Rental Gorus: Chief Administrator of the Spacing Guild

Rental Gorus was the Chief Administrator of the Spacing Guild during the years that opened the age of Kralizec and through the great battle itself. As the leader of the Guild's Administrator branch in a period of severe spice shortage, he traveled with the Navigator Edrik to Chapterhouse to plead with Murbella, Mother Commander of the New Sisterhood, for a larger allotment of melange. Rebuffed, he presided over the first great breach in the Guild's fifteen thousand years of existence, fell under the hidden influence of the Enhanced Face Dancers of Khrone, and authorized the destruction of his own Navigators, an act that placed the Guild, without his knowledge, in the hands of humanity's ancient Enemy.

Chief Administrator in a time of shortage#

Gorus held the highest office of the Spacing Guild's Administrator branch, the arm of the Guild that managed its commerce while the Navigators guided its heighliners through foldspace. His tenure was defined from the outset by scarcity. The New Sisterhood formed from the merger of the Bene Gesserit and the Honored Matres controlled the flow of melange from Chapterhouse, and under Mother Commander Murbella it kept the Guild on short rations. The Sisterhood demanded that Guild ships ferry raw materials and workers to the shipyards of Richese and Ix at a discounted rate, while granting the Guild only enough spice for its basic services and needs.

Under that pressure Gorus accompanied the Navigator Edrik to Chapterhouse, where the Mother Commander received the two Guild dignitaries in audience. They came to beg for an increase in the Guild's spice allotment. Murbella heard them with her two principal aides, Doria and Bellonda, at her side, and on their scornful advice she chose to show the Guild a hard line. The Sisterhood answered that the Guild would receive only a meager increase, and the Mother Commander pressed her visitors in turn, telling the Guild's leadership to do its part in the war that was coming.

The breach in the Guild#

The failure of the Chapterhouse mission opened the first great breach in the Guild in the fifteen thousand years of its existence, dividing the Navigator branch from the Administrator branch. The two arms of the Guild wanted different things from the crisis. The Navigators were completely dependent on melange, without which they could not guide the heighliners across space, while the Administrators cared far more for pure profit than for the substance itself.

It was through this fracture that the Enemy entered. The Administrator branch, and above all its leader Gorus, came under the influence of the Enhanced Face Dancers and their leader Khrone. The shape-shifters had already replaced many leaders of the Old Imperium by then, including many within CHOAM and on the foundry worlds of Richese and Ix, and the Guild's commercial arm proved no better defended. Gorus never recognized the guidance he was receiving for what it was.

The compilers and the killing of the Navigators#

Seven years after the breach opened, at a meeting held at the Ixian shipyards, it was announced that the Ixians had discovered a means of replacing Navigators aboard Guild ships. Their answer was the mathematical compiler, a machine that could detect a safe path across space without the prescient guidance of a spice-saturated Steersman. For an Administrator starved of melange and weary of dependence on the Navigators, the machines promised liberation.

Gorus took the promise. He authorized the mass killing of Navigators as they brought their heighliners to the Junction shipyards for routine maintenance, and one by one the Guild's Steersmen were destroyed and supplanted by Ixian machines. What Gorus did not know was that he had placed the entire Spacing Guild in the hands of the great Enemy, for Khrone's masters were the reborn Thinking Machines Omnius and Erasmus. Nor did he know that the mathematical compilers installed on the Guild's ships had been sabotaged with a trip mechanism that would render them useless the moment they faced the armada of the machines.

The Day of Kralizec#

When the great day of Kralizec arrived, Gorus was stationed with Murbella aboard her rag-tag fleet above Chapterhouse. As the machine armada came on, he was the first to realize that humankind had been tricked. The sabotaged starships from Ix were useless, and so were the Obliterators, the super-weapons built by Ixians who had themselves been replaced by Face Dancers. The fleet that was meant to defend humanity's last stronghold had been hollowed out from within, and Gorus had signed away its surest defense when he ordered the Navigators killed.

To his relief, the Navigators' patron saint and leader appeared at the hour of crisis. The Oracle of Time, once Norma Cenva, arrived with the remaining five hundred Navigators whom Gorus had not killed. The Navigators fired up their heighliners and destroyed the first wave of machine starships that attacked the fleet.

The full measure of what Gorus had done was revealed as the battle turned. On Synchrony, Erasmus killed all of the Enhanced Face Dancers throughout the galaxies through the machines' tachyon net, and aboard Gorus's own vessel, as everywhere in the universe, every Face Dancer dropped dead at once. Gorus was astounded to find that almost all of his ship's personnel had been Enhanced Face Dancers. The Chief Administrator had commanded a crew of the Enemy's creatures without ever suspecting it.

A few weeks after the Day of Kralizec, the breach within the Guild was healed. Administrators and Navigators set to work together under the leadership of the Ultimate Kwisatz Haderach, the final ghola of Duncan Idaho, and the Guild that Gorus had nearly destroyed entered its restored age as one body.