Omake: What Is Defeated Is Not Vanquished
To the powers of the galaxy, the Haldive Nabula was a simple celestial feature on the edge of the Romulan/Klingon border. The drifting remains of a destroyed binary, several protostars were already gestating in it's depths. The occasional civilian vessel stopped by to view the accretion disks, but star development times were measured in millions of years: as such there was no permanent presence in the area besides a handful of sensor units placed there by both empires.
What neither side knew was that the nebula now served as a refuge. Not to space life, or to any sentient race. No, what now skulked among the cooling corpse of ancient stars was a plague. The Ulith Biophage, The Inflictor, it's names were varied and never kind. But the true danger of this mechorganic plague wasn't that it was capable of converting an infected vessel in minutes. No, it was that it had fought and lost.
Some would say that that made it less dangerous. But during the nearly year long crisis it had inflicted on the greatest local powers, the plague had adapted. It had learned from those it had converted, it had pulled knowledge from computers it had interfaced with, and was now sitting in the background until it had built up strength.
In the depths of the Haldive Nebula, there was a cluster of structures. Central in the array was a womb, a sickening sack of metal frames and liquid substrate in which ships were assembled at the molecular level. The plague had learned this from the war: it needed things to occupy attention that could survive the attention of warships while smaller forms took advantage of the enemies split attention. One of these new warships already hung nearby the shipwomb, accepting mass from the collectors that came and went.
The collectors were camouflaged mining and harvest vessels, traveling at low warp to and from collections of minerals and unwatched biospheres to gather the building blocks for this section of the plague's new force. On the outside they were indistinguishable from Discordant constructed vessels, and similarly were to pretend to be a recently warp capable race if discovered. Sensor baffles were incorporated to cover the lack of life signs and 'conventional' engineering, as well as the distinctive types of cargo the vessels carried in their guts.
But even while building up it's strength, this node of plague continued to be active. Nothing too overt, but using a collector to lure in a hunter for conversion? Simple, easy, and useful. Most of these raiders were crude vessels simply broken down for new growth, but some were sent back out as covertly as possible to continue their business as usual. With maybe a few pounds of plague aboard, the vessels easily came and went among their typical haunts, passing information and resources back to the node.
Sometimes, the plague became more bold in it's acts, coordinating it's raiders to ensnare or destroy a warship of one of the greater powers for it's technology or quality materials.
Any way at all, the plague was going to be ready for it's next opportunity to harmonize the choir.
