30
Command must always look confident. Respect all that faith riding on your shoulders while you sit in the critical seat, even though you must never show that you feel the burden.
Tleilax had been conquered, and the rebel Honored Matres were no longer a threat. The Valkyries had flawlessly accomplished their most important mission, and the Mother Commander could not suppress her feelings of pride, both in her daughter and in the whole New Sisterhood.
At last, we can move on.
Under the domed rotunda of the Chapterhouse library, Murbella had little time to rejoice or reflect on the recent victories. She glanced out a small window toward the skeletal orchards and the ravenous desert beyond. The sun was setting on the horizon, outlining the craggy rock escarpments as an artist might. Each time she looked, the desert seemed to loom larger and closer. It never stopped advancing.
Like the Enemy… except that the Bene Gesserit had intentionally put the sands in motion, sacrificing everything else to produce one substance—melange—for the ultimate victory they hoped to achieve. The war against the Honored Matres had cost humanity dearly for the past several decades, inflicting great harm and destroying many planets. And the whores were by far the lesser threat.
Accadia, the old Archives Mother, stood in the center of the projection field in silent reverence, with a hundred of the New Sisterhood's most intelligent followers. 'This shows what you need to know, and the scope of the threat we now face. I've drawn heavily on candid testimonies provided by our former Honored Matres, tracking their initial expansion into unexplored territories… and their recent abrupt withdrawal back into the Old Empire.'
Now that Murbella had broken through the black wall in her Other Memories, she understood exactly what the Enemy was and what the Honored Matres had done to provoke them. She knew more about the nature of the Outside Enemy than Odrade, Taraza, or any previous Bene Gesserit leader had ever guessed.
She had lived those lives.
In particular she saw herself as a harsh, ambitious, and successful commander, driving her squadron of ships outward, ever outward. Lenise. That was my name.
In those days she'd had spiky black hair, obsidian eyes, and an array of metal adornments protruding from her cheeks and brow-battle trophies, one for each rival she had killed in her rise to power. But after failing in a bid to assassinate a higher rank, she had taken her loyal squadrons and plunged farther out into uncharted territory. Not as an act of cowardice, Lenise had assured herself. Not to flee. But to conquer new territory of her own.
In their rapacious expansion, she and her Honored Matres had blundered into the fringe of a vast and growing empire—a nonhuman empire—the existence of which had not been previously suspected. Unknown to them, this dangerous Enemy had its genesis more than fifteen thousand years ago, in the last days of the Butlerian Jihad.
The Honored Matres had encountered a strange manufacturing outpost, a bustling interconnected metropolis inhabited entirely by machines. Thinking machines.
The significance of this had been lost on Lenise and her women; they had asked few questions about the origin of what they'd found.
The self-perpetuating, evolving computer evermind had taken root again, building and spreading a vastly networked landscape of machine intelligences.
Lenise had not understood, nor had she cared. She had issued the order—lost in the vision of history now, Murbella mouthed the words again—and the Honored Matres had done what they did best: attacking without provocation, expecting to conquer and dominate.
Never guessing the scale or strength of what she had found, Lenise and her Honored Matres had surprised the machines, stolen shiploads of powerful and exotic weapons, destroyed the outpost… and then left. She had added several metal adornments to her face to celebrate the victory. And then returned to reconquer the other Honored Matres who had initially defeated her.
The machines' response had been swift and terrible. They launched a massive retaliation that swept forward into the settled worlds of the Scattering, exterminating whole Honored Matre planets with deadly new viruses. The Enemy continued to hound them, hunting down and destroying the whores in their hiding places.
Murbella saw various generations in different memories. Never terribly subtle, the Honored Matres began their panicked flight, stampeding across star systems, plundering them before moving on. Setting bonfires and burning bridges behind them. What an embarrassment to them… how resoundingly they had been defeated by their foe!
All the while, they led the Enemy toward the Old Empire.
Murbella knew it all. She saw it vividly in her past, in her history, in her memories. She needed to Share those experiences with other Sisters who had not yet unlocked their generational secrets. The Enemy is Omnius. The Enemy is coming.
Now, under the domed rotunda with the audience hushed, Accadia worked the display with gnarled fingers. A holoprojection of the Known Universe materialized over their heads in the great vaulted room, highlighting key star systems in the Old Empire as well as planets described by those who had returned from the Scattering. A variety of independent federations had formed out there—clustered governments, trade alliances, and isolated religious colonies, all tied together by a thin common thread of humanity.
The Tyrant spoke of this in his Golden Path, Murbella thought. Or is our understanding imperfect, as usual! The old librarian's voice crackled. 'Here are the planets the whores already charred, using the terrible Obliterator weapons they stole from the Enemy.'
A spangle of red spattered like blood across the star chart. Too much red! So many Bene Gesserit planets, even Rakis, all of the Tleilaxu worlds, and any other planet that happened to be in the way. Lampadas, Qalloway, Andosia, the low-gravity fairyland cities on Oalar… Now graveyards, all of them.
How could she not have seen this blatant horror when she called herself an Honored Matre? We never looked behind us except to find out how close the Enemy was. We knew we had provoked something ferocious, but we still barged into the Old Empire like a hound into a chicken house, wreaking havoc in our attempt to flee.
When the Enemy got here, the stirred-up planets would fight instinctively, and they would be annihilated. The Honored Matres used that as a stalling tactic, throwing obstructions in the path of the oncoming opponent.
'The whores did all that?' breathed Reverend Mother Laera, one of Murbella's administrative advisors.
Accadia seemed intrinsically fascinated by what she could show. 'Look—this is far more frightening.'
Another swath of the perimeter systems turned a dull, sickly blue. The star charts displayed some as blurry points, indicating unverified coordinates. The number of affected worlds was far greater than the red wound of Honored Matre destruction.
'These are the planets we know have already been destroyed by the Enemy out in the Scattering. Honored Matre worlds wiped out primarily through devastating plagues.'
Studying the huge, complex projection, Murbella didn't need a Mentat to draw the obvious conclusions from the patterns she saw. Her Bene Gesserit and Honored Matre advisors muttered uneasily. They had never before seen the outside threat so plainly displayed. Murbella could truly sense the nearness of 'Arafel,' the cloud-darkness at the end of the universe. With so many dark legends pointing in the same direction, she smelled her human mortality. Even Chapterhouse, marked on the three-dimensional holoprojection as a pristine white ball far from the Guild's main shipping lanes, would become the target of those relentless hunters.
The unified Sisters now had the Spacing Guild to assist them, though Murbella did not fully trust the Navigators or the less-mutated Administrators. She harbored no illusions about a lasting alliance with the Guild or CHOAM, if the war went badly. The Navigator Edrik dealt with her only because she'd bribed him with spice, and he would cease to cooperate if he ever found an alternative source of melange. If the Guild's administrative faction chose to rely on Ixian mathematical compilers, then she had very little hold over them.
'The Enemy does not seem to be in a particular hurry,' Janess said.
