The Tick Swarm

While eclipsed in scale and grandeur by the Second Empire of Man, the First Empire has made its mark on the galaxy. The most obvious is the diversity of the human species; almost all non-baseline humans are the product of the First Empire's genetic engineering. The second most obvious, and far less welcome, legacy of the First Empire is the Tick Swarm. The Tick Swarm, like the conquest drones before them and the Berzerker drones after them, were an automated, self-replicating force designed to exterminate any threat to the First Empire in the galaxy. The First Empire designed the Tick Swarm to seek out any lifeforms that had accomplished interstellar travel, and to consume their biomass entirely.

What sets the Tick Swarm apart is that they are not traditionally mechanical, but rather the product of the First Empire's genetic engineering. The Tick Swarm was entirely biological, from the smallest virus to the largest worldships. Rather than destroying enemies outright, the Swarm would integrate the genetic code of any species it encountered into its already-vast library of genes. This allowed the Tick Swarm to adapt quickly to different environments and situations. The Tick Swarm also had an overarching hive intelligence, which was linked together by biological ansibles. This allowed the Swarm to communicate with the First Empire, it also allowed the Swarm to coordinate its attacks in a manner that would not be possible for a "dumb" swarm. The Tick Swarm absorbed the knowledge and memories of its victims and integrated it into the Swarm's overall intelligence, allowing the Swarm to learn from its enemies.

Even the First Empire feared the Tick Swarm, particularly the possibility that it could be turned against them. Thus, several safety measures were integrated. The Tick Swarm was programmed with an innate friendliness to baseline humans and designated human species, and the Swarm was forbidden from attacking humans. If the Swarm encountered hostile humans, it was to retreat, and inform the First Empire of the attack. Then, the First Empire's conventional military would be deployed, to deal with the human threat themselves. Human genetics is also highly poisonous to the Tick Swarm, and any interface with human DNA can infect an entire swarmfleet and kill it from the inside.

The Tick Swarm sent regular updates to the First Empire, as part of its mission. Not only did it give information on its progress back to its human masters, it also sent back genetic and technological information on the species it encountered, so that the First Empire's engineers could use them. For millennia, this persisted, until suddenly the Tick Swarm stopped reporting back. The First Empire initially believed that the Swarm's ansible system was malfunctioning, particularly as the Swarm had entered the Eldritch Stars, which were known to disrupt faster-than-light communications. Eventually the Swarm communicated back to the Empire in unintelligible gibberish. The Swarm then attacked thousands of Imperial systems in one fell swoop, catching the defenders off-guard and forcing the First Empire to retreat. The Swarm had broken from its programming, and, to the horror of the First Empire, began to consume human genes with no trouble. The centuries-long Swarm War ensued, and the First Empire was defeated in battle after battle. The Sol System itself fell to the Swarm. The Swarm War ended only when the First Empire deployed the Destroyer Plague, a deadly cocktail of viruses and carcinogens, deliberately infected most of their peasant population, and fed them to the Tick Swarm. This succeeded in reactivating the genetic failsafe in the Tick Swarm, destroying the swarmfleets and disrupting the Swarm's hive mind, at the cost of eighty percent of the First Empire's surviving population. The Destroyer Plague then mutated and infected the rest of the human population, starting the Gene Plagues and the Tribulation.

For much of galactic history since, the galaxy has paid the Tick Swarm no mind. It was largely believed that the Swarm had been destroyed entirely. However, this was discovered to be false by the Second Empire. During their colonization of the Andromeda galaxy, Imperial explorer probes discovered ansible signals consistent with that of the Tick Swarm. Concerned by the possible threat to mankind's efforts to expand beyond the Milky Way, the Second Empire immediately deployed millions of probes to map out the Swarm's reach in Andromeda. To their horror, they realized that nearly the entire Andromeda galaxy had been consumed by the Swarm, with only a few interstellar alien empires holding the line. Attempts to communicate with the Swarm were met with failure, with those managers and artificial intelligences commissioned to communicate with the Swarm being driven insane and hostile by whatever knowledge it imparted. The Second Empire created several massive fleets to scour the Andromeda galaxy of the Swarm, and they were reportedly successful.

The Tick Swarm reemerged in recent galactic history when several swarmfleets collided with the United Galactic Federation. Initially, the Federation believed that they were being attacked by an otherwise unknown alien species, but attempts to track their homeworld failed, and the swarmfleets continued to advance on the Federation. Soon, it was discovered that the aliens bore an extreme resemblance to the Tick Swarm, and that the swarmfleets were originating from beyond the galaxy. These claims were brought before the Protectorate, which initially dismissed the possibility of the Tick Swarm returning from Andromeda. Years later, the Federation found evidence that the Tick Swarm were not coming from Andromeda, but rather three other spiral galaxies, and their numbers were far larger than the Second Empire ever estimated. This evidence was later corroborated when the Tick Swarm attacked Imperial, Consortium and Alliance worlds, effectively surrounding the Milky Way in swarmfleets. In response, the Protectorate declared that the Tick Swarm had returned, and that it was the duty of all mankind to stop it. The Second Swarm War put an end to many Imperial-Federation conflicts around the galaxy, as both sides cooperated to stop the Swarm's invasion. However, several decades after the swarmfleets first arrived, the vast majority of swarmfleets surprisingly stopped their invasion and made a beeline for the Large Magellanic Cloud. With the threat over, the Empire and Federation resumed the Tournament of Shadows, conveniently using the Tick Swarm as an excuse for even heavier military buildup. The largest swarmfleet is currently attacking the Citizens' Alliance, which has used the attack in propaganda proclaiming that the Alliance is the defender of the gates to the Milky Way.

The swarmfleet is a truly terrifying thing to behold. Every swarmfleet contains millions of vessels, tens of thousands of which are the size of a capital ship or larger. Every Swarm vessel is the thing of nightmares. Smaller craft, used to fight drones and fighters, are fast-moving monstrosities covered in teeth, claws, tentacles and spines, which attach themselves onto ship hulls and bore through even the thickest durasteel. They regurgitate their deadly cargo into the holds of enemy ships, where they make quick work of the crew. This cargo, known as starticks among the human powers, crawl through the vessel, whispering taunts, blasphemies and horrible truths from their many mouths as they hunt for their prey. The larger vessels are writhing masses of flesh and chitin, some with gaping maws to eat battlestars whole, others with rows of razor sharp teeth to tear durasteel plating apart. Looking at the larger vessels of the Tick Swarm is known to cause headaches, while trying to comprehend how such a thing could be can lead to madness. The Swarm's vessels are, in fact, shielded from many forms of electronic targeting simply because modern computers cannot make sense of their alien geometries. Indeed, sometimes enemy fire simply does not hit a Swarm vessel, even if it should; this is explained by some less reputable scientists as being due to the Swarm vessel simultaneously existing in other dimensions. While the Swarm takes preference in consuming an enemy fleet whole, they also have access to weapons that spew unknown energies that only the mad artificers of the Duzhonev Imperium and the even madder sophonts of the Imperial Remnant have an inkling of understanding. These weapons disrupt the laws of physics itself, often erasing entire vessels from existence.

On any inhabited world the Swarm decide to descend upon, there is inevitably madness. The Swarm releases many spores and viruses into the atmosphere, and those who are not protected quickly become thralls to the Swarm. Their minds are connected to the swarmfleet, and the strange, beautiful, and terrifying truths they witness drive them into the Swarm's loving embrace. The infected preach their new wisdom in familiar speech and alien tongues, filling electronic communications with their enlightened wisdom. Their physical forms are twisted by ancient mutagens, alien viruses, and even forces not of the material realm. Then, the skies themselves blacken with the swarmfleet's children: unspeakable genetic aberrations that cover the world, consuming everything for the good of the Swarm. Once a world falls, it is stripped down to the bedrock, all of its biomass consumed and brought to the swarmfleet in orbit, and then it leaves. Notably, the Swarm leaves behind artifacts carved into the stone of dead worlds: strange runes in countless dead and unknown languages.

Current Protectorate calculations of the Tick Swarm's numbers are truly astounding. It is believed that, of the three known galaxies the Tick Swarm has consumed, no other lifeform persists beside the Swarm. It is further estimated that the Tick Swarm is consuming other galaxies. What drives the Swarm to do this is a mystery, as any attempts to communicate with the Swarm lead to insanity and suicide among those trying to communicate with it. What little could be gleaned from the Swarm is that the hive mind believes it is saving all biological life from a universe-wide shift that will occur "when the stars are right," but apart from that, little but nonsense about the stars going out and things that are but should not be. It is also believed that the Swarm is communicating with means other than the use of the biological ansibles they were designed to use, as attempts to use ansible signals to intercept the swarmfleets have been met with failure. Likewise, the Swarm's propulsion is a mystery. While the Swarm originally used a biological hyperdrive, the swarmfleets' movements in the modern day defy hyperdrive or warp drive functionality, both in speed and accuracy. How the swarmfleets could cross the intergalactic void so quickly, and with knowledge of which systems to attack, is a mystery, but it is known that whenever a swarmfleet enters a system, faster-than-light systems go haywire, and even basic measuring devices reveal impossible calculations in the space around the swarmfleet. In other words, it would appear that the Swarm moves through space by manipulating physics itself.