Termagant

Termagants exist for one purpose: to be numerous. Grown in vast broodings aboard bio-ships and birthed in litters that number in the hundreds, they are the cheapest currency the Hive Mind spends, thrown forward in dense screens to absorb fire, clog choke points, and simply exhaust an enemy's capacity to keep killing. A single termagant is a fragile, almost pitiable thing. A tide of them is an unstoppable statistic.

Each termagant carries a bio-weapon fused directly to its nervous system, grown rather than issued, which means the creature has no more choice in wielding it than a human soldier has a choice in growing arms. Left without synaptic guidance from a nearby synapse creature, termagant broods can degrade into a chittering, panicked mass, but under proper control they advance with an eerie, disciplined patience that belies their disposability.

What unsettles veteran defenders most is not any single termagant but the arithmetic of them: for every one destroyed, a bio-ship somewhere in the fleet has already begun growing three more, drawing on biomass harvested from the very world being invaded.