Night fell on Arrakeen, but the heat didn't leave. It remained trapped in the stones, radiating inward like a dying animal.
I stood in the corridor outside the family quarters. I didn't need to sleep. My body, charged with the solar radiation of that first day, buzzed with 100% efficiency. While the guards changed shifts with tired eyes, I was processing millions of variables per second.
I could hear Paul's breathing in the next room. It was ragged. He was awake, studying the film book about the fauna of Arrakis.
Suddenly, a new sound filtered onto my auditory radar.
It was a hum. Not electrical, but a magnetic suspension. Very low. Almost imperceptible.
It was coming from inside Paul's room.
My eyes pierced the stone wall.
There it was. A Hunter-Seeker. A small, floating, remotely controlled metal capsule, designed to kill with a poisoned needle at the first sign of movement. It had emerged from a ventilation duct my men hadn't yet sealed.
Paul was frozen in his bed. He knew what it was. He knew that if he moved, he would die. The door was ajar, and Shadout Mapes, the Fremen handmaid, stood in the corner, paralyzed with terror.
The device's operator had to be nearby, hidden within the palace walls, watching through the drone's camera.
I didn't run. I moved.
Paul's bedroom door opened, not by my hand, but by the pressure wave of my movement.
I entered the room.
The Seeker-Hunter turned its sensor toward me. It detected movement. It shot toward my left eye at a speed no human could dodge.
I didn't need to dodge it.
My right hand moved. It was a blur in the air.
My fingers closed around the mid-flight metal cylinder. The needle, loaded with deadly poison, stopped a millimeter from my pupil.
Paul released the breath he'd been holding.
"Valerius..." he whispered.
I didn't answer. My attention wasn't on the toy in my hand, but on the signal it was emitting.
Technological knowledge flooded my mind. I felt the drone's transmission frequency vibrate against my skin. 450 megahertz. Standard Harkonnen encryption. Pathetic.
I squeezed the drone lightly. Not to break it, but to connect my own bioelectric fields to its circuits. In a nanosecond, I hacked the signal. Reversed the data flow.
I saw what the camera saw. I saw myself holding the device. And then, I followed the signal back to its source.
I descended through the palace floors, through walls of concrete and bedrock, to a sealed basement near the water generators.
"Stay here, Paul," I ordered. My voice was pure ice.
I left the room.
I didn't take the stairs. I jumped down the gravity elevator shaft, falling ten stories in absolute silence. I landed in the basement with a heavy impact that cracked the concrete floor, but I didn't stop.
I walked toward a false wall at the end of the service corridor.
Behind it, a sweating man, hunched over a handheld control console, was frantically trying to disconnect. He had seen my face through the camera. He had seen me catch death with my bare hand. He knew I was coming for him.
The man pulled out a cheap pistol.
I went through the false wall. I didn't go around it. I walked right through it. Bricks and plaster exploded inward.
The man fired. The poison pellets ricocheted off my chest, denting against my impenetrable skin and falling uselessly to the floor.
I grabbed him by the neck and lifted him off the ground. His feet thrashed in the air. He smelled of fear, a particularly rancid kind of smell.
"Who sent you?" I asked, though I already knew.
"The... the Harkonnens..." he gurgled. "Long live the Baron..."
He tried to bite a poison capsule into his molar. Standard suicide.
I was faster. With my other hand, I dislocated his jaw before he could close his mouth.
"Death is easy," I whispered, my eyes gleaming with that inhuman golden light in the basement darkness. "And you don't deserve it easy."
I didn't kill him. Not yet.
I used the ring.
I opened a tiny fissure in subspace, barely the size of a cell.
"I have questions about the city's defenses," I said. "And you have time. Plenty of time."
I threw him into the vortex. The man vanished into thin air, screaming as he fell into my personal dimensional prison, where time stood still and the air was endless. I would interrogate him later, using methods that would make Harkonnen interrogators look like amateurs.
I went back upstairs.
Duke Leto, Gurney, and Thufir Hawat were in the corridor, surrounding Paul. There was controlled panic.
When they saw me, unharmed, not a drop of sweat despite the sweltering heat, silence fell once more.
“The assassin has been neutralized,” I reported, brushing some plaster dust off my shoulder. “The basement service sector has security breaches. Thufir, your men need to review the plumbing plans. There are tunnels that aren’t on the Imperial maps.”
Thufir ascended, pale. He had failed. I hadn’t.
I approached Paul. I was sitting on the bed, staring at the remains of the drone I'd left on the nightstand.
"Thank you," Paul said.
"Don't thank me," I replied, looking out the dark window at the desert that surrounded us. "This was a test. Greetings from the Baron."
I reached into my pocket and pulled out five small objects, metallic spheres the size of marbles that I'd made on the trip.
"Father, Mother, Paul," I said, handing them the spheres. "These aren't shields. They're Sentinel Drones. Our own technology."
The spheres floated in the air, humming softly.
"They have thermal, motion, and pheromone-based hostile intent sensors," I explained. "If someone enters this room with murderous intent, these things will pierce their brain before they can even blink. One for each of you. The other two will patrol the corridors."
Leto took his sphere, staring at it in awe.
“Where did you get this, Valerius?”
“From the design, Father,” I half-lie. “One man’s trash is another man’s arsenal.”
That night, no one slept well. Except me.
I slept soundly, attuned to the planet’s pulse, dreaming of half-kilometer-long sandworms and how to transform their biology into living ships.
Arrakis was dangerous. But I was the alpha predator.