"Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what's incomplete and saying: 'Now, it's complete because it's ended here."
—PAUL MUAD'DIB ATREIDES
The city was hushed beneath a pewter sky when Paul stepped from the bus and entered the grimy storefront that called itself "Net-Nexus Internet Lounge." Neon letters hummed like restless sand-flies. The clerk did not look up; he took the currency in Paul's outstretched hand and produced a keycard, which Paul accepted with a curt nod and descended the narrow hallway to Booth Twelve.
As he sat down, the flickering cathode glow of the cybercafe monitor painted his face in transient, pallid hues. Outside, Brockton Bay churned through its mid-morning routines, oblivious to the silent warfare waged across its digital sinews. School was, yet again, an abstraction, its mundane rituals superseded by the demands of war – not the grand, terrible struggle of his past, but the intimate, necessary battle for control in this new, water-poisoned world. Inside this private booth, the air was thick with the scent of stale coffee and cheap plastic. In front of Paul sat a chipped melamine desk, a computer whose fan rasped in arthritic protest. Sufficiency, nothing more. He preferred such places—they carry no memory of him when he finally departed.
Paul retrieved a flash drive from his pocket and ran an installer program directly off the device. Copies of the custom web trawlers, surveillance scripts, and analytical engines he had crafted earlier were downloaded and installed on the ancient machine. Pinpricks of light danced across the screen as lines of code uncoiled.
Minutes later, the web trawlers began sifting PHO boards, brokerage APIs, and municipal email relays. Information flowed, parsed and correlated. The aggregator programs flashed updates as Paul monitored the unfolding consequences of the previous night's work. With every second that passed, more information, raw and unfiltered, poured in, demanding analysis, correlation, and integration into the ever-shifting mosaic.
Then, at 09:47 Eastern, a signal emerged from the noise. A PHO alert, cross-referenced with a local news feed embed. Video. Grainy, shot from an elevated angle. Armsmaster's distinctive blue-and-silver power armour, a blur of motion. A dozen frames captured a figure in modest civilian garb – Calvert – tased and placed in transit cuffs, head pressed to dirt by a metal-shod knee.
Coil had been captured.
An unsurprising outcome. Paul permitted himself the span of three slow breaths for disappointment. He had long deduced that the probabilities had hovered near equilibrium – fifty per cent chance of Coil's elimination by his own mercenaries, fifty per cent chance of capture or escape. Capture was… suboptimal. Death would have been more elegant, irreversible. A permanent erasure of the variable. Still, the primary objective of the public unmasking had been achieved: Coil was removed from the board, his covert influence shattered. But Calvert, alive and in PRT custody, represented a new set of complications. A wounded serpent, capable of striking even from its cage.
There was a window, then. A finite period before Calvert inevitably began to leverage his knowledge, to bargain, to trade information for some measure of leniency, some escape from the absolute consequence he deserved. Paul had to act decisively, to control the narrative, to salvage what he could before the PRT's inevitable crackdown came, to reshape the board before his opponent could reassert any influence.
Paul had to assume Calvert would sing. Out of spite, he would offer information on the organisation Paul now sought to command. He would sacrifice his underlings, his associated capes, to save himself. Paul held no specific affection for these parahumans, but they were assets. Useful assets.
Even more valuable was the network of mercenaries, informants, safehouses, and logistical support amassed over years of meticulous effort; a structure of considerable potential utility. If Paul could consolidate his control, inherit that accumulated power, his own objectives in this city would become significantly more attainable. To allow them to get compromised would be a senseless waste of resources.
Paul's fingers danced across the keyboard, the cheap plastic keys clicking softly. Earlier, he'd directed his new hires to physically access Coil's hidden servers and install custom programs enabling remote entry. Through these secured backdoors, Paul deployed an automated data migration script whilst simultaneously launching a digital purge. Calvert's access credentials, administrator privileges, and security tokens—all revoked, erased. Passwords were cycled, replaced with simple but mathematically complex algorithms far beyond this era's computational reach. Communication protocols were overhauled, shifted to heavily encrypted, peer-to-peer channels under Paul's exclusive control. The kingdom's locks were changed while its former king languished in his enemies' dungeon.
At the same time, the data migration script initiated a full data transfer. Terabytes of operational files, personnel records, financial ledgers, blackmail material, psychological profiles, intelligence reports – everything Coil had hoarded over the years. These were segmented, encrypted, and relocated to a collection of anonymous, dedicated, geographically dispersed private servers Paul had leased under untraceable identifiers hours earlier. He embedded a final script within Coil's primary servers that, upon confirmation of successful data migration, initiates a level-seven data wipe. Scour the drives clean. Leave nothing for PRT forensics but digital ghosts. Since the process was automated, Paul was free to turn his focus elsewhere.
Using the hijacked communication network, he disseminated new directives. The organisation, formerly a pyramid under Coil's apex, was fractured, reformed into numerous independent cells with minimal cross-contact with each other. Each cell received new operational protocols, new secure communication methods, new designated dead drops and emergency rally points – locations unknown to Calvert. Damage mitigation. Compartmentalization. Should Calvert begin to talk, the information he possessed would be outdated, the revealed locations empty, the protocols obsolete.
Further instructions flowed: relocate mobile assets, liquidate traceable resources, establish new low-profile safehouses. He leveraged Coil's extensive list of underworld contacts – brokers, fixers, real estate agents operating in the grey – initiating requests for new properties, both within Brockton Bay and in neighbouring districts, even other states. Decentralisation was key. Many of Coil's established bunkers, compromised by their very existence in Calvert's knowledge, were acceptable losses. The goal was preservation of the core structure, the personnel, the potential.
This restructuring would take time. Hours for directives to disseminate, days for relocations to complete, for new routines to solidify. He estimated he had perhaps three days, maybe four, before the PRT's interrogators likely cracked Calvert's resolve, assuming they hadn't already offered him a deal. The pressure on them to secure convictions after the recent string of failures – Lung's escape, Purity's recapture and loss, Gallant's death, Hookwolf's evasion – would be immense. Calvert held valuable cards. Paul needed to devalue them before they could be played. Ghafla, the heedlessness of his enemies, their bureaucratic inertia, was his temporary shield.
He was preparing to monitor the initial stages of the organisational shift when a priority message flagged his attention. Encrypted, from the firewalled channel used by the security detail at one of Coil's now-leaderless secondary sites. SecureChat-Omega / Asset Caretaker-West . Subject: Asset Query – Designation 'Pet'...
Sir, instructions regarding "Package D.A."?
Pet?
Paul accessed the relevant secured files, cross-referencing with CCTV logs from the location. His Mentat mind absorbed the data swiftly. Dinah Alcott, age eleven, Tier-A probabilistic clairvoyant. Niece to Mayor Christner. A parahuman. A precognitive, apparently of significant power. Kidnapped by Coil weeks ago, held captive, kept docile and compliant through a regimen of potent, addictive designer drugs. Coil had used information gleaned through Calvert's PRT consultancy to identify and target her. His private journals dripped with clinical sadism—opioid titration schedules, behavioural compliance notes, recorded sobs time-stamped like lab results. The methods, the cold exploitation, the deliberate breaking of a child… it resonated with a deep, ancestral hatred.
"He would make a great Harkonnen," Paul mused, unimpressed.
Muad'Dib felt a flicker of genuine distaste, a rare intrusion of emotion into the cold calculus. Keeping the girl was untenable. Morality aside – a luxury he rarely indulged these days – the strategic liabilities were overwhelming. Her presence was a beacon, attracting unwanted attention from heroes and villains alike, especially if Calvert revealed her location. Containing her, managing her withdrawal, securing her against recovery attempts – it demanded resources better allocated elsewhere. Furthermore, the act of returning her, handled correctly, offered far greater strategic value than possessing a drugged, possibly unreliable precog.
The plan formed, cold and precise. He began compiling evidence. Extracting relevant CCTV footage: Dinah's arrival, her confinement, interactions with Coil, the visible effects of the drugging. Documenting the security protocols, the drug dosages noted in Coil's logs. Meticulously building a case, not for prosecution, but for manipulation. Exposing Coil's treatment of the Mayor's niece would ignite a public firestorm, far exceeding the reaction to his other crimes or villainous identity. It would place immense pressure on the PRT, on the judiciary, to impose the harshest possible sentence. No quiet deals. No negotiated leniency. Birdcage. This aligned perfectly with Paul's primary goal regarding Coil. Secondary benefit: the further erosion of the PRT's public image. Already reeling, this scandal – a known consultant kidnapping a vulnerable child under their noses and torturing her – would deepen the cracks, foster more distrust. An environment of weakened central authority provided fertile ground for his own organisation to grow, unseen.
He retrieved a throw-away handset and dialled the secure line for the team holding Dinah. An operative answered, his voice tight with uncertainty.
"Who is this?" the man asked.
"Put the girl on the line," Paul replied, his voice flat. The command carried an implicit weight.
A pause, confusion evident even over the encrypted channel. "Sir…? Yes, sir!"
A moment of fumbling, then a small, hesitant voice, slurred by drugs. "H-hello?"
"Dinah," Paul said, allowing his tone to soften. "You will be going home today. The men with you will not harm you. Remain calm a little longer."
A pause. "Are you a Hero?"
"...No," Paul answered after a momentary hesitation. "Sleep if you can."
He ended the call. Snapped the cheap plastic phone in half, stuffing the pieces to be discarded later.
The next minute was spent drafting new instructions, concise and explicit. Paul sent them to the operatives holding Dinah: 1. Asset Alcott to be prepared for transport. Blindfold securely. 2. Administer only prescribed hydration. No further sedatives or narcotics. 3. Proceed via designated low-traffic route to Brockton Bay Central Police precinct. 4. Deposit Asset Alcott anonymously near the main entrance. Ensure visibility by patrol or entrance guard. Ensure she is safely escorted in. 5. Deposit accompanying sealed data package (printout attached) with Asset Alcott. 6. Exfiltrate via pre-planned secondary routes. Maintain absolute comms silence until reaching designated tertiary safe point.
The attached printout contained a breakdown of Coil's actions regarding Dinah, emphasising the kidnapping, the drugging, the illegal confinement – carefully omitting any reference to her parahuman abilities. Protect the asset, devalue the opponent.
Paul then packaged the compiled CCTV footage, edited to remove any hint of Dinah's powers, focusing solely on Coil's abusive actions and the girl's condition. He prepared it for mass dissemination to the same news networks that had received the Calvert exposé. Another wave was coming.
He checked the time. Three hours had passed since Armsmaster's capture of Coil. The restructuring of the organisation was underway. The Dinah Alcott situation was in motion. He wiped the cybercafe terminal's temporary memory, erased his login traces, logged off. That done, he paid for his excess time in cash and left the booth.
Outside, wind gusted from the bay, carrying the iodine scent of low tide. Clouds shredded to reveal a brief disc of sun. He pulled his coat closer and stepped into the moving crowds—another student skipping school, another nobody.