New Sisterhood

The New Sisterhood was created by Murbella after the death of Mother Superior Darwi Odrade. Murbella succeeded Odrade as Mother Superior of the Bene Gesserit, but as a former Honored Matre she met resistance to her assuming leadership of the order. In response she merged the two rival factions into a single body, the New Sisterhood, which became the instrument by which humanity was united against the returning Thinking Machine empire.

A merger of two orders#

The two bodies Murbella sought to combine were opposites. The Matres were more athletic, more emotional, and possessed greater sexual prowess, while the Bene Gesserit were more conservative, careful keepers of exact records, and held access to Other Memory. Murbella attempted to bring these strengths together into a single powerful combination. Resistance was natural, and to counter it she used deliberate symbolism. Doria, her assistant from the Matre side, and Bellonda, the conservative mentat aide from the Sisterhood side, were made co-executives of the desertification of Chapterhouse, overseeing the start of the spice cycle and the establishment of the sandworms on the planet. Their ability to work together demonstrated to all the Sisters that unity was possible.

The union was most pronounced in the creation of the Valkyries, a paramilitary strike force that fused the strategic quickness of the Bene Gesserit with the athletic ferocity of the Matres, producing an elite fighting force. To complete the union among the willing, Murbella eventually had all the women wear simple black clothing in place of the skin-tight Matre leotard and the flowing Bene Gesserit aba robe. That final symbolism, together with the appointment of her own daughter Janess Idaho as Bashar of the human starship forces, allowed the New Sisterhood to emerge as a strong, united organization.

War with the Honored Matre rebels#

Some Honored Matre strongholds openly refused to join Murbella's order. The most prominent was led by Hellica on Bandalong, the Tleilaxu homeworld. Hellica had launched a pre-emptive strike against united humanity's starships being built above Richese, going so far as to render that planet uninhabitable. Murbella dispatched the Valkyries to take Bandalong, ending the rebellion. To her dismay, Hellica was revealed in the moment of her defeat to be an Enhanced Face Dancer, a sign that the true enemy had already infiltrated humanity's ranks.

Preparing for the Machine invasion#

The New Sisterhood emerged as the uniter of humanity under Murbella's leadership and led the war effort against the great Enemy, eventually identified as Omnius and the reborn Thinking Machine empire. Murbella accepted that the power brokers of the old Imperium expected to be paid in melange for their cooperation, and she encouraged the continued harvesting of Soostones on Buzzell, prized both for their intricacy and for their use in jewelry. She pressed the craftsmen of Ix and Richese to build as many ships armed with Obliterator technology as possible, anticipating the invasion of human space she knew was coming. The Sisterhood was also instrumental in making the Spacing Guild and CHOAM understand that the Machines had no interest in barter or diplomacy.

Kralizec#

When Omnius launched the invasion, he unleashed the Omnius Scourge, a fast-acting plague that devastated a system's population before the Machines moved in to exterminate the survivors. Murbella and the Sisterhood dispatched look-alikes of Sheeana to worlds in the invasion path to raise the morale of local populations to fight, buying humanity time and allowing the Sisterhood to gather a last-ditch defensive fleet above Chapterhouse. When that ragged fleet fired its Obliterators, almost every device failed, for the fleet and the yards that built it had been infiltrated and sabotaged by Enhanced Face Dancers loyal to Omnius.

As the situation grew desperate, the Oracle of Time arrived with a fleet of Navigator heighliners that destroyed the first Machine wave, then fold-spaced to the Machine capital and banished Omnius to another dimension at the Cathedral on Synchrony, leaving the leaderless Machine ships adrift. It was further revealed that the Duncan Idaho ghola, Murbella's lover and the father of Bashar Idaho, was the ultimate Kwisatz Haderach, and that man and machine could live in coexistence. Through the leadership of the New Sisterhood, humanity's hope was kept alive and genocide was held off long enough for Kralizec to arrive.