Hive fleet reasonable

A Tyranid hive fleet that behaves intelligently.

***…

Deep on the very edge of the galaxy far from the nearest inhabited planet there was a star, a yellow dwarf star, very similar to the sun that terra orbits far far away, but with no life to be found. This star had lifeless planets including one planet virtually identical to the planet Venus in its natural state, a hellish greenhouse effect planet with over 100 atmospheres of pressure and sulphuric acid in the clouds.

This planet was hot as hell, hot enough to melt lead down on the surface, the atmosphere so thick that down on the surface the carbon dioxide rich atmosphere was neither a gas nor a liquid but rather a supercritical fluid, the same as it was on old Venus before the humans terraformed it.

This system was dead and this planet most of all.

Up in space for the first time ever, life was arriving in this system, the huge stony skinned forms of the monstrously large hive ships of Hive Fleet Reasonable, come not to steal from inhabitants who could possibly fight back but come to take that which was unclaimed and ripe for the taking.

Above the Venus-like planet the ships swarmed in a multitude, dropping down seeder spores to explode bacteria among the clouds of the upper atmosphere, intermixed with very heavy payloads of phosphine gas to fill the atmosphere with trace amounts of phosphorus and other vital minerals in gaseous or fine dust form.

The growth in these conditions was extremely rapid, the cloud layers of the far more pleasant temperature upper atmosphere soon turned completely black from the sheer mass of photosynthetic bacteria now growing in the clouds. Other Tyranid organisms dropped down, gas bag creatures with huge hydrogen sacks swollen above them for buoyancy floating around in the dark clouds, serving as roosts for huge swarms of smaller flying creatures that swoop through the clouds to filter feed on the bacteria, using this biomass to grow yet more creatures.

For years and years the bountiful harvest continued, the atmosphere growing so thick with floating Tyranid biomass of all types that the atmospheric pressure slowly but steadily reduced as ever more carbon dioxide was sucked in for photosynthesis. The atmosphere was rapidly oxygenating but for a time this oxygen was consumed by the rocks far below, oxidising iron at a furious rate.

The biomass was still growing and the hive ships started to line up mouth to ass in a huge ring above the upper atmosphere. They flooded their joined guts with hydrogen and plasmarised it to bio-plasma contained within bio-magnetic fields. They now had a functional orbital ring, they accelerated the bio-plasma to super-orbital speeds running an endless loop of the planet through their joined guts. The ships themselves then slowed down to stationary above the surface, no longer orbiting but hanging in place off this bio-plamsa ring that was magnetically contained, in every respect making an orbital ring.

With this done the ships simply dropped down stationary flesh cables down into the atmosphere to dock with the floating mass of creatures. The bounty of biomass was obediently handed over to the ships by the floating creatures at the command of the hive mind, bringing in FAR more biomass than any earth-like planet ever could.

The atmosphere was getting dry as more and more water was consumed but this wasn't a problem, H2O water was the second most common molecule in the entire universe after only dihydrogen H2 molecules, it was beyond easy to have some ships consume the ice of every comet and icy moon in the star system, the orbital ring liberally pissing down more water to replace the losses to the atmosphere.

For years and years they got many hundreds of times an earth's biosphere worth of biomass just from the insanely fast growing tyranid bacteria that were genetically engineered to thrive in these clouds, the sulphuric acid harmless to these particular super bacteria. They had no viruses and no diseases, no lack of nutrients or light, living in water rich clouds that were highly fertilised by spore drops.

The carbon dioxide and nitrogen alike were gradually but steadily sucked away, the air pressure ever dropping, the amounts of biomass produced so extreme that it made even jungle planets look meagre pickings in comparison. The hive ships were calving like crazy with this huge glut of biomass, every ship stuffed to capacity with thick fat to store this bounty.

The new young infant hive ships budded off the top of the backs of their parents, the infants arranging mouth to ass with all the other infants to share a bio plasma ring stream to support their weight and form a new orbital ring. As the infants grew longer the ring got bigger, raising them up off their parents backs to 100 kilometres above their parents, with 100 kilometre long umbilical tubes connecting the adult infants to their parents to transport nutrient rich boluses from orbital ring to orbital ring. The adult infants then had calves of their own, which formed a new orbital ring even higher up, which then spawned yet another, all the way out to geostationary orbit where orbital rings were no longer necessary.

The fleet doubled in size, tripled in size, orders of magnitude bigger and bigger, grew absolutely monstrous from just feasting on the atmosphere of this one lifeless planet for many years, the fleet growing so huge that all enemies would tremble.

The heat on the planet steadily dropped as the pressure decreased thanks to what the human physicists called "Boyle's Law", more and more of the atmosphere cool enough for yet more life to infest, the oxygen levels steadily rising now as the oxygen sinks on the surface were quenched.

Huge fires raged across the atmosphere as the phosphine gas ignited, and the tyranids switched to using various phosphorus oxides in fine dust forms to fertilise the atmosphere without fire risks. The growth quickly recovered from the fires, the biomass growth and harvesting process never ending.

The hive fleet, now many times its original size, formed additional orbital rings on different orbital axises to speed up the harvesting, these new rings down next to the original lowest ring, with hanging horizontal tubes connecting them to the original ring.

The atmosphere was now so oxygen rich that the carbon dioxide and nitrogen together comprised less than half of the atmosphere. The hive fleet simply sucked away excess oxygen with dangling tubes hanging down into the atmosphere, sucking in oxygen and using peristaltic motions to deliver it up to the first orbital ring, dropping the pressure even more and dropping the temperature in the process.

For the first time in eons it began to rain on this planet, the temperature and pressure finally low enough for the thick black bacteria choked clouds to dump their moisture in a crashing deluge that drenched the hot surface. Tyranid organisms flocked down to the flooding surface as new oceans slowly began to fill, gorging on the years worth of roasted dead biomass that had fallen down to accumulate when it was still too hot on the surface.

Huge forests of Tyranid vegetation sprouted as tyranid fungi filaments dissolved rock and prepared the soil for growth, the forests subsequently submerged under the growing oceans as the rain endlessly continued.

The orbital rings were only 100 kilometres above the surface, short enough distance to not need fancy advanced materials to make a cable that wouldn't snap. They lowered down tubes all the way to the surface, the ends of the tubes growing into vast hive complexes that both spawned tyranids and consumed and transported biomass up to the lowest orbital rings.

The feast just continued, now enriched by minerals from the ground. Vast swarms of rippers consumed biomass and returned to the hive to regurgitate this bounty without wasting the biogenesis energies of making new rippers, reusing the same rippers endlessly to deliver food to the hives.

But unlike other more wasteful tyranid hive fleets, hive fleet reasonable didn't simply strip the surface and then leave, they instead systematically excavated the surface, collecting not just biomass but also rock, the hive ships mineralising their outer shells to store so much silicon and aluminium and iron, wasting nothing.

Out beyond the final orbital ring other ships took the excess raw rock that the orbital rings couldn't use, these ships then flew closer to the local star, extending vacuum resistant foliage for hundreds of kilometres around them in the zero gravity. They engaged in photosynthesis, using the energy to remove the worthless oxygen from the rocks to reduce weight, stockpiling only the purified metals and metalloids for the use of the fleet, venting the worthless oxygen that comprised more than half of the atoms in the rock.

As the worthless rock was removed and processed, phosphorus was liberated from the rocks to fuel the endless growth, and carbon was extracted to create yet more biomass. The growing ocean on the surface was being drunk raw by tubes to maximise the rain drenched land surface, this rain would continue for millions of years if left undisturbed, the oceans could be safely drained without incident.

Specialist rippers with super hard teeth chomped into the exposed rock wherever it could be found, their bodies digesting the rock and absorbing valuable minerals like phosphorus, pissing these minerals out liberally over the growing vegetation to be harvested by yet other types of rippers. Entire mountains were chomped away, the planet getting gradually smaller as literally all of it was consumed.

The hive fleet grew and grew, after years of nonstop feeding it was already far bigger than all but the largest other hive fleets, all from feeding on just one planet. The hive fleet now had a lot more silicon and aluminium and iron than they really needed right now but this wasn't a problem, they would have great need of it soon once they started harvesting the gas giant planets themselves, minerals were far rarer than volatiles in cosmic abundance.

That said, the hive fleet was already forming orbital rings in the extreme upper atmospheres of every gas giant and ice giant in the star system, ready to greedily harvest these bounties as well. They dropped tendrils down into these atmospheres and began sucking up everything, obtaining hydrogen in such great abundance that they simply used bio plasma cannons on the backs of the hive ships in the orbital rings to shoot it away into space. Amongst this ocean of unwanted hydrogen they obtained methane, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and other valuable volatiles, and these were greedily kept.

Back on the Venus-like planet the various ground hives were joining together and mutating into an overlapping group of new orbital rings while they still had ground under them, the rock disappearing fast. Soon these new orbital rings (at former ground level) were self supporting on their own super-orbital speed bio plasma streams and the ground under them was completely eaten away.

The hives turned orbital rings dropped down feeding tubes for the rippers to regurgitate their stomach contents into, the tubes elongating as the ground under them was eaten away, other tubes sucking up the ocean water wherever they had ocean water under them.

The rock disappeared fast until the exposed rock was too hot for tyranids to survive on. The tyranids simply waited for the endless rain to boil off this hot rock and cool it down, volcanic gases seeping out of cracks in this rain drenched super hot rock to fuel fresh growth of photosynthetic organisms.

The rain did its job sluggishly, the orbital rings sucking in more atmosphere to reduce the pressure and temperature to compensate, and the moment it was cool enough the surface erupted with yet more vegetation that was soon consumed by rippers. The hive fleet was in no hurry, it would take a LONG time for them to harvest the gas giants of their volatiles.

Around the gas giants the growth was slowed by less sunlight, and specialised Tyranid ships in far orbit were opening up huge mirrored flesh sails hundreds of kilometres across to reflect additional sunlight down onto the orbital rings to let them photosynthesise directly with foliage on their back.

Soon these orbital rings were calving new rings on their backs that grew longer and rose up connected by umbilical tubes, not as high this time due to the additional gravity affecting the maximum tube length that could withstand the added tensile pressure. These calves grew mature and had calves of their own, extending orbital rings all the way up to geostationary orbit.

It took vast numbers of ships with mirrored sails to light all of these orbital rings, and regular shipments of minerals from the Venus-like planet were required for all of these new orbital rings to grow, but now they had the means to suck the gas giants empty over long years. The amounts of volatiles extracted from the gas giants was almost limitless, the atmosphere of the Venus-like planet was nothing in comparison to these ultimate mother-lodes.

Every planet and moon and floating rock and comet was now being consumed as fast as it possibly could be, waste hydrogen and waste oxygen and waste helium littering the space of the system as it was vented away.

The Venus-like planet was steadily shrinking with only geothermal heat slowing the process to as fast as rain could cool down the rock. Hive Fleet Reasonable was now bigger than even the entirety of Hive Fleet Leviathan, the entire (non hydrogen/helium/oxygen) mass of every planet in this star system being converted into more tyranids.

The star provided all the energy they needed, indefinitely renewable, they didn't even need to eat to obtain energy anymore, all the ships using their own photosynthesis to endlessly energise themselves.

It took hundreds of years, nothing in the scale of time in the 40k setting, and Hive Fleet Reasonable had eaten EVERYTHING, not so much as a gas giant metallic core remained, all of it exposed, cooled as fast as thermodynamics allowed, and then eaten. The Hive Fleet was now so vast in numbers that it could easily conquer the entire galaxy without any difficulty at all.

Even more sensibly they had not wasted those hundreds of years in just one star system, they had been steadily sending out small splinter fleets to every other uninhabited star system in thousands of light years radius, and now they had more ships and more biomass and more tyranids than anyone could possibly imagine.

The entire galaxy was doomed if hive fleet reasonable desired to be hostile, no amount of Mary Sue Rowboat Girlyman or primarchs or Emperors or chaos gods or Krorks or necrons or anything else could save the day now, the tyranids of Hive Fleet Reasonable had already won and they had not yet even attacked anyone yet.

They would multiply exponentially faster than they could be killed no matter what happened, they simply had too many ships and forces now.

***…