The journey on the Guild's Great Freighter was an exercise in cosmic claustrophobia.
We were inside a vessel so immense it had its own gravity, its own weather, and its own politics. Hundreds of frigates from other Houses, merchant transports, and pilgrims were housed in its metal belly, waiting for the Navigators to fold space.
I remained in my cabin, meditating. My ring rested inert on my finger, a dormant singularity. Within it, my private fleet floated in timelessness, ready to be deployed. I knew the Guild's Navigators, floating in their orange gas tanks, sensed something strange about me. A density in the fabric of reality they couldn't explain. But their addiction to the spice clouded their curiosity.
Then, we arrived.
I felt the shift before the ship's sensors did. Space unfolded. Reality returned to its usual elastic form.
We were in orbit above Arrakis.
The descent to the surface was brutal. The shuttles rattled, battling the rising thermals of the desert. Paul, sitting across from me, was pale. His body, accustomed to the humidity and gentle pressure of Caladan, was in shock from the sequence of recycled air.
Lady Jessica maintained her Bene Gesserit composure, but her hands gripped the armrests. Duke Leto reviewed data on a tablet, searching for threats even before we touched down.
I wasn't looking at data. I was peering through the plazglass porthole.
Below, the planet wasn't a world. It was an oven. Endless dunes of ochre and rust. And above it all, the sun. Canopus. A white star, fierce, merciless.
My heart lurched. Not from fear. From hunger.
The shuttle ramp dropped with a hydraulic system, slamming onto the concrete runway at Arrakeen.
The heat hit us like a physical hammer. Fifty degrees in the shade, and rising. The air was dry, abrasive, heavy with dust and the smell of flint.
Paul coughed, covering his mouth. The Duke squinted.
I stepped forward. And out into the light.
It was as if I'd been plugged into a nuclear reactor.
On Caladan, the sun was always filtered through thick clouds and rain. My biology had subsisted on a poor diet of light, slowly "starving" for fifteen years.
Here, under the direct, unfiltered light of Canopus, my cells screamed.
I felt the radiation penetrate my skin, not as damage, but as pure fuel. My mitochondria ignited like microscopic supernovas. The chronic fatigue I'd felt my entire life, that heavy feeling, vanished in an instant.
I straightened up. My spine creaked, aligning itself. My senses expanded violently.
I no longer saw just the airfield. I saw the entire electromagnetic spectrum. I saw the heat radiating from the ornithopter engines three kilometers away. I heard the rustling of sand shifting in the deep dunes beyond the Shield Wall. I heard the heartbeat of every Atreides soldier on the tarmac, and the faster, more nervous heartbeats of the local servants watching us.
"Valerius," Jessica's voice sounded concerned beside me.
I turned to face her.
She took a half-step back, surprised.
Normally, my skin had the pale tone of a cave dweller. Now, under this sun, my skin seemed to glow with an inner radiance, golden and healthy. My eyes, once dark wells of calculation, reflected the light with an almost metallic intensity.
“I’m fine, Mother,” I said. My voice resonated with a newfound depth. I didn’t have to strain to project it over the roar of the engines. The sound poured from my chest with the force of a contained thunderclap. “I’ve never felt better.”
Paul looked at me, wiping the sweat from his brow. He was withering. I was blossoming.
“You like this hell,” Paul murmured, fascinated and horrified.
“It’s not hell, brother,” I replied, staring unblinkingly into the white sun, my retinas greedily absorbing the light. “It’s a battery.”
We walked toward the residence, a colossal structure of concrete and stone designed to withstand the heat. As we moved forward, my X-ray vision involuntarily activated from the sensory overload.
I saw through the walls of the residence. I saw the support beams. I saw the water pipes hidden in the walls. And I saw... anomalies.
Hollow spaces in the architecture that shouldn't be there. Tiny mechanical devices embedded in the plaster of the private rooms.
Microphones. Sensors. Traps.
The Harkonnens were gone, but they'd left their eyes and their teeth.
As we stepped into the great hall, cool and dark, relief was visible on my father's face. But I felt like a drug had been taken away from me. I wanted to go back outside. I wanted to burn.
"Secure the perimeter," Leto ordered Gurney Halleck.
"I'm doing that, Father," he interjected.
Let me look.
"What? We just got here."
I closed my eyes for a moment, filtering out the noise of the universe, focusing my superhuman hearing on the low-frequency electrical hum within the walls.
"The residence is infested," I said with cold calm. "There are transmitters in the east wing. Pressure sensors in the main corridor." And something... something biological and mechanical in your bedroom's ventilation system.
Gurney looked at me, skeptical.
"How can you tell, kid? My scanners aren't picking up anything."
I walked toward a seemingly solid wall. "Raise your hand. Don't use the ring. No technology. Use my fingers."
With a swift motion, I dug my fingers into the plaster and stone as if it were cake. I tore off a chunk of wall.
Behind it, embedded in the concrete, was a tiny, black device, bearing the Harkonnen glyph.
I crushed it between my fingers into dust.
"Your scanners look for active signals," I said, wiping the dust from my hands. "I listen to the circuits."
Duke Leto looked at the destroyed device and then at me. A fierce, predatory smile crossed his face. On Caladan, my strength had worried him. Here, in the lion's den, my strength was their only guarantee.
"Gurney," Leto said, "do as Valerius says. If he says there's something in the wall, tear down the damn wall."
I nodded. The sun of Arrakis coursed through my veins.
The trap was set. But the Harkonnens didn't know they'd invited a monster to dinner.