Hunter-seeker: the assassin's sliver

The hunter-seeker was a deadly tool of the assassin's trade, a tiny floating machine shaped like a tadpole and guided from hiding by an operator stationed close at hand. It carried a poisoned needle inside a metal sliver no more than five centimeters long, and it drifted through the air on a compressed Holtzman suspensor field until its mark came within striking distance. The most infamous of its kind was launched by an agent of House Harkonnen against the ducal heir Paul Atreides in his chambers on Arrakis in 10191 AG, only days before the fall of his House.

Design and operation#

The hunter-seeker was built for a single purpose, the quiet killing of a chosen victim. The device was a suspensor-buoyant sliver, tadpole in outline, that floated through the air on a tiny Holtzman field generator. Its tip held a camera that transmitted a video signal back to the operator, who remained concealed somewhere close to the target. The picture the operator received was imperfect, for the compressed suspensor field distorted the transmitted vision, but distance was the true constraint. A seeker could not be flown from afar. Whoever guided it had to be hidden near the killing ground, waiting, sometimes for a very long time, for the target to present itself.

The killing mechanism was a tiny needle tipped with a quick-acting, lethal poison. The needle stayed retracted while the machine hunted, and appeared only once a target had been acquired, moments before the sliver shot into the victim's flesh. Against an unwarned victim the weapon was terribly effective. Once the device had found its mark, the target was almost guaranteed to die.

The attempt on Paul Atreides#

The most notorious deployment of a hunter-seeker came in 10191 AG, shortly after House Atreides took possession of Arrakis. A Harkonnen assassin had been sealed into a narrow crawlspace within the Arrakeen governor's palace for several weeks before the attack, a concealment so long that daily grooming would have been impractical for the man entombed there. From that hiding place the operator flew his sliver into the room of the ducal heir, Paul Atreides.

The strike failed. Paul evaded the device, and when the Fremen housekeeper Mapes entered the room, the seeker meant for the heir nearly took her instead. Paul destroyed the machine and saved her life, and in return Mapes gave him a warning worth more than the assassin's poison: the Fremen knew there was a traitor among the Atreides household, though she could not name who it was.

The Lady Jessica received her own warning too late. In the conservatory of the palace she found a note that directed her, in cryptic terms, to a hidden message on the undersurface of a fan leaf overhanging the table. The message could not prevent the attack on her son, though the conservatory's fountain proved useful in shorting out the deadly sliver's motor.

The failed assassination was a prelude rather than an ending. Within days the traitor Mapes had warned of, the Suk doctor Wellington Yueh, lowered the defensive house shields of Arrakeen and drugged Duke Leto, Paul, and Jessica, leaving House Atreides leaderless before the combined assault of Harkonnen troops and Imperial Sardaukar. The hunter-seeker in Paul's chamber was the first blade drawn in the war that destroyed his father.

Weaknesses and countermeasures#

For all its lethality, the hunter-seeker was a fragile instrument. Like any machine it could be destroyed by simple violence, smashed against a hard surface or submerged in water, which shorted out its motor. Paul Atreides employed both means against the seeker sent to kill him on Arrakis. The distorted vision fed back through the compressed suspensor field limited what the operator could perceive, and the requirement that the operator hide near the victim meant that every seeker attack left a human accomplice within reach of the target's guards. In later ages the invention of the reversant was recorded to have made the hunter-seeker obsolete altogether.

The seekers of the Great Surrender#

The weapon returned to hunt Paul Atreides long after he had taken the Imperial throne as Muad'Dib. During the ceremony of the Great Surrender, with the assembled nobles seated in the giant audience room, deadly hunter-seekers emitted themselves from the ceiling and the walls in an attempt to kill the Emperor himself. Paul was stung by one seeker, yet adjusted his own body chemistry to neutralize the poison even as the next stung him with a different type of toxin. He quickly defeated all of the seekers and batted down all of the darts. The device that had once driven a boy across his bedchamber in Arrakeen could no longer touch the man who had become Emperor of the Known Universe.

The Golden Path and the seekers that never were#

The darkest possibility of the hunter-seeker was one that never came to pass. The God Emperor Leto Atreides II saw through his prescience that his Golden Path had prevented the makers of Ix from becoming the cause of humanity's destruction. In the future his path foreclosed, the Ixians released self improving hunter-seekers and ultimately lost control of them, and the machines would eventually have consumed all organic life in the known universe. The assassin's sliver, grown clever enough to perfect itself, would have finished what no war of men ever could. That the weapon remained a small and mortal thing, easily drowned in a fountain, was among the quieter mercies of the Golden Path.