The rain on Caladan hides sins. It also hides noise.
It was the third hour of the night. The House Atreides military spaceport was silent, broken only by the hum of field generators and the rhythmic footsteps of sentries.
I moved through the shadows of the scrapyard, the "Bird Graveyard." This was where damaged ornithopters and obsolete frigates came to die. Mountains of plastiel, titanium, and Holtzman engine components rusted slowly under the perpetual drizzle.
To my father's engineers, this was junk. To me, with the blueprints of a godlike civilization burning in my cerebral cortex, this was clay.
I needed materials. High-density conductors. Shape-memory alloys. And no one could know I was taking them.
A guard passed ten meters away. His heart rate was slow, dull.
I didn't hide. I simply moved.
My speed wasn't human. It wasn't running; it was displacement. In the time it took the guard to blink, I'd crossed the open space and was crouched beneath the broken fuselage of an old spice freighter.
My eyes scanned the scrap metal. Normal vision overlaid with a structural analysis.
Target located: Iridium suspension core. Purity: 88%. Sufficient.
I thrust my hand into the dead machine's openings. The metal was twisted, welded together by years of neglect. A human would need a plasma torch and three hours.
My fingers dug into the armor plating. Stellar physiology kicked in. The metal groaned, a low sound masked by the rain. Pneumatic. The steel tore like wet paper. Extract the core, a heavy, grease-slicked sphere.
Keep moving. A crystal condenser from an ornithopter. Spools of monomolecular filament from a discarded defense system.
I filled a canvas sack with fifty kilos of high-tech components in less than ten minutes.
No one saw me. To the perimeter sensors, I was just a static disturbance, a ghost in the rain.
Back in my shelter, the black cube in the woods, the silence was absolute.
There were no tools on my stone table. Only piles of stolen scrap.
The library in my mind opened. I wasn't looking to build a weapon, not yet. I was looking for logistics. If I was going to change the fate of this universe, I needed resources. And I couldn't hide a fleet of ships under my bed.
I needed a pocket in reality. A fold.
I took the iridium and the crystal.
I didn't light a fire. I was the fire.
I closed my hands around the materials. I squeezed. My muscles tensed, harder than diamond. I began rubbing and compressing the material, generating friction at a molecular level. The temperature in my palms rose to 2000 degrees in seconds. A furious red light filtered between my fingers.
The metal liquefied, but I didn't let it drip. I kept it suspended in a field of pure pressure, forcing the atoms to rearrange themselves. I was removing impurities, rewriting the periodic table of the material.
Spatial compression. Nonlocalization theorem. Calabi-Yau dimension folding.
It was painful. My human mind struggled to channel concepts that required the energy of a star, but my alien hands obeyed.
After an hour of absolute concentration, I opened my hands.
The heat dissipated instantly.
In the center of my palm rested a ring.
It didn't look like much. It was a simple band of a dark gray, almost black, material that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. It had no jewels, no engravings. It was brutally simple.
I slipped it onto the index finger of my right hand. It adjusted automatically, the "living" metal contracting until it was perfect.
Now, the test.
I looked at the rest of the scrap metal I had stolen: twisted sheets of steel, heavy engine blocks. Trash cluttering my pristine floor.
I reached for the pile of debris.
I focused on the ring. I sent a mental impulse, a neural encryption key that only I possessed.
The air in front of my hand distorted. There was no sound. No colored lights. It was far more unsettling than that.
Space simply... broke.
A vertical fissure, an absolute blackness, two-dimensional, opened in the air. It wasn't darkness; it was the absence of space. A controlled event horizon.
I pushed the 100-kilo engine block toward the fissure.
Upon touching the blackness, the engine didn't collide with anything. It simply ceased to be there. It was swallowed without resistance.
Inside the ring, in that stabilized quantum subspace, he felt the engine's mass floating in a perfect stasis vacuum. He could put an entire mountain in there, and the ring wouldn't weigh a gram more.
I walked around the room, touching each piece of scrap metal. Touch. Vanish. Touch. Vanish.
In a minute, my refuge was empty again. Clean. Minimalist.
I looked at the ring on my finger. It had the storage capacity of a Guild freighter, hidden in plain sight. I could steal an entire frigate, piece by piece, or all at once if I expanded the vortex enough, and no one would ever find the evidence.
I was the perfect smuggler. The ultimate thief.
I sat down on the stone floor. The ring was cold.
The first step was taken. I had the warehouse. Now I needed to fill it with things that would make the Emperor tremble.
Outside, the rain continued to fall, unaware that in a cabin in the woods, the law of conservation of mass had just been violated.