#&dune

Hagma stood at the edge of one of Arrakis’s many graben villages. A crowd had gathered there to stare with sour, pinched faces at the passage of a carryall overhead. The massive thoptor cradled a spice factory between its jaws, a mess of wire and metal that swung precariously as it was buffeted by thermal drafts.

Judging by the carryall’s low altitude it would soon land. And that was the problem.The men on board, uniformly CHOAM-affiliated outsiders, would undoubtably soar away to their compounds and enjoy their date-palms from behind thick, sturdy walls when the sandworms began to swarm their landing site. Finding nothing left, the sandworms would burrow toward the vibrations they sensed from the village’s denizens. 

Hagma fiddled with the lip of his stillsuit’s tube and frowned thoughtfully into the distance as a low murmur of outrage began to fester on his companions’ lips.

‘It would kill them to move it a few miles?!’

‘They want to come here for work, I have airlocks that have awaited repair for years-- they can tinker with those, not our lives, the thieves!’

The crowd mainly ignored Hagma. Unlike Arakeens of the plains or sinks, Arakeens of the grabens were proud to stand aloof of Fremen and Imperium aid alike, though even their local economies were becoming dependent on what they scavenged and replicated of the Imperium’s technology. They even crafted their own stillsuits, near as good as the Fremen’s.

Their indifference suited Hagma just fine. He hated explaining how faraway and irrelevant his sietch was, or pretending to be about business. He had only come because he was tracking something new and exciting, a murmur of daring intrigue among the Fremen and a closely guarded secret of sietch Tabr. All he’d divined was that someone or something was traveling this way.

And if he, Hagma, were the only friendly Fremen in its path, then just maybe he’d be the lucky historian who got to take a peek at history in the making.

Certainly these graben villagers were fertile soil for mutiny.