Wormdogs are a genetically engineered lifeform, a creation of the Crimson Corporation. They are also generally considered to be some of the more awful things running amok in the galaxy.
In their search for a more efficient guard(humans were easily distracted, robots were hard to program and ordinary animals were easy to dispatch) the Crimson Corporation decided to turn to invertebrate lifeforms. They found the tiny, Terran bloodworm, made it about twice as long as a man and gave it all the brains of a relatively clever dog. They performed well in the labs since they were poisonous, vicious, hard to kill, reproduced rapidly and were trainable.
They were initially tested on research colonies in the Kholdan and Nox systems, which is where the flaws in them became apparent. At their rapid rate of reproduction, no one had enough time to train all the newly born Wormdogs, which soon evaded their pens and began a wholescale slaughter of the colonies after they learned how to destroy power lines and disable automated defenses. The solution was simply to abandon those planets, valuable as they were, but soon rumours spread of them, and they were actively sought out by pirates and smugglers who wanted exotic pets, effective guard animals or just something particularly creepy for a gladiatorial arena.
Thus the Wormdogs have become a pest in several other systems.
The average, adult Wormdog is a ten-foot, creamy-coloured tube roughly as wide around as a human thigh, with a small flap at one end that just looks like a vestigial, leathery fin, but which is actually the Wormdog's head. They can burrow and swim, and from the same end that has the head they can swiftly eject their jaws, tipped with four sharp, poisonous fangs. The fleshy appendage which contains the jaws is bright red. Usually they tend to lurk underground and wait for surface or water vibrations before slithering forth to find something to chase, but if they know there is prey in an area, they can be quite active hunters.
Wormdog is also used as an insult or swearword by Crimson Corporation personnel, for example: "Some Wormdog stole my spare sunglasses!"
In recent years, rumours have surfaced that the Crimson Corporation and others have harvested Bloodworms from the overrun colonies on Nox and Kholdan specifically for use as bioweapons. None of this has been proven and the Crimson Corporation denies all charges.
