-SIGAN VISEE, First Head Instructor, Guild Navigator School
DEEP BENEATH THE CITY GROTTOES on Ix, the hot subterranean tunnels were illuminated red and orange. Generations ago, Ixian architects had drilled field-lined pits into the molten mantle of the planet, bottomless shafts that served as hungry mouths for industrial waste. The thick air smelled of acrid chemicals and sulfur.
Suboid workers sweated through twelve-hour shifts beside automated conveyors that dumped debris over the lip into the brimstone fires. Robed Tleilaxu guards stood perspiring, bored and inattentive. Dull-faced laborers tended the conveyors, removing items of value, gleaning bits of precious metal, wires, and components from wreckage torn out of scrapped factories.
Unnoticed on the line, the young man was able to snag several valuable crystals, tiny power sources, even a microsensor grid. After the Sardaukar raid on the freedom fighters two months earlier, he no longer had a network to supply him with the technological items he needed. He was all alone in his battle now, but he refused to concede defeat.
For two months he'd lived in paranoia. Though he still had a few peripheral contacts in the port-of-entry grottoes and the resource-processing docks, all the rebels C'tair knew, all the black marketeers he'd dealt with, had been slaughtered.
He kept a desperately low profile, avoiding his previous haunts, afraid that one of the captured and interrogated rebels had provided some clue to his identity. Out of contact with even Miral Alechem, he went deeper underground, literally, than he had ever gone before, working on a labor gang in the refuse-disposal shafts.
Beside him, one of the disposal workers fidgeted too much, glanced around too often. The man sensed intelligence in C'tair, though the dark-haired man studiously avoided him. He made no eye contact, did not initiate conversation, though his work partner clearly wanted to make a connection. C'tair suspected the man was another refugee pretending to be much less than he actually was. But C'tair could afford to trust no one.
He maintained his dull demeanor, pondering a shift in jobs. A curious work partner could be dangerous, perhaps even a Face Dancer mimic. C'tair might need to flee before anyone closed in on him. The Tleilaxu had systematically wiped out the Ixian middle class as well as the nobles, and would not rest until they had ground even the dust under their boot heels.