I wanted more than a name for them. I wanted the rules.
I stopped my ground-effect bike and slipped into the Old Man’s dreamscape island, asking him for everything he knew about Umbrella Worms.
He didn’t sugarcoat it.
In their default state, Umbrella Worms stayed sealed in an egg-like form. They were blind, but their hearing and sense of smell were razor sharp. The moment they detected vibration or scent nearby, they unfolded their shell into an umbrella canopy.
Then came the bait: a perfume like tropical fruit. In a desert where water was life, that smell was lethal.
Once prey wandered beneath the “umbrella,” the canopy snapped shut and wrapped it tight. At the same time, more than a dozen ground spines—hidden under the sand—shot up and punched into the body.
And prey didn’t even need to step under the canopy. If it hesitated, the ground spines could still strike as long as it came close enough. Small animals would die on impact and be dragged under. Larger prey would be poisoned, stagger away, and collapse a short distance later. After that, the Umbrella Worm would drift over and enjoy its meal.
The Old Man even showed me records of humans being killed that way.
But Umbrella Worms, like every other creature on this planet, were supposed to be extinct.
They also had a known distribution pattern: sparse. You normally wouldn’t find a second one within ten square kilometers. Yet here, in front of me, they were everywhere.
I thought of the suicide bees I’d encountered before. These had to be Phantom Forge’s biocopies too. And if they were copies, I couldn’t assume they were faithful copies. Phantom Forge liked to “improve” things.
The wind eased. I pulled out of the dream.
I decided to test them myself.
“Stay here,” I told Dorian. Then I switched to stealth mode and walked toward the nearest Umbrella Worm.
Fifty meters. No response.
Forty. Still nothing.
Thirty. Same.
I didn’t dare get any closer. If a ground spine erupted under me, I couldn’t guarantee I’d dodge in time. I picked up a few pebbles and threw one with controlled force so it landed about twenty-five meters from the worm.
Nothing.
But when I tossed another pebble to the twenty-meter mark, a curved spike exploded up from the sand with terrifying precision—more than two meters tall.
The canopy began to unfold.
I dropped flat. The opened shell was a green umbrella nearly seven meters across.
For the first time in my existence, I disliked the color green.
And then I saw what mattered.
Around the “stem” was a ring of fine mechanical hardware. A faceted, diamond-shaped electronic eye extended out and stared at the pebble’s landing point. A thin violet beam swept the area, scanning for cloaked targets.
I pressed myself into the sand and didn’t move. Thankfully, in daylight that purple beam didn’t reach very far. It scanned for about five minutes, then the worm folded back into its egg state.
Only after another long wait did I retreat to the bike.
Dorian leaned out from the swordfin whale skull we’d been using as cover. “Well? Can we slip between them, Wyatt, sir?”
“Yes,” I said quietly. “But we’ve to stay absolutely silent.”
Using the Shadow Falcon’s overhead view, I marked a circular exclusion zone around each worm—twenty-five meters from its center—then plotted a winding path through the gaps.
In theory, if we followed the route and kept our noise near zero, we wouldn’t trigger the ground spines.
I drove forward at a crawl, keeping the bike’s hum as low as possible. Dorian watched through a hole in the skull, binoculars pressed to his face.
The desert was quiet in a way that felt staged—clouds thin, sunlight brutal, not even the wind willing to speak. After more than an hour of creeping forward, we hadn’t even covered ten kilometers.
Too slow.
And through the Shadow Falcon’s lens, the Umbrella Worm field still had no edge.
Then Dorian turned back, pointing up at the sky and pinging me over the link.
“Look! Wyatt, sir—there’s a green… cloud.”
I followed his finger.
Overhead drifted a half-dome “cloud” eight meters wide. Under it trailed long tendrils like tree roots, swaying as it sailed with the wind.
Picture a giant jellyfish floating through the sky.
I recognized the movement pattern immediately. Umbrella Worms couldn’t walk, but they could manufacture a special gas and pump it into their canopy until the shell inflated enough to generate lift. Those dangling tendrils were the ground spines. When the worm found a place it liked, it would vent the gas, drop back down, and the “roots” would spear into the sand and anchor it.
I stopped the bike and watched the green cloud drift over us.
For a moment, I considered turning back and skirting the entire sand sea.
But we’d been in the desert for two days already. Who knew how many more of them waited behind us? I wasn’t afraid of the spines. I was afraid of the machinery. If they had mechanical eyes, they could have comm systems. And if one of them spotted me, that might be as good as Phantom Forge spotting me.
So I kept moving—slowly. Every time a green cloud passed overhead, I stopped and waited.
At six kilometers an hour, we crawled on until night.
When darkness fell, the temperature dropped hard. Then something happened that I hadn’t expected at all:
The Umbrella Worms opened their canopies.
Without sunlight to blunt them, they poured out violet anti-stealth beams like they owned the sky, turning the desert into a shifting quilt of eerie purple light.
Their detection range at night was easily double what it had been during the day.
I knew that if one beam swept across me, everything I’d done out here would collapse in an instant.
I pushed my processing power to the limit and threaded the bike between intersecting bands of purple. More than once we passed so close I could feel the beam’s edge in the timing of my own calculations. Dorian covered his eyes and refused to look. We slowed even more.
After two hours of that, a massive black silhouette entered the Shadow Falcon’s view.
As we closed the distance, Dorian spotted it too.
“Wow… what is that, Wyatt, sir?”
“A wreck,” I said after a moment. “A ship.”
“Doesn’t look like a spaceship. What kind of craft is it?”
“Not a spacecraft,” I said. “A sea-going ship. Human era.”
Half an hour later, we reached it.
The hull had snapped into two pieces. One half was buried under sand, but the exposed section was still enormous—rusted through, riddled with rotten holes.
The Shadow Falcon’s battery was almost empty. I decided to shelter inside the wreck and wait out the dangerous night. Dorian agreed immediately.
Inside, I hid the bike and checked the place. It was a cargo ship. We walked through several empty holds and found nothing.
Dorian wanted to keep searching. The interior seemed safe, so I let him.
By morning his “expedition” had produced a pitiful haul: a broken badge, a smart bracelet reduced to its casing, a human dinner fork, an inflatable raft that had never been unfolded, and a metal box. Inside the box was a small hand pump that still looked usable.
At dawn I jumped down through a hole in the hull and landed soundlessly on the sand.
I was about to release the Shadow Falcon.
Then several root-like tendrils dropped from less than two meters in front of me and whipped toward my head.