The mid-afternoon sun in the deep desert wasn't light; it was physical violence.
We were flying in a ducal ornithopter, soaring over the Great Erg. Duke Leto was piloting, his jaw clenched. Gurney Halleck was monitoring the scanners. Paul sat in the back, gazing at the endless dunes with an almost religious fascination.
Beside me was Dr. Liet Kynes, the Imperial Change Arbiter.
She (in this universe, Kynes is female, following the modern adaptation, or male, but we'll maintain the ambiguity or Villeneuve's canon where she's female to give her that maternal/stern desert energy) eyed me suspiciously. She wore a stillsuit that felt like a second skin. I wore a formal Atreides suit, black and silver. No mask. No snorkel.
For any human, this was suicide. Dehydration in minutes. For me, it was an energy bath. My skin absorbed the UV radiation and converted it into sustenance. I wasn't sweating. I wasn't thirsty.
"You're not wearing a stillsuit," Kynes said, her voice muffled by the wind, even though the cabin was sealed. She was testing me.
"My body retains its own water, Dr. Kynes," I replied, watching the orange dunes whizz past at 300 kilometers per hour. "I'm a closed system. Efficient."
Kynes snorted.
"Efficiency in the desert is measured in survival, not arrogance. The desert kills outsiders."
"The desert is just thermodynamics," I said, pointing to a rock formation. "Heat, friction, and adaptive biology. It's not mystical. It's an equation."
Kynes looked at me coldly. She hated that I reduced her god to numbers.
"Worm sign!" Gurney shouted, pointing at a green phosphor screen.
Leto banked the ship sharply.
Down below, a few kilometers away, a Spice Harvester crawled across the sand like a giant, clumsy beetle. A cloud of red and cinnamon dust rose around it.
But something was wrong.
My eyes, with the biological zoom at its maximum, spotted the disturbance in the sand long before the ornithopter's sensors did.
Five kilometers to the south, the sand wasn't being blown by the wind. It was sinking. A massive depression was hurtling toward the harvester at terrifying speed.
"Worm!" the Harvester's pilot confirmed over the radio, panic breaking through the static. "Calling for Transport! We need immediate evacuation!"
"Where's the Transport?" Leto barked, scanning the sky.
There was nothing. The sky was empty.
"It's not coming," I said. My vision pierced the upper atmosphere. There was no cargo ship on radar. "The Harkonnens made sure of that."
"Damn it!" Leto rattled the controls. "I'm going down! Let's get them out!"
"There's not enough room for everyone, my Lord!" Gurney warned. "There are twenty-three men! This ornithopter is only for six!"
“We’ll get as many out as we can!” Leto roared. The Duke’s humanity shone even in the face of certain death.
The ornithopter plummeted down.
The sand was drawing closer. And with it, the monster.
We landed fifty meters from the harvester. The noise was deafening. The sand vibrated so much my teeth chattered. It wasn’t an earthquake; it was the heartbeat of a subterranean god.
The ramp lowered. The scorching air rushed in, carrying the scent of pure cinnamon. Spice. The most valuable drug in the universe.
“Leave the spice!” Leto shouted to the workers running from the doomed machine. “Save your lives!”
The men ran toward us, stumbling on the soft sand. There were too many of them. They began to pile up inside the ornithopter, one on top of the other.
“Shai-Hulud!” “—whispered Kynes, looking toward the approaching depression. It was here.
The sand in front of the combine began to bubble. Bolts of static electricity, generated by the worm's friction, danced in the air.
“We're full!” Gurney yelled from the cockpit. “Duke, we can't take off! There's too much weight!”
The engines groaned, the wings beat furiously, but the landing skids wouldn't lift off the ground. We were anchored by the mass of twenty extra men.
And the worm was ten seconds away.
I looked at Paul. He was pale, staring death in the face. I looked at my father, struggling with the controls, refusing to throw anyone out.
I sighed.
“Gurney, open the door,” he said.
“What?!” Gurney yelled.
“Open the damn door!”
Gurney obeyed instinctively.
I jumped out.
"Valerius!" Paul's scream was bloodcurdling.
Terrified, I lay on the sand. My boots sank into the sand. The heat was infernal, but the technological knowledge in my mind analyzed the situation in milliseconds. The ornithopter needed an extra 5,000 newtons of thrust to break gravity with that load.
I ran toward the underside of the ornithopter's fuselage.
The worm tore through the surface.
It wasn't a beast. It was a mountain of flesh, teeth, and rings. A mouth the size of a football stadium opened, an infinite abyss surrounded by crystalline teeth. The sound wasn't a roar; it was a shockwave that slammed into our chests.
I positioned myself under the right landing skid.
I activated my cells at 100%. The stored solar energy exploded in my muscles.
"UP!" I roared.
I didn't use technology. I used brute force. Kryptonian strength.
I propelled the ten-ton ornithopter into the sky.
Metal crunched beneath my hands. My fingerprints pressed into the reinforced steel. I launched the craft upward, providing the critical thrust the engines couldn't deliver.
The ornithopter shot into the sky, freed from gravity by my thrust.
I stood alone on the sand.
The worm's shadow fell upon me. Its mouth descended to swallow the harvester and everything around it.
Time stood still.
I stared up into the fleshy abyss below.
I could have jumped. I could have flown. But I wanted to watch.
Level 10 knowledge analyzed the worm's biology in an instant. Organic silicon. Internal furnaces of chemical fusion. A walking ecosystem.
The worm swallowed the harvester with a metallic crunch that sounded like a soda can being crushed.
The immense mouth closed just meters from my head. The shockwave knocked me off course, stirring up a sandstorm.
In the last second, just before being buried by the massive body that submerged again, I activated the ring.
Not to escape. But to anchor myself.
I generated a subspace bubble around myself, a sphere of invulnerability two meters in diameter.
Tons of sand and worm meat swept over me, flowing around my bubble like water around a rock. I was inside the worm's wake, beneath the sand, protected by physics-defying technology.
I waited ten seconds.
Then, when the tremor subsided, I deactivated the bubble and propelled myself upward at super speed.
I shot out of the sand like a missile, flying toward the ornithopter circling desperately above.
I grabbed the landing skid mid-flight and leaped into the open cockpit, brushing the spice and sand off my suit.
The silence in the cockpit was absolute. Twenty-three workers, my father, Gurney, Paul, and Kynes stared at me.
I was unharmed. Not a scratch. I just smelled intensely of cinnamon.
Liet Kynes stared at me, wide-eyed. His lips trembled. He had just seen a man stand in the path of Shai-Hulud, pushing a craft with his bare hands, and emerge from the sand as if the desert had spat him out in fear.
"The machine failed," I said calmly, sitting down and fastening my seatbelt. "We got lucky with the thermal current."
No one believed me.
Kynes muttered something in Chakobsa, the ancient hunting language.
"Mahdi... no... this is something else. Djinn."
Leto looked at me in the rearview mirror. His eyes said: Thank you. And also: What are you becoming?
"Let's go home," the Duke ordered, his voice hoarse.
As we drove away, I looked back. The desert was quiet again. But I knew the worm had sensed me. There was something in the sand that wasn't human. And I had sensed him.
And in my mind, the plans began to change. I wasn't just thinking about ships anymore.
I was thinking about how to control them.