Hive Fleet Hydra

Hydra takes its name from the myth of the beast that grew two heads for every one struck away, and no title could suit it better. A comparatively recent arrival, it drifts along in the wake of the great fleet Leviathan, hunting down the defeated remnants of earlier hive fleets and cannibalising them to absorb their genetic memory, growing ever richer in stolen adaptation as it comes.

Its sheer fecundity is its weapon. Every organism Hydra fields, down to the lowliest slimer maggot, breeds and multiplies at a horrifying rate, so that its swarms seem to have no bottom and no end. When it closes upon a world it first seeds the upper atmosphere with countless spore clusters, each cradling scores of dormant hormagaunts and termagants. As its vanguard broods meet resistance and begin to die, every slain creature looses a synaptic death-cry, and at that psychic signal the waiting spores burst open across the sky, disgorging fresh legions directly into the fighting.

Hydra was roused early from its long hibernation by Drukhari raiders who boarded its greatest bio-ships in search of specimens for the flesh-sculptors of Commorragh. They had gravely misjudged their quarry, for the ships woke faster than any pirate expected, and every raider who set foot within was torn apart. When the survivors turned to flee, they found that for every drone-ship they destroyed, two more rose to hound them. To wage war on Hydra is not to fight an army but to drown beneath one.