Hive mind Beyond the veil

A black sky hung low, thick with acidic rain and radioactive dust, that obscured the sun's light from sight. The convoy crept across a scorched plain, visibility reduced to ghostly silhouettes and the occasional flare of distant lightning storms.

Impact scars pocked the landscape, the long, slow aftermath of Aegirarch's last attack, his final solution. He had authorised the attack that sent most of their ships hurtling into the surface, a purge that left crater fields and ruined ships melted into molten metal, creating an expansive debris field.

As they passed, he watched crater basins filling with water and felt the temperature fall across Imreth. The cooling only invited more strange and erratic weather, as if the planet itself were reconfiguring its moods.

If it could be called healing, the planet's new biosphere was grotesque. Life sprang up with obscene speed, a riot of forms that mocked everything they had known.

Trumek's handiwork spread ahead of them, it was a single, vast symbiotic organism whose tendrils and mycelial root-frames claimed hectares in days. Trees fused with fungus and vines, creating living architecture that shimmered in bands of purple, blue and sickly green. The horizon pulsed with alien light, an aurora of vegetation that crawled closer with every hour.

Everything beyond the convoy was hostile. The only safety lay inside a sliver of Trumek's awareness. Where its consciousness was present to halt the organism's hostile attacks, the planet was becoming one large predator.

Any foolhardy traveller who strayed alone would be swallowed, consumed and recycled down to their base nutrients. The air itself had turned traitor, as clouds of corrosive fog rolled in from north and south, laced with spores that would kill any organism in hours.

Below the surface, a different army stirred as billions of creatures, burrowed and expanded their network of tunnels and winged creatures flew everywhere by the millions, ready to swarm an enemy the moment they breached the atmosphere.

He had drawn the short straw. While others were carving out a new home on Veridia, bolstering fortifications and raising habitats, he and his brothers were sent to recover prewar artefacts that might still carry historical value.

It was a lonely, dangerous task, to salvage missions at the edge of a planet that no longer wanted them.

Hours blurred as the convoy pushed deeper into one he regarded as one of the most dangerous places in Nythora's Halo. The ground rumbled underfoot and he looked east.

From hundreds of launch points across the ruined plains, another of Trumek's constructs was rising from a field of living pylons, joining an ever-growing horde that was slowly creating a ring around the planet.

He swallowed and watched it ascend, he shook his head and refocused on the road. The only constant was the noise his partner made, he had the unlucky fate to be paired with the one clone in the entire system whose snore resembled an orbital strike.

His HUD told him they had twenty-two minutes until they reached their destination. He sighed. He hated this planet. Everything about it could kill you or grind you down to raw components. He would rather be back on Veridia in the isolated mountains, far from death.

Another thunderous snore broke the silence. He jabbed Earthquake with a hefty shove and woke him.

"What… what? I'm awake… are we there yet?" Earthquake stretched and sat up.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"No, and why did I end up stuck with you of all the clones in the solar system?" he snapped, more annoyed and frustrated.

"Cosmic chance, divine intervention, or you had awful luck picking my name from a helmet," Earthquake grinned. "Personally, I think you enjoy my company."

He rubbed his four eyes and muttered, "I hate this planet. I hate this system and I hate your snores."

"You'd like it if you joined the collective," Earthquake said. "Only a handful of clones left, all skittish and paranoid, wondering if Trumek will break their minds and recycle their bodies."

"That's precisely why I'm not joining," he shot back. "It's like the control chips but worse."

"Fine by me. Either way, it's better than being dead. At least we got a choice."

They fell silent again as the convoy rolled on toward their destination, neither of them speaking.

They saw their destination long before they reached it, it was a ruined city rising from the plain like every other shattered settlement on the planet, its coral architecture rendered in bruised shades of purple, orange, and red. A single wall still ringed the city.

Where vibrant colour should have been, soot and scorch marks blackened the façades. The place had been gutted in the early days of the war, years before Trumek arrived and claimed what remained.

He ran a final systems check on his armour, making sure his seals were intact, air tanks topped. Then he climbed down from the cab and paused at the city's edge. The wall loomed ahead, scarred and half-collapsed.

Nothing lived within the immediate vicinity, it was as if this place had been frozen in time while the world around it crawled onward.

He heard his brothers approaching, the tread of boots on broken paving. Most of them had been taken at the end of the conflict and offered the same choice. Surrender and live under the new master, or die. His HUD flickered as their armours linked into a local mesh. He felt the brief, cold comfort of shared telemetry.

Others waited beyond him. They wore no familiar pattern of uniform. Their bodies had been augmented with a strange synthesis of cybernetics and Trumek's biotech. Black as obsidian, alien in its contours, the frames raised them taller than any clone.

The plating looked insectoid. Faceplates bore multiple black lenses, they were the only figures among them actually carrying Trumek's weapons. Rumour said the armour formed a neural symbiosis, tying the wearer and suit into a shared network.

He found the sight unsettling.

"Same job as always," he said over the comm link. "We search for anything that survived the war and take it back." He did not know when the work would end, or what would happen when it did.

As they moved into the ruins, none of them noticed the lone infiltrator watching from one of the tallest towers. Only those in the symbiotic frames, directly linked to the hive mind, registered the presence. They knew it was there and simply gave a nod.

Moving through the city was slow. The streets were choked with debris and whole buildings leaned like wounded beasts, ready to collapse at the slightest tremor. Progress meant moving house to house, ducking low beneath fallen beams and picking a route through unstable corridors. The guards, by contrast, moved with an agility no clone was supposed to possess, always watching, always alert.

There were no corpses left where we walked. Trumek had long since collected the dead, what had been a battlefield was now a cleared, silent ruin. Finding anything of value was harder, for it meant sifting through rubble that had already been stripped clean. We had a catalogue of priority items to recover.

Valurian religious symbols, cybernetic implants, neural interface blueprints, access codes, and biological sample archives. We were lucky that we did not have to haul every piece of furniture out.

My radio crackled to life with a few clipped clicks. The signal came from survivors of Imreth hiding below the city. It sounded pathetic and delusional to me. They had refused to surrender and now served as living experiments for Trumek's new environment. Their fate had been decided long before they thought to hide.

Days bled into one another as we moved through the wreckage, cataloguing finds and loading them into the hauliers. We stocked food, water and air, everything neatly stored and manifest-ready.

I kept to myself, distancing from brothers and guards alike. I counted down the years I had left, the rapid ageing grafts would claim most of us soon. I had not taken the procedure to extend my life.

In my mind, I resolved one thing with cold clarity. I would die on my own terms. I would not serve another.

Earthquake watched CT-9901 from a distance. He and the others had resigned themselves and folded into the collective, the first moments of being linked to thousands of brothers felt odd, but the network made communication and understanding far easier than anything they had before.

Trumek had no use for them, so it carved off a swathe of Veridia and left them to their own devices. They began to build a kind of civilisation. A small minority, like CT-9901, clung to isolation it was a lonely way to end a life when you had been given freedom.

———

I found that one clone's behaviour curious and added his name to a growing list of oddities, those who insisted on remaining unchanged, clinging to some notion of purity.

It was a psychological problem more than anything else, what I could slowly fix. This minority harboured a stubborn conviction that they were untainted, despite eating my modified rations and surviving on my supplies.

I knew their thoughts and memories, their petty fears and the fragile hopes that this was all a nightmare they would soon wake from.

I had not yet decided what to do with them. They were few, dwarfed by the majority who had accepted my rule and the new order. With the fighting over, I finally had the luxury to experiment, to interact and to test what uses they might serve.

My mind remained busy, spreading across the system, constantly tinkering with new drone designs, fusing cybernetics to organic tissue, optimising factories and supply lines. I had won the battle, but not the war.

A larger conflict loomed, and having eradicated the Triumvirate's castoffs, I understood what came next.

I would need to break the Triumvirate itself.

And make it mine.