The Bitch is Back...

[b]Name of nation: [/b] The Broodmind

[img]http://www.unc.edu/~rc1210/images/fluoresence.jpg[/img]

[b]Description of government:[/b] Every entity within the race operates as a pawn of an overarching conscious - or Broodmind - that guides them. Every walker and every ship within the Broodmind answers their command without question, serving their purpose with the same unquestioning loyalty as your own fingers and hands to you. Even across the vast distances of space, Broodmind assets appear to be able to communicate both amongst themselves and also with the Broodmind proper.

[b]Description of military:[/b] The Broodmind has no military to speak of - at least not in the formal sense that sentient beings are familiar with. The Broodmind is a purely biological phenomenon; a plague of the mind and body that transforms its host into a shambling minion and a thrall to the Broodmind's nefarious schemes. As such, the Broodmind may assume control of armed forces and entire starship crews - allowing surface armies and fleets to come under its command.

Broodmind forces do not tend to follow any rigid tactical doctrine and make only minimal use of any weapons they may commandeer. Larger arms and ship-mounted weapons platforms may be used sparingly to breach defenses and cripple hostile or escaping starships. But the overall intent of any conflict - after neutralizing any threats to Broodmind assets - is to acquire new hosts and secure ever larger quantities of energy and biomass. Broodmind surface assets - often called walkers, zombies, or ghouls - often try to drown enemies in a sea of corpses and their hijacked starships have a disconcerting tendency to ram into target vessels. Because a single Broodmind-commandeered starship is quite capable of infesting entire planets - preventing Broodmind walkers from taking possession of even small, unarmed starships is of the highest priority in stopping and controlling Broodmind infestation. Local outbreaks can spread rapidly across multiple planets if aggressive containment measures are not taken in short order.

[b]History:[/b] The origin of the Broodmind is lost to history. Where it came from and how it developed is unclear. But on another plane, many millennia ago, a Broodmind outbreak took a sister universe of our own by storm. A hundred alien civilizations set aside their comparatively petty quarrels and joined to eliminate the Broodmind menace. Although a thousand worlds were destroyed in the great cleansing, the Broodmind was successfully contained and eventually obliterated all traces of the Broodmind from their midst.

But beyond their universe, the Broodmind lingered. Broken, derelict warships infested with the plague drifted for eons in the void of Slipspace. On these shattered masses of interstellar flotsam, dormant vestiges of the Broodmind lingered. Forgotten relics cast adrift beyond space and time by an ancient war, they are doomed to float forever through an empty void.

Slipspace, though, is an unstable place. It follows laws of nature exotic and incomprehensible compared to those of our universe. Currents and rifts form, however infrequently, between Slipspace and the other universes. Through one such rift, one such derelict vessel drifted through into the murky fringes of our own universe. And so a single derelict hulk, with a belly full of slumbering monsters, drifts now among us. Hungry veterans of that ancient war stir within, ready to embark upon a ripe, virgin universe grossly unprepared for their arrival.