Hive mind Beyond the veil

War, in all its twisted majesty, was never a single act. It was a series of movements—slow advances, sudden withdrawals, unending stretches of silence punctuated by frenzied chaos. Yet amid all this, one thing remained constant, the waiting.

Waiting for a ship to move. Waiting for my forces to build up. Waiting for the right moment to strike, to counter or to retreat. And though I controlled multiple bodies, each with its own sensory feed and consciousness shard, I still hated the waiting.

My mind, stretched across ten Ghost Maws, buzzing with anticipation. Fifteen enemy ships drifted into this sector of the belt, their crude forms were little more than stripped-down mining hauliers.

Everything nonessential had been gutted—life support, shielding, even internal bulkheads. They weren't piloted and were guided by a V.I.

The enemy had sacrificed every haulier they had into a projectile, and they hurled themselves through the void like kinetic harpoons.

Even when shredded by bone spikes or ruptured by acidic or plasma, the hauliers didn't stop. Their cores, already strained from maximum burn, simply exploded, taking whatever was nearby with them.

I watched as my Ghosts stalked forward, drifting through the dense plane of stone and dust, their serpentine bodies stayed cold and camouflaged. Only slight bursts of gas or whipping tendrils gave them propulsion, slithering silently through the three-dimensional maze of debris.

The enemy ships spread out, each plotting chaotic, spiralling courses—zigzagging through tunnels of rock and iron. They weren't aiming to engage. They were probing, looking for a path into this sector.

I couldn't allow that.

I initiated a two-minute countdown. Dozens of Star lance missiles unfurled from hidden tubes along the ridges of my Ghost Maws.

Each missile selected a target, then burst forward like bone-white javelins, weaving around tumbling debris, riding gravitational eddies between asteroids. My Ghosts fell back, sinking deeper into shadow.

The enemy reacted instantly, engines spiking to maximum thrust. The hauliers twisted and rolled, smashing aside smaller debris with brute force, gambling on speed and unpredictable movement through the belt to shake the missiles. For a few agonizing seconds, it looked like they might succeed.

But I'd planned for this.

The first three hauliers, unable to reach full evasive speed, were the first to fall. Acidic warheads struck, melting through their armoured flanks, while plasma charges followed, vaporizing their exposed cores.

Their deaths were not silent. The explosions sent shards of hull and asteroid rock into spiralling vectors, chewing through a fourth ship that had barely begun evasive manoeuvres.

Four more hauliers ran in a tight wedge formation. One slowed, sacrificing itself, and detonated its core. A tactical burst outward, vaporizing nearby missiles in its expanding fury. The others, however, weren't so lucky.

The shockwave slammed debris into them, puncturing hulls and throwing their mass into erratic spins. One disintegrated, another went cold, and the last one still moving did its best to rapidly flip end-over-end and decelerate.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

It tried to return to its fallen companions, flipping again mid-flight, only to detonate its core in a final suicide charge. The explosion wiped out several of my slower-tracking missiles. I clenched my thoughts in frustration. Those cores could've powered a new generation of gen-3 Zhyrraak.

What a waste.

Seven remained.

Three broke upward in a steep arc above the plane, using a shattered ring of rock as cover. The remaining four dived into the lower belt, scattering debris as they went. I divided my remaining Star lances, tracking them through fractured asteroid shadows.

But the belt worked against all of us. An unstable chunk of iron twisted into the path of a Ghost Maw, tearing through its midsection, and exposing the soft internal organs.

It writhed, spraying bone shards into the void before dying in silence.

Two more Ghosts were caught in a sudden rock collision. Their camouflage was broken, and in seconds, the enemy targeted them. The four ships adjusted trajectory and pushed their cores to maximum burn, ramming straight into them, their cores detonating at point-blank range.

Another Ghost lost was a burden to my defences.

I watched through a dozen eyes as what was left of their bodies accelerated forward from the explosion. My eyes focused on one section of its body. Its internal fluids bled into space, as tendrils spasmed uselessly in a vacuum.

The Ghosts were made for speed and stealth, not durability. A trade-off I had accepted, it seems the next iteration gen-1.1 would need better speed or armour. The enemy's suicidal tactics were taking their toll.

Across the belts, the same scenes repeated. Ghosts retreated as missiles were launched. Hauliers attack or escape by pushing themselves at max burn to gain a split-second thrust advantage. The battlefield was a tangled and complex mess.

In the Shattered Veil, multiple scouts picked up a larger formation of fifty ships moving in tight formation toward one of my minor construction facilities for my own cores. I had burrowed deep into this sector, turning multiple asteroids into outposts, bases and manufacturing hubs. I couldn't let the enemy breach them.

One thought and a swarm of star-lance missiles raced forward.

The enemy did not pause. They accelerated, cores on the brink of collapse, swerving through asteroids, scraping hull against rock, sacrificing parts of themselves for every inch of ground.

Missile after a missile struck.

Ships broke apart mid-flight, metal cracked and twisted as acid and plasma destroyed sections of their hulls, spilling parts like blood as they moved forward.

Fifty ships became forty-one. Then twenty-two. Then one.

And then, nothing.

A final detonation from the last surviving ship set off a chain reaction. The remnants of the hauliers ignited in a synchronized wave, a line of nuclear charges erupting in quick succession. A hole was blown clear through the Shattered Veil, vaporizing dozens of square kilometres of debris and thinning the asteroid's density.

I blinked through the haze. What was the purpose of such waste?

Then I saw it.

More ships. Dozens more pushed through the cleared gap in clusters of three to five. Their cores were red-hot—already overloading. These were follow-ups. The real strike.

For every ship that was pursued by my missiles, one of its companions would slow, reverse, and detonate, intercepting my missiles. They sacrificed themselves with clinical precision, letting others slide through my defences.

I launched everything I had left. Ghosts lunged into the gaps, massive maws unhinging to tear into the exposed engine cores. Some succeeded—ripping ships in half, throwing debris across the field.

But still, the enemy pushed.

The outer defences were beginning to buckle.

Alarms pulsed in my mind like distant heartbeats, each a reminder of another Ghost lost.

My perimeter bristled with bone shards, spent. The last of the Star lance missiles had already been launched their trails were long gone, and their payloads were buried in the carcasses of enemy hulls.

The enemy V.I. had grown more cunning. As we battled for supremacy in the belts. I had no choice but to send out the reserves.

A storm of fresh bio-ships erupted from the deeper hangers within my strongholds, their wet carapace glistening with birth-fluid as they screamed into the black void to meet the enemy.

I watched one cluster of five descend through a dense asteroid cluster, their V.I. executing perfect synchronized detonations. The resulting shockwave turned half the belt into a death field of high-velocity shrapnel.

My reinforcements held, but only barely. The sheer volume of suicide ships had turned the battlefield into a meat grinder of blood and steel.

Finally, I saw the tide turn slowly.

The suicide strikes became less effective. As reinforcements came forward, shifting the tide of battle, using injured Ghosts as shields, I sent them forward into baiting ships to detonate, reducing their overall numbers. I clawed back control inch by inch.

But it wasn't a victory.

It was a stalemate.

The enemy had calculated the exact number of ships needed to break a hole in my defences, just enough to bleed me, but not enough to win. It was data collection. They were watching, measuring and learning my next moves.

And then they retreated.

The remaining undamaged ships scattered, using their damaged ship's overcharged cores to detonate and scatter debris behind them. Each explosion sent another wave of rocks crashing through the belt, making navigation a nightmare.

I stared through the damaged eye of one Ghost. The battle was over, for now. My remaining facilities stood, though scarred and weakened. I had no choice.

I ordered the ships to tow the captured mobile refineries, sensor webs, and outposts and begin a rapid relocation to safer territory. Likewise, I would have to create another defensive zone, deeper in the belt, it would have to be more defensible. Giving me more time to grow and rebuild my losses.

But I knew they'd return with a new strategy.