House Harkonnen - By Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson Page 0,2

one would include in a report to the Emperor.”

The battering wind, the scraping sand, and the roar of the storm reached a crescendo; then, with a burst of pressure inside the survey pod, it all broke into a bubble of silence. Liet blinked, swallowing hard to clear his ears and throat. Intense quiet throbbed in his skull. Through the hull of the creaking vessel, he could still hear Coriolis winds like whispered voices in a nightmare.

“We’re in the eye.” Glowing with delight, Pardot Kynes stepped away from his instruments. “A sietch at the center of the storm, a refuge where you would least expect it.”

Blue static discharges crackled around them, sand and dust rubbing together to generate electromagnetic fields. “I would prefer to be back in the sietch right now,” Liet admitted.

The meteorological pod drifted along in the eye, safe and silent after the intense battering of the storm wall. Confined together in the small vessel, the two had a chance to talk, as father and son.

But they didn’t. . . .

Ten minutes later they struck the opposite sandstorm wall, thrown back into the insane flow with a glancing blow of the dust-thick winds. Liet stumbled and held on; his father managed to maintain his footing. The vessel’s hull vibrated and rattled.

Kynes looked at his controls, at the floor, and then at his son. “I’m not sure what to do about this. The suspensors are”— with a lurch, they began to plunge, as if their safety rope had been severed—“failing.”

Liet held himself against an eerie weightlessness as the crippled pod dropped toward the ground, which lay obscured by dusty murk. As they tumbled in the air, the Planetologist continued to work the controls.

The haphazard suspensors sputtered and caught again just before impact. The force from the Holtzman field generator cushioned them enough to absorb the worst of the crash. Then the storm pod slammed into the churned sand, and the Coriolis winds roared overhead like a spice harvester trampling a kangaroo mouse under its treads. A deluge of dust poured down, released from the sky.

Bruised but otherwise unharmed, Pardot and Liet Kynes picked themselves up and stared at each other in the afterglow of adrenaline. The storm headed up and over them, leaving the pod behind. . . .

• • •

After working a sandsnork out through the clogged vent opening, Liet pumped fresh air into the stale confinement. When he pried open the heavy hatch, a stream of sand fell into the interior, but Liet used a static-foam binder to pack the walls. Using a scoop from his Fremkit as well as his bare hands, he set to work digging them out.

Pardot Kynes had complete confidence in his son’s abilities to rescue them, so he worked in dimness to collate his new weather readings into a single old-style datapack.

Blinking as he pushed himself into the open air like an infant emerging from a womb, Liet stared at the storm-scoured landscape. The desert was reborn: Dunes moved along like a marching herd; familiar landmarks changed; footprints, tents, even small villages erased. The entire basin looked fresh and clean and new.

Covered with pale dust, he scrambled up to more stable sand, where he saw the depression that hid the buried pod. When they’d crashed, the vessel had slammed a crater into the wind-stirred desert surface, just before the passing storm dumped a blanket of sand on top of them.

With Fremen instincts and an inborn sense of direction, Liet was able to determine their approximate position, not far from the South False Wall. He recognized the rock forms, the cliff bands, the peaks and rilles. If the winds had blown them a kilometer farther, the pod would have crashed into the blistering mountains . . . an ignominious end for the great Planetologist, whom the Fremen revered as their Umma, their prophet.

Liet called down into the hole that marked the buried vessel. “Father, I believe there’s a sietch in the nearby cliffs. If we go there, the Fremen can help us dig out the pod.”

“Good idea,” Kynes answered, his voice muffled. “Go check to make sure. I’ll stay here and work. I’ve . . . got an idea.”

With a sigh, the young man walked across the sand toward the jutting elbows of ocher rock. His steps were without rhythm, so as not to attract one of the great worms: step, drag, pause . . . drag, pause, step-step . . . drag, step, pause, step. . . .

Liet’s comrades at Red Wall Sietch,