves became terminal patients.
Repeatedly, he asked exhausted-looking nurses and doctors if they knew Raquella Berto-Anirul. When someone finally directed him to the sixth floor, he entered the noisome, hopeless ward and observed her from a distance. He tried to find echoes of her grandmother, though after so much time he didn’t remember Karida Julan too clearly.
Raquella looked strong as she moved quickly and efficiently from bed to bed. Her clearplaz breather and the transparent eye-protection film allowed Vor to see through to her face. Her cheekbones were hollow with shadows from lack of sleep and insufficient nutrition. She had an upturned nose and golden brown hair secured in a braided bun to keep it out of her way while she worked. Her figure was slender, and she had a graceful way of moving, almost like a dancer. Though her expression was dull and grim, it did not appear hopeless.
Raquella and a lean male doctor worked tirelessly in a ward of a hundred beds, each occupied by a sick or dying patient. Attendants removed corpses to make room for emaciated victims who had collapsed into a deadly fever coma.
Once, she happened to glance in his direction, and Vor saw that Raquella’s eyes were a striking shade of light blue. His own father, the notorious Agamemnon, had had pale blue eyes centuries ago when he was in human form, before he had transformed himself into a cymek….
Vor caught her gaze, and Raquella seemed surprised to see a healthy stranger standing in the ward. He stepped forward, opening his mouth to speak, when suddenly she recoiled in alarm. One of the patients sprang on Vor from behind and clawed at his breather mask, then fell on him pummeling him and spitting in his face. Fighting instinctively, Vor threw his attacker to one side. The wretch clutched a scrap of a banner that depicted Serena’s baby Manion, and he howled prayers, begging the Three Martyrs to save him, to save them all.
Vor pushed the screaming man away, and medical attendants took him swiftly to a diagnostic bed. Trying to regain his composure, he reseated the breather across his mouth and nose, but Raquella was already there, spraying him on the face and in the eyes.
“Antivirals,” she said in an edgy, businesslike voice. “Only partially effective, but we haven’t found anything better. I can’t tell if anything got into your mouth or eyes. The risk of infection is great.”
He thanked her, didn’t say that he believed he was immune, just looked at Raquella’s bright blue eyes. Vor couldn’t stop his smile.
It seemed an odd way to meet his granddaughter.
* * *
“VORIAN ATREIDES,” SAID Dr. Suk. In a small private office, he checked Vor quickly after the attack, though he had many patients in far worse shape. “The Vorian Atreides? You were a fool to come here.”
Suk’s skin was such an intense brown that it was almost black. He appeared to be around forty, with shallow creases on his face and large brown eyes, though he was impatient and harried. His boyish features, accented by a wild mane of black hair that he kept out of the way with a silver clasp, gave him the look of a grown-up child.
Even in the enclosed office, the air stank of harsh disinfectants. Vor didn’t want to talk about his life-extension treatment. “I will either survive… or not.”
“The same can be said of all of us. The Scourge gives us an even chance of living or dying.” Suk shook Vor’s hand in his own gloved grip, then he squeezed Raquella’s hand, a warm gesture that implied how close they had been for a long time. The crisis of the plague would have thrown many people together in desperation, but Suk and Raquella had already been a team.
After Suk hurried off, already intent on other duties, Raquella turned to Vor, giving him an appraising look. “What is the Supreme Commander of the Jihad doing on Parmentier, without a bodyguard?”
“I’ve taken a leave to attend to personal matters— to meet you.”
The weeks of fighting the epidemic had left her with little capacity to experience any emotions. “And why is that?”
“I was a friend of your grandmother Karida,” Vor admitted. “A very good friend, but I let her down. I lost her. I found out a long time ago that we had a daughter, but I lost track of her until very recently. A daughter named Helmina, who was your mother.”
Raquella stared at him with wide-open eyes, then seemed to comprehend all at once. “You’re not that soldier, the one my grandmother loved? But— “
He gave a faint, embarrassed smile. “Karida was a beautiful woman, and I’m deeply sorry she’s gone. I wish I had done a lot of things differently, but I’m not the same person I was then. That’s why I came here to find you.”
“My grandmother thought you had died in the Jihad.” Her brows knitted over her clear blue eyes. “The name she gave me was not Vorian Atreides.”
“For security reasons, I had to use aliases. Because of my high rank.”
“And other reasons, perhaps? Because you never intended to return?”
“The Jihad is an uncertain master. I couldn’t make promises. I…” His voice trailed off. He didn’t want to tell lies, or even distort the truth.
The thoughts were peculiar to Vor. He had been a free spirit during most of his long life, and the idea of family had always frightened him because of the chains and limits it suggested. But in spite of his lack of closeness with Estes and Kagin, he had come to realize that a family also opened up limitless possibilities for love.
“My grandfather looks as young as I do.” Raquella seemed interested, but she was so overwhelmed by the epidemic that her reactions were dulled. “I would like to study you, take genetic samples, prove our blood connections— but that can’t be my priority right now. Not with all this. And during such a crisis, it seems to me that a personal visit to track down an illegitimate granddaughter is rather… self-indulgent.”
Vor gave her a wry smile. “I have lived through eight decades of the Jihad, and there is always ‘such a crisis.’ Now that I see what’s happening here, I’m glad I didn’t wait.” He grasped her hand with both of his. “Come back with me to Salusa Secundus. You can deliver your summary and message to the Parliament. We’ll get the best medical teams in the League to work on a cure, send all possible aid back to this planet.”
She cut him off. “If you truly believe I am the granddaughter of the great Vorian Atreides, then you can’t possibly imagine I would leave when there is so much for me to do, so many people to help?” She raised her eyebrows, and he felt his heart swell. He had, of course, expected no other answer.
Raquella turned, fixing him with her bright, intelligent gaze. “And I wouldn’t risk spreading the plague. However, Supreme Commander, if you insist on going back to Salusa, then tell the League what we face here. We need doctors, medical equipment, disease researchers.”
He nodded. “If this epidemic was truly engineered by the thinking machines, then I don’t doubt that Omnius has launched plague canisters to more worlds than Parmentier. The rest of the League must be warned.”
Uneasy, Raquella pulled away and stood up. “I will give you all of our records and test results. The plague is out of control here, an RNA retrovirus. Hundreds of thousands of people have died in a short time, with over a forty percent direct mortality rate, not to mention all the deaths from derivative causes like infections, dehydration, organ failure, and so on. We can treat the symptoms, try to make the patients comfortable, but so far nothing eradicates the virus.”
“Is there any chance for a cure?”
She looked up at the sound of shouts coming from one of the crowded wards, then sighed. “Not with our facilities here. We don’t have the supplies or personnel to tend everyone. Whenever he can spare a moment, Mohandas does laboratory work, researching the course of the Scourge. We don’t see the usual pattern of viral progress. It builds up in the liver, which was quite unexpected. We discovered that aspect only days ago. A cure is not— ” She caught herself. “We can always hope.”
Vor thought of his youth spent as a trustee of the thinking machines, blind to all the harm they were causing. “I should have guessed long ago that the thinking machines might try something like this. Omnius… or, more likely, Erasmus.” After a moment’s hesitation, Vor pulled off the breather. “What you’ve accomplished here, and all the impossible things you’re attempting— it’s most noble.”
Raquella’s blue eyes shone with a new intensity. “Thank you… Grandfather.”
Vor took a deep breath. “I’m very proud of you, Raquella. More than I can ever express.”
“I’m not used to people saying that.” She seemed to feel a shy pleasure. “Especially when I see all around me every patient I’ve failed to save, and all the broken ones who will never completely recover. Even once this has passed, a large segment of the population will remain crippled for life.”
He took her shoulders, stared intently into her face. “Nevertheless, I am very proud of you. I should have found you long before this.”
“Thank you for caring enough to find me now.” Obviously uncomfortable, she spoke with a new urgency. “Now, if you can indeed get away from Parmentier, then leave right now. I pray that you have not contracted the disease, and that you arrive safely on Salusa. Be very cautious. If… if you are infected, the incubation period is short enough that you’ll show symptoms long before you reach the nearest League World. However, if you manifest any sign of the disease, don’t risk— “
“I know, Raquella. But even if the quarantine here was imposed in time, and never broken, I fear that Omnius dispatched plague canisters to other targets as well. Machines rely on redundancy.” He saw Raquella wince as the realization hit home. “If that is the case, then all your quarantine efforts might not save humanity. Warning them and sharing what you and Dr. Suk have learned so far may do more to protect them than any quarantine could.”
“Hurry, then. We’ll both fight this plague as best we can.”
Vor reboarded the Dream Voyager and set coordinates for home. He easily evaded the barely manned barricade stations and feared that some infected people might have done so as well. Sadness enveloped him as he lifted away from Parmentier, and he hoped he would see Raquella again.
In memory, he saw the fleeting expression of pleasure she had shown when he’d said he was proud of her. That moment, so ephemeral but beautiful, had been worth the entire trip.
But now he had another duty to perform for humanity.