Grimdark Future

This story is fan-fiction made in the Grimdark Future universe, by One Page Rules.

Horva ith Irnwuld stared over the darkened forest at the distant horizon of the Maldadori Gap. The fog was dark with a hint of green, and the air was sour in the nostrils, the familiar signs of Hive industry. The scientists called it terraforming, but Horva had fought Hive infestation for years, and had seen the devastation left after the Hive moved on. It wasn’t terraforming, it was digestion.

She had grown used to the smell, though she was not proud of the fact. Her expertise had come at the cost of thousands of good men and women. If their charge were correct, if there really some way to end the fighting…

At first she had been skeptical. No, that was selling it short; at first she had been dismissive. Their own war-scientists had been studying the Hive for decades, and every report had been the same; they were highly advanced animals, acting on instinct and emergent hive-behavior. They communicated mostly through pheromones and growls, and there were no signs of sentience, let alone sapience, in individual beings.