Olivia seemed relieved. All the tense muscles in her face relaxed. “Our work here is vital for the Sisterhood. Each of us is an important member of the team.”
As the shuttle continued its descent, Valya looked through the windowport at the night-darkened planet below. She spotted a few city lights spangled in the murky wilderness. Although the Sisterhood School had been uprooted and the primary cliff city abandoned, many people still lived on Rossak: entrepreneurs, harvesters, scouts, even exiles.
According to an intelligence report that Cioba Venport had obtained from her own VenHold operatives, Emperor Salvador had stationed a small contingent of troops near the former Sisterhood settlement. Although the soldiers had poor service records and substandard equipment, Valya was sure the guards were here at Dorotea’s suggestion to make certain the exiled Sisters didn’t try to return to the cliff city. Dorotea wanted to keep her faction of pandering Sisters important to the Emperor — and keep Raquella irrelevant.
I should have killed Dorotea while she lay writhing from the poison, Valya thought. But no one had expected her to live through the Agony. No previous Sister candidate had survived intact, with the exception of Raquella herself.
Since the Imperial contingent had only rudimentary surveillance equipment, the camouflaged VenHold craft easily slipped past their scans and set down in a jungle clearing several kilometers from their destination. She listened to the low conversations of her team members, heard the excitement and anticipation in their voices. Simply returning to the order’s original home planet felt like a kind of victory for them.
Stepping outside into the heady jungle wearing a night-vision headset, Valya listened to the rustle of animals gliding through the underbrush. She didn’t worry. Many times, she had traveled the depths of the jungle when she assisted Karee Marques in search of natural toxins or drugs.
Through the illumination enhancers she magnified the view and saw the majestic cliff city in the distance, its pockmarked stone face riddled with tunnels and now-empty living quarters. At one time this had been the Sisterhood’s vibrant hub; now it was nothing but faded memories. She could no longer discern the trails or crepelike balconies that had graced the sheer stone wall.
In those days, the breeding computers had been concealed up there in a cavern deep inside the cliff. Egged on by the insistent Dorotea, the paranoid Emperor’s search team had ransacked the tunnels, but Valya had already whisked the dangerous technology away. Undeterred by the lack of proof, the Emperor had slaughtered the Sister Mentats and the remaining Sorceresses, who were merely trying to protect their school. Even though Salvador Corrino had given the order, Valya still placed the blame on Dorotea.
As her team members emerged from the shuttle and gathered their equipment, she inhaled the moist, odor-rich jungle air. While gazing at the haunted-looking cliff city, she remembered the women she’d known there. In the back of her mind, Valya heard what sounded like a murmur of human voices, as if the honeycombed cliffside were saturated with the spirits of dead Sisters. She felt a sudden chill as the voices called out plaintively, moaning for what was lost and would never be again.
Valya had enough ghosts in her own past, and too much blood on her hands. And she wasn’t finished yet. Even with all the struggles of the downtrodden Sisterhood, she thought angrily of her slain brother, Griffin, and the generations of disgrace that House Harkonnen had suffered. The blood Valya wanted on her hands was Atreides blood.
When the rest of her team stood equipped and ready to move through the undergrowth, Valya activated a holomap in the air, and her team gathered around. “We’re here,” she said, pointing. “This sinkhole is our destination. Three of you were with me when we sealed away the computers, and though it’s been less than a year, the jungle reclaims its territory quickly.”
She regarded them all. “We retrieve what is ours, which will bring us one step closer to rebuilding the Sisterhood to what it is meant to be.”
VALYA AND HER comrades trudged through the gloomy Rossak jungles. Carrying electronic locators, they moved behind two trailblazing commandos who wielded melters that dissolved the tangled plants to clear a wide path.
Their tracks would be obvious, but once they escaped with the computers, Valya didn’t care. Imperial scouts would never guess what had really happened, and the fecund silvery purple foliage of Rossak would erase the scars quickly enough.
All of them still wore enhancement goggles, which added a greenish outline to everything around them. Behind the trail-cutters, six commandos guided silent suspensor bins to hold all of the sealed components.
Valya sent two women ahead, with two others on each side to watch for any dangers. They found a game trail trending in the right direction, and the foliage melters cleared the path through vines and tangled shrubs. Sister Olivia and two others maneuvered the suspensor bins. It was warm even in the night, and Valya perspired heavily.
Having led the original operation to hide the computers, she knew where to find the limestone sinkhole. She came upon the dim, moss-blurred outline of a mushroom-shaped rock, recognized the landmark, and moved off the trail to explore, telling the others to wait. Valya found a loose stack of pancake-shaped limestone slabs as high as her shoulders. She walked around it, discovering one of the loose slabs fallen to one side — it looked natural to the casual eye. Using her goggles, she enhanced the detail.
“Over here,” she called. “I need help.”
Valya stood aside and directed two of her commandos to push. Under their effort the stone moved, revealing a concealed cave opening and a sloping passage lined with rough limestone steps. She adjusted her light-enhancing goggles and entered the darkness, leading the way down.
When she and her companions had hidden the components here, they’d had very little time. Mother Superior distracted Dorotea’s followers by inviting them to a debate, fooling the detractors into believing that the subject of computers was open for discussion. And while that was happening, Valya had saved the machines and records.
Now the rest of her team followed Valya down the sloping passage to the underground cenote chamber. The access tunnels had been widened by generations of the Misborn, outcasts from the cliff city who lived in isolation around the underground pools. The Misborn were gone now, having died out in the generations since the end of the Jihad.
Valya removed her night-vision goggles and switched on a bright illuminator. Overhead, the thick, hairy roots of trees penetrated through the ceiling, dangling down like lost ropes. Water dripped and echoed in the tunnels.
Valya remembered the route; she counted her steps, then looked to her right and found a narrow, chest-high opening. She pointed the illuminator beam, revealing a rock tunnel. “This should be the place.”
The other Sisters pressed close, ready to help. Valya looked at Olivia, summoned a sense of command, and altered her voice into a lower, more throaty range. She had been observing Olivia, assessing her, learning her weak points that could be manipulated. Setting the pitch of her voice, she said, “Crawl in there and verify that the components are intact.”
She had been practicing a new technique she had discovered since becoming a Reverend Mother, a way of influencing people by utilizing her voice to manipulate that person’s will. Now she was pleased by how effective the command was against even a Sister Mentat. “Crawl in there.” It was like an invisible push.
Olivia froze for an instant, and then, as if an unseen hand pushed her, she sprang into the tunnel opening. She seemed startled by her reflexive reaction and cried out in alarm, then recovered and proceeded into the passage, crawling along. When she saw Olivia’s response, Valya felt a giddy sense of power.