Dune: The Machine Crusade Read Free

encounter. He felt restless. “In the meantime, Vergyl, you’re in command of the battlegroup. I’ll shuttle down to see if your brother has managed to talk any sense into our Zenshiite friends.”

In order to understand the meaning of victory, you must first define your enemies… and your allies.

    — PRIMERO XAVIER HARKONNEN, strategy lectures
    S ince the exodus of all Buddislamic sects from the League of Nobles centuries earlier, IV Anbus had become the center of Zenshiite civilization. Its primary city of Darits was the religious heart of the independent and isolated sect, largely ignored by outsiders, who saw little value in the planet’s meager resources and troublesome religious fanatics.
    The land masses of IV Anbus were mottled with large, shallow seas, some fresh, some potently salty. The tides caused by close-orbiting moons dragged the seas like a scouring rag across the landscape, washing topsoil through sharp canyons, eroding out grottos and amphitheaters from the softer sandstone. In the shelter of the deep overhangs, the Zenshiites had built cities.
    From one shallow sea into another, rivers drained naturally, pulled by the tidal surges. The inhabitants had developed exceptional mathematics, astronomy, and engineering skills to predict the swelling and dwindling floods. Silt miners reaped mineral wealth by sifting the murky water that flowed through the canyons. The downstream lowlands offered fertile soil, as long as agricultural workers planted and harvested at appropriate times.
    In Darits, the Zenshiites had built an immense dam across a narrow bottleneck in the red rock canyons… a defiant gesture to show that their faith and ingenuity were enough to hold back even the powerful flow of the river. Behind the dam, a huge reservoir had backed up, full of deep-blue water. Zenshiite fishermen floated delicate skiffs around the lake, using large nets to supplement the grains and vegetables grown on the floodplain.
    No mere wall, the Darits dam was adorned with towering stone statues carved by talented and faithful artisans. Hundreds of meters high, the twin monoliths represented idealized forms of Buddha and Mohammed, their features blurred by time, legend, and notions of idealistic reverence.
    The faithful had installed bulky hydroelectric turbines, turned by the force of the current. In tandem with numerous solar-power plates that covered the mesa tops, the Darits dam generated enough energy to power all the cities of IV Anbus, which were not large by the standards of other worlds. The entire planet held only seventy-nine million inhabitants. Still, communication lines and a power grid connected the settlements with enough technological infrastructure to make this the most sophisticated of all Buddislamic refugee worlds.
    Which was exactly why the thinking machines wanted it. With minimal effort Omnius could convert IV Anbus into a beachhead and from there prepare to launch even larger-scale assaults against League Worlds.
    Serena Butler’s Jihad had already been in full force for more than two decades. In the twenty-three years since the atomic destruction of Earth, the tides of battle had shifted many times between victory and loss, for each side.
    But seven years ago, the thinking machines had begun to target Unallied Planets, which were easier conquests than the heavily defended, more densely populated League Worlds. On the vulnerable Unallied Planets, the scattered traders, miners, farmers, and Buddislamic refugees were rarely able to muster sufficient force to resist Omnius. In the first three years, five such planets had been overrun by thinking machines.
    Back on Salusa Secundus, the Jihad Council had been unable to understand why Omnius would bother with such worthless places— until Vorian noticed the pattern: Driven by the calculations and projections of the computer evermind, the thinking machines were surrounding the League Worlds like a net, drawing closer and closer in preparation for a