Free Dune: House Atreides by Frank Herbert Page A

industry-covered planet filled with artificial constructions, square angles, metal, and smoke. The Harkonnens liked to keep their home that way. Duncan had known nothing else in his eight years.

    Even the dark and dirt-stained alleys of his lost home would have been a welcome sight now, though. After months of imprisonment with the rest of his family, Duncan wondered if he would ever again go outside the huge enslavement city of Barony. Or if he would live to see his ninth birthday, which shouldn't be too far off now. He wiped a hand through his curly black hair, felt the sweat there.

    And he kept running. The hunters were coming closer.

    Duncan was beneath the prison city now, with his pursuers behind him. He hunched down and rushed through the cramped maintenance tunnels, feeling like the spiny-backed rodent his mother had let him keep as a pet when he was five.
    Ducking lower, he scuttled along in tiny crawl spaces, smelly air shafts, and power-conduit tubes. The big adults with their padded armor could never follow him here. He scraped his elbow on the metal walls, worming his way into places no human should have been able to navigate.

    The boy vowed not to let the Harkonnens catch him -- at least not today. He hated their games, refused to be anyone's pet or prey. Negotiating his way through the darkness by smell and instinct, he felt a stale breeze on his face and noted the direction of the air circulation.

    His ears recorded echoes as he moved: the sounds of other prisoner children running, also desperate. They were supposedly his teammates, but Duncan had learned through previous failures not to rely on people whose feral skills might not match his own.

    He swore he would get away from the hunters this time but knew he would never be entirely free of them. In this controlled environment the stalking teams would catch him again and run him through the paces, over and over. They called it
    "training." Training for what, he didn't know.

    Duncan's right side still ached from the last episode. As if he were a prized animal, his tormentors had put his injured body through a skin-knit machine and ace-cellular repair. His ribs still didn't quite feel right, but they had been getting better each day. Until now.

    With the locator beacon implanted in the meat of his shoulder, Duncan could never really escape from this slaveholding metropolis. Barony was a megalithic construction of plasteel and armor-plat, 950 stories tall and 45 kilometers long, with no ground-level openings whatsoever. He always found plenty of places to hide during the Harkonnen games, but never any freedom.

    The Harkonnens had many prisoners, and they had sadistic methods of making them cooperate. If Duncan won in this training hunt, if he eluded the searchers long enough, the keepers had promised that he and his family could return to their former lives. All the children had been promised the same thing. Trainees needed a goal, a prize to fight for.

    He ran by instinct through the secret passageways, trying to muffle his footfalls. Not far behind, he heard the blast and sizzle of a stun gun firing, a child's high-pitched squeal of pain, and then teeth-chattering spasms as another one of the young boys was brought to ground.

    If the searchers captured you, they hurt you -- sometimes seriously and sometimes worse, depending upon the current supply of "trainees." This was no child's game of hide-and-seek. At least not for the victims.

    Even at his age, Duncan already knew that life and death had a price. The Harkonnens didn't care how many small candidates suffered during the course of their training. This was how the Harkonnens played. Duncan understood cruel amusements. He had seen others do such things before, especially the children with whom he shared confinement, as they pulled the wings off insects or set tiny rodent babies on fire. The Harkonnens and their troops were like adult children, only with greater resources, greater imaginations,