"Use the first moments in study. You may miss many an opportunity for quick victory this way, but the moments of study are insurance of success. Take your time and be sure."
—GOD EMPEROR, LETO II
The engine idled in a broken staccato, heat seeping through yet another stolen Chrysler's thin firewall while dawn's first amber filtered between shuttered roofs three houses down from the Hebert residence. Paul sat unmoving. Breath measured. Mind distant.
Two days since Brockton Bay took its latest wound. Two days of imposed sabr—patience as strategy. The city held its breath beneath Eidolon's hovering judgement, villain and vigilante both weighed by a single question: Am I worth his notice? Few answered yes, yet none dared try their luck
Hookwolf's kill order had resounded like a cracked bell, predictable in its consequence: chaos. Bounty hunters from Boston, Newark, even Toronto slipped into the city in droves. Rogues drawn to the scent of sanctioned bloodletting. Publicly visibly fracturing within the Empire. Events unfolded with the grim predictability of a flawed system reacting to stimuli. The arrival of the strongest man in the world – a display. Less about genuine stabilization, more about managing perception. Zahir, the outward appearance, concealing the batin, the hidden reality. Gallant's death, brutal and public, had sent tremors through the fragile structure of the Wards program nationwide. Parents, gripped by fear, might withdraw their children. The PRT, desperate to maintain its supply of young capes, deployed its ultimate symbol. A reassurance bought with the presence of near-absolute power. Quod erat demonstrandum. The powerful guarded their own, always.
As a result, a temporary ceasefire held among the major players, cowed by Eidolon's presence. Skirmishes continued, yes – Empire strongholds raided, ABB remnants hunted – but the true rot festered still. The villains waited for the godling in the sky to depart, for the illusion of order to fade. Futile, this policing of symptoms. The disease remained, rooted deep in the city's failing heart.
Paul tasted the deduction, found it unsurprising, and let the thought settle into the deep stillness of his Bene Gesserit training. Outer stillness breeds inner clarity. His eyes never left the Hebert apartment door.
At 06:41 Taylor emerged. Brown jacket, messenger bag, hair tucked. She checked the street—a habit born of persecution rather than tradecraft—then moved for the bus stop on Forsberg. Paul allowed her a half-block head start, killed the engine, and drift-coasted downhill before the starter barked again. Distance mantained: two car-lengths behind a refuse truck, mirrors angled to cut glare.
He tracked her progress to the bus stop, maintained distance, observed. She boarded; he followed, the bus a lumbering beast navigating its ordained path. Routine ride. The 9D to the Docks always smelled of rust and cheap detergent. Paul shadowed it until she alighted; he parked off Kilmer, and proceeded to follow on foot. She never saw him, his gait mimicking the local rhythm, unremarkable, blending into the sparse pedestrian traffic.
She threaded abandoned loading yards until an unpainted door swallowed her. Red-brick shell. Broken skylights. Nothing to mark the lair from the hundred other dead factories beside. Paul circled once, mapped sight-lines, then found a silent vantage in a neighbouring warehouse—roof panels gone, concrete damp with years of fog. A cracked pane offered twenty-degree coverage of the Undersiders' base's side wall.
Prudence dictated observation. Quietly, Paul established his perch. Waiting. Minutes dripped. The city's pulse tapped faintly: distant siren, gull cry, the drone of a south-moving transport helicopter—National Guard rather than private, judging by cadence. Time stretched until 07:53 when Taylor exited with three others: tall in black biker leathers—Grue; smirking boy swinging a plastic bag—Regent; blond girl half-hidden beneath lilac hoodie—Tattletale. They moved east, conversation lost on the wind. A dog-walker followed five minutes later. Stocky, wary, hood drawn. A scarred mastiff at heel, step disciplined. Hellhound—Rachel Lindt, memory supplied.
Silence returned. He waited five more minutes – a Mentat interval, allowing patterns to settle, confirming no immediate return. Then he crossed. The main entrance was locked. A padlock—cheap brass. The internal clockwork yielded to precise manipulation of an improvised pick. Five heartbeats. A soft click. Entry.
Inside, the air was cool, smelling of dust, stale air, and faintly of ozone. Smells of insect musk and polyethylene. Silk. Paul turned to find, against one wall, a small, organised collection: plastic bins, netting, glass containers. Inside: Latrodectus hesperus. Black widows. Hundreds. Each bin held brood segregated by instar. Efficient. Skitter's work, if the rumours on PHO regarding her ability were true.
The stairwell to the side led upwards: rust, faint dog musk, a sock abandoned on step sixteen. The first floor opened into a central living area. Mismatched furniture – couches, armchairs, a coffee table – spoke of scavenged comfort, a semblance of domesticity amidst squalor. From a closed door to his right, the distinct, heavy scent of dog and the sound of rhythmic, sleeping breaths. Rachel Lindt's room: a kennel room presumably containing her other animals. He bypassed it without disturbing the inhabitants.
Exploring the rest of the room, he found a functional kitchen area, basic appliances. A bathroom. A communal space with a television, gaming consoles, a computer setup – remnants of adolescent downtime. Then, individual rooms, doors marked by crude artwork or symbols. He tested each handle. Most locked. Within moments, he picked the locks and they yielded.
Of the rooms only two caught his attention. The first: orderly, almost spartan. A desk, files neatly stacked, bearing Manila folders labelled Supply, Rent, Jobs. Paul scanned. Financial ledgers in Grue's blocky script, time-tables cross-referenced with payments. Spare mask folded with soldier's care in drawer. Name on an insurance letter: Laborn, Brian. Paul filed every datum into mentat lattice and left the space unaltered.
The second room was of a more feminine, carefree nature. Clothes strewn. Empty food containers. Sticky notes spider-webbed on cork board. Posters on the wall – esoteric bands, obscure movie references. Another costume, different style: purple domino mask, tourist-trap hoodies, perfume atomiser containing OC pepper spray. Shopping receipts from a boutique coffee house on Port Avenue (two lattes, lactose-free) for "Lisa Wilbourn". Tattletale. And on a cluttered desk, computer tower—custom water loop, triple-fan radiator. It was a high-end model. Expensive.
Staring at the black screen, Paul felt it in his bones then: Opportunity.
He sat, the chair creaking softly. Power-button click. The machine booted. BIOS logo. Windows 7, by now a familiar, archaic system to him. Accessing the data within was imperative. He reached inwards, seeking the echo of knowledge across the gulf of time and lineage. Ancestral memory bloomed. Sarah Chen-Atreides, tertiary line, pre-Jihad technologist – expertise in software architecture, AI theory, systems security. Her knowledge flooded his consciousness, alien yet instantly comprehensible. He layered it with another, more recent echo – Greg's, his surface knowledge of the primitive computation circa 2015 Terran Standard – providing context for this machine's specific limitations.
Knowledge integrated, he began with a sophisticated Privilege Escalation Attack. Fourteen seconds later, he was stalled by a barrier: full-disk encryption. TrueCrypt. AES-256. Computationally secure against brute force, even with the theoretical advantages of ancestral knowledge. Predicting the key via pattern analysis supralogical intuition – possible, but inefficient, time-consuming. A waste of waqt, precious time.
There were other paths. Elegance over force. Chen-Atreides' memory offered insights into historical implementation flaws, theoretical weaknesses in cryptographic protocols often ignored by later generations reliant on raw processing power. He accessed the system BIOS. Working swiftly, fingers flying across the keyboard with un-Greg-like speed, he scripted a low-level routine. Not breaking the encryption, but exploiting a known, subtle vulnerability in TrueCrypt's key schedule setup within this specific OS environment. A resonance cascade within the algorithm, induced by precisely timed memory access calls. Weakening the effective key strength logarithmically. Enough. Restart. Decryption handshake spoofed. The disk unlocked.
On the screen in green text, file systems unmounted. Individual file encryptions remained, but these were trivial, based on predictable patterns or common user habits easily bypassed by his enhanced analytical abilities. Within moments, the trove sprung open.
It was vast. More valuable than Grue's logistical data by grand orders of magnitude. Operational plans, heist data, detailed intelligence on Brockton Bay's cape scene – heroes, villains, independents. Psychological profiles, power weaknesses, strategic vulnerabilities derived from observation and, Paul inferred, Lisa's own power. Rumours, leaks, financial accounts. Information on their enigmatic employer, Coil – suspected timeline manipulation, mercenary forces, safehouses, contacts, Tinker connections.
Lisa Wilbourn kept meticulous, almost paranoid records. Yet, curiously, many key files existed in multiple variations, subtly altered: Directories nested thrice deep, mirrored with inconsistencies. Deliberate obfuscation? Or a byproduct of her power, capturing possibilities, struggling to isolate the single truth? Paul activated his Mentat functions, sifting, comparing, cross-referencing data points, intuiting the consistent threads, discarding the chaff. The process was confirmation: her ability mirrored aspects of Mentat function, an intuitive, perhaps uncontrolled, data-processing and probability-assessment engine. A low-level Mentat, hampered by untrained intuition and emotional interference, and having to result to such ineffective means of obfuscation.
He found her personal notes. Insights into team dynamics. Rachel's trust issues. Brian's burdens. Taylor Hebert's conflicting desire for heroism within a villain team. Lisa's own speculations – including notes on a shadowy organization manipulating events from behind the scenes, influencing parahuman development. Qabda, the hidden hand. Echoes resembling the Bene Gesserit. An immediate, visceral dislike formed within Paul. Such groups always served themselves, their agendas draped in justifications of stability or progress.
Extrapolating Lisa's data, cross-referencing with public information and his own observations, Coil's profile sharpened. A mastermind, manipulating events, destabilizing the city. The why remained obscure, but the pattern was clear. Intentional chaos, directed towards an unknown end.
Enough. The core data was absorbed, catalogued within his mind's ordered matrix. He worked quickly now. Coded three distinct malware packages – information taps, remote access backdoors, subtle system destabilizers – leveraging Chen-Atreides' advanced knowledge, far beyond this era's detection capabilities. Embedded them deep within the operating system kernel, masked as system processes—printer spooler, audio driver, a game overlay shim. Four watchdog scripts to copy future file-tree diffs to a dead-drop server he spun up in Belarus five minutes later. Erased logs. Wiped caches. Physically cleaned keyboard and mouse. Shut down the machine. Left the room as he found it.
Retracing his steps, Paul exited the factory after relocking all the doors. Outside, a light drizzle had begun. Returning to where he abandoned his ride, Paul found a BPD cruiser idling behind it, an officer examining the licence plate, speaking into his shoulder mic. A minor complication. The vehicle was compromised.
He altered course smoothly and kept walking, abandoning the car without a backward glance. Anonymous. Blend into rusted scenery. As he pulled away, Paul checked the mirror glass of another parked vehicle: the policeman was writing a ticket; it was only a matter of time before they discovered the vehicle was stolen. An acceptable loss, all things considered.
En route to the main road, seeking the bus route, Paul spotted the Undersiders on the opposite-side sidewalk, arms laden with shopping bags. They laughed as they passed him, too engrossed in conversation to notice his presence. Paul ignored them, reaching the stop as their laughter faded down the street. Boarding the arriving bus, he turned his face to the fogged window, watching the blighted landscape of the Docks slide past as he contemplated the day's harvest.
In the stillness between breaths an old Fremen aphorism surfaced, dry as silt: He who hoards water hoards futures. In this world information is the only water.
Today, Paul Muad'Dib Atreides drinks very deeply indeed