He raised his voice to his squad. “You were all getting tired of practice, weren’t you, lads?” The din of landing ships, burning fields, and clashing blades was deafening, but his voice rolled above it all. “Gods below, nothing smells as good as an enemy’s blood.”
He and his fighters ignored the drab workers who scurried to escape through the flaming barra fields. Those weren’t his real adversaries. Atreides troops had found stockpiles of packaged ailar and burned them all. With a loud whump, a windowless storehouse erupted in flames. Gurney kept pushing forward, with more soldiers spreading out behind him. The Duke’s army would overwhelm the entire complex in no time.
Near the tents and low dwellings, behind long processing barracks protected by shimmering shields, Gurney spotted a generator hut. “There! Let’s take out their power and cut some of their defenses and camouflage.”
A hard grin was a slash on the face of the man beside him. He was young and impatient. “I want to poke my sword tip into a few soft bodies, not wreck some old machinery!”
“Go ahead, lad. There are plenty of mercenaries to kill. I’ll join you once I take care of this business.” He grinned. “An explosion can be as enjoyable as a sword thrust, if you do it right.”
His fighters bounded ahead, weapons raised, eager to face Marek’s mercenaries, but no one stood against Gurney as he loped ahead to the generator shack. Standing by the thrumming machinery, he removed a small explosive and attached it to the metal housing. He, too, was eager to get to more personal fighting. He bounded away, drawing his blades, one in each hand. Gurney counted out the seconds, then braced himself.
The eruption blew shrapnel in all directions, destroying the generators. The camp’s entire sensor net went down, exposing even more of the fern-growing operations to Atreides air support. A column of smoke and fire swirled up from the ruined machinery.
Gurney paused to admire his work, looked up to the sky. Within minutes, he heard the boom and roar of Atreides warcraft coming back around. They dropped firebombs on the far side of the fields, spreading a carpet of fire on the perimeter of the complex.
He ran, catching up with his fighters as they collided with Marek’s armed forces. The enemy mercenaries fought viciously, professionally, and they stood their ground as if the thought of retreat had never occurred to them. From the range of facial features and skin tones, Gurney realized these recruits were drawn from across the Imperium, attracted by whatever pay Chaen Marek offered. But there had to be more than simply money involved to buy such fanatical loyalty.
These enemy fighters were obviously willing to die, and Gurney was willing to let them have their wish. “For Atreides!” he roared.
His fighters responded. “For Atreides!” The words gave their hearts a surge of energy.
The enemy defenders wore shields, but all of the Duke’s soldiers knew how to fight shielded opponents, slowing each blade enough to slip through the Holtzman field. It was second nature to them. They clashed and danced, defended themselves against enemy swords, pressing close enough to deliver a death blow, even through the thrumming barrier.
As his squad kept fighting, hand to hand, blade to blade, Gurney leaped in to engage a scar-faced mercenary. He thrust in slowly from the side, penetrating the shield and then, in a quick motion, stabbing the kindjal into the man’s kidney. It was a natural movement for him, and he had defeated more opponents than he could remember, shield or no shield.
Another group of mercenaries flooded onto the battlefield from a side cluster of buildings. More than a hundred new fighters. This entire installation—generators, processing barracks, ’thopters, sensor webs, enemy fighters, equipment—everything spoke of a major, well-funded operation.
But Gurney knew the Atreides forces would uproot this compound like a weed and stomp it. The fighters would not let their Duke down.
Gurney spun to face a dark-skinned man with jade eyes. He had a blank expression as if he were drugged, but his reflexes were not sluggish at all. Gurney defended himself with both rapier and kindjal, searching for an opening. They fought, evenly matched. Gurney pushed hard, straining to get his weapon through the shield, and the mercenary shoved back. The thin rapier vibrated under a blow from the enemy’s thicker sword, but Gurney drove the opponent’s weapon aside, running the rapier’s edge along the other blade, then pulling back.
Panting, just out of the opponent’s reach, Gurney held up both of his blades. “Which would you choose for your mortal blow? Kindjal or rapier?” He slashed at the air, driving the enemy one step back. “I’d be happy to kill you with either.”
The man didn’t answer. Gurney threw himself against the shimmering shield, while the mercenary thrust and slashed. Ironically, the other man wasn’t accustomed to battling an opponent without a shield, so Gurney pressed his unexpected advantage. He was more nimble, felt the sting of a gash across his shoulder, and spun, ducked. He parried the other blade, then ducked again. He fought, easily feeling out the man’s defenses and his patterns, until he killed the man with a clean thrust with the rapier. As the victim fell, Gurney followed through with the kindjal. “I made the choice for you.”
With both of his blades slick with blood, Gurney easily found another target. He was just getting limbered up.
As they continued to battle their way forward, his squad left a trail of bodies behind them. Gurney glanced sideways, intrigued by a fortified hut protected by a full shield. Details and anomalies clicked together in his mind, and he realized that this must be more than a mere supply storehouse. Gurney made the unusual structure his priority, leaving the hand-to-hand combat to his squad. They could handle it.
Reaching the perimeter shield, he tested the barrier, then pushed his way slowly through it.
Once he entered the structure, he saw it was a records complex filled with papers and spools of shigawire, shipment manifests, contact names, routes—a treasure trove of information. Given this data, Thufir Hawat might be able to unravel the web of ailar operations, find out who on Caladan helped distribute the drug, where the funding came from, and where the offworld customers were concentrated.
Delighted, Gurney laughed out loud. “The rewards of God shall belong to the righteous!” He broke the seal of a storage cabinet and began ransacking the documents. He lifted the lid of a box—and heard a thin fiber snap. He instantly knew something was wrong. A puff of searing flame gushed into the enclosed records and incinerated them. He stumbled back and raised his blistered hands.
With another small whump, flames engulfed a second box of records, and then a third, as a protective self-destruct sequence obliterated the information.
“By the seven hells!” He shoved his hands into the container and yanked out a jumble of papers and two shigawire spools, whatever he could grab before the fire shot too high. He stumbled back, and within moments, the entire records cabinet went up in flames. More fires sparked from adjacent containers, and the blaze spread, hot and white.
Cursing, Gurney saw he would be trapped as the inferno rushed higher. He threw himself out the door as the flames rose and the smoke thickened inside the shielded hut.
Clutching the few scraps he had rescued, he blinked his burning eyes and hurried away from the fire. He stashed the spools and papers where he could retrieve them later, then flexed his reddened fingers. He took up his weapons again and strode toward the melee.