House Harkonnen - By Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson

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DUNE

HOUSE HARKONNEN

Brian Herbert and

Kevin J. Anderson

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BANTAM BOOKS

NEW YORK • TORONTO • LONDON

SYDNEY • AUCKLAND

To our mutual friend Ed Kramer, without whom this project would never have come to fruition. He provided the spark that brought us together.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSJan Herbert, with appreciation for her unflagging devotion and constant creative support.

Penny Merritt, for helping manage the literary legacy of her father, Frank Herbert.

Rebecca Moesta Anderson’s tireless support and enthusiasm for this project, her ideas, imagination, and sharp eyes truly enhanced this project.

Robert Gottlieb and Matt Bialer of the William Morris Agency, Mary Alice Kier and Anna Cottle of Cine/Lit Representation— all of whom never wavered in their faith and dedication, seeing the potential of the entire project.

Irwyn Applebaum and Nita Taublib at Bantam Books gave their support and attention to such an enormous undertaking.

Pat LoBrutto’s excitement and dedication to this project— from the very start— helped to keep us on track. He made us consider possibilities and plot threads that made Dune: House Harkonnen even stronger and more complex.

Picking up the editorial reins, Anne Lesley Groell and Mike Shohl offered excellent advice and suggestions, even at the eleventh hour.

Our U.K. editor, Carolyn Caughey, for continuing to find things that everyone else missed, and for her suggestions on details, large and small.

Anne Gregory, for editorial work on an export edition of Dune: House Atreides that occurred too late to list her in the credits.

As always, Catherine Sidor at WordFire, Inc., worked tirelessly to transcribe dozens of microcassettes and type many hundreds of pages to keep up with our manic work pace. Her assistance in all steps of this project has helped to keep us sane, and she even fools other people into thinking we’re organized.

Diane E. Jones and Diane Davis Herdt worked hard as test readers and guinea pigs, giving us honest reactions and suggesting additional scenes that helped make this a stronger book.

The Herbert Limited Partnership, including Ron Merritt, David Merritt, Byron Merritt, Julie Herbert, Robert Merritt, Kimberly Herbert, Margaux Herbert, and Theresa Shackelford, all of whom have provided us with their enthusiastic support, entrusting us with the continuation of Frank Herbert’s magnificent vision.

Beverly Herbert, for almost four decades of support and devotion to her husband, Frank Herbert.

And, most of all, thanks to Frank Herbert, whose genius created such a wondrous universe for all of us to explore.

ARRAKIS — North Polar Region

South Polar Region

CALADAN

GEIDI PRIME

LANKIVEIL

Discovery is dangerous . . . but so is life. A man unwilling to take risks is doomed never to learn, never to grow, never to live.

—PLANETOLOGIST PARDOT KYNES,

An Arrakis Primer, written for his son Liet

When the sandstorm came howling up from the south, Pardot Kynes was more interested in taking meteorological readings than in seeking safety. His son Liet— only twelve years old, but raised in the harsh ways of the desert— ran an appraising eye over the ancient weather pod they had found in the abandoned botanical testing station. He was not confident the machine would function at all.

Then Liet gazed back across the sea of dunes toward the approaching tempest. “The wind of the demon in the open desert. Hulasikali Wala.” Almost instinctively, he checked his stillsuit fittings.

“Coriolis storm,” Kynes corrected, using a scientific term instead of the Fremen one his son had selected. “Winds across the open flatlands are amplified by the planet’s revolutionary motion. Gusts can reach speeds up to seven hundred kilometers per hour.”

As his father talked, the young man busied himself sealing the egg-shaped weather pod, checking the vent closures, the heavy doorway hatch, the stored emergency supplies. He ignored their signal generator and distress beacon; the static from the sandstorm would rip any transmissions to electromagnetic shreds.

In pampered societies Liet would have been considered just a boy, but life among the hard-edged Fremen had given him a tightly coiled adulthood that few others achieved even at twice his age. He was better equipped to handle an emergency than his father.

The elder Kynes scratched his sandy-gray beard. “A good storm like this can stretch across four degrees of latitude.” He powered up the dim screens of the pod’s analytical devices. “It lifts particles to an altitude of two thousand meters and suspends them in the atmosphere, so that long after the storm passes, dust continues to fall from the sky.”

Liet gave the hatch lock a final tug, satisfied that it would hold against the storm. “The Fremen call that El-Sayal, the ‘rain of sand.’ ”

“One day when you become Planetologist, you’ll need to use more technical language,” Pardot Kynes