Quarantiner Tsi'ka-ul

Neuters, the lowest "caste" of the Hive, are of... varying degrees of intelligence. Common ones are mindless, just extra bodies for their mothers, or other females, to control. More specialized ones have limited fields of intelligence, like present-day AI on earth. Very good at one thing, but need commands for much else. A very rare few are completely intelligent, usually sent places that an actual female or male is too valuable for, but where independence is needed.

Neuters come in any number of shapes, sizes, and degrees of modification. Tsi'ka's usual brood is described below.

General purpose neuters, 3-4x: Smallish things, with a total body length no more than maybe two meters, so standing about 1.2-1.3m tall when upright, though they usually scuttle around on all eight legs. They're a bit stronger than they look, but not by much. They tend to have limited augmentations, though sometimes some simple ones. Better spinnerets, better carapace material, poisoned claws, improved eyesight, improved hand-eye reaction speed, and so on. They're mostly used for day-to-day manual tasks, and are completely catatonic without Tsi'ka's control. If in combat, they will use very high fire-rate bullpup smg-like energy weapons, meant to provide shots down-range and suppression fire more than stopping power, usually two per individual.

High-sophistication assistant neuters, 1-2: About 2.5-3m long, these buggies are essentially an overall step up over the general purpose neuters. They can perform simple tasks on their own, have more augmentations, including things like enhanced musculature, more advanced sensory organs, tools, cybernetic rather than biotech augs such as mind-machine interfacing equipment, medical devices to help their mother's tasks, weapons like spike shooters, lashes like their mother's, gas vents for simple toxins, servo-based strength enhancers, optical periphery nervous systems, and image-links to their weapons. These ones are more able to use things like sniper rifles, heavy lasers, larger automatic weapons, and so on. They may wear light armour.

The Heavy, x1: This thing is made for two things: Tough, heavy physical labour, and being Tsi'ka's most powerful line of defence. At least as large as she is, and definitely more solid, the Heavy "wears" stupidly tough armour, which is actually plating attached to a needlessly strong exoskeleton grafted to its already impressive body. It can punch through walls with its mostly inorganic fists, easily drag a broken down vehicle to a service station, help unload starships better than most robots, and carries a gattling-railgun that would normally be mounted to a tank, as well as a massive blaster-type weapon that fires quickly enough to look like it shoots a continuous beam. It's as mindless as the general purpose critters, but has a much higher "bandwidth" to its mother's mind. If she were to die, however, it would not go catatonic. It would instead keep shooting until nothing around it that its integrated HUD didn't recognize via FFR sensors was left moving, or it runs out of charge on its weapons. if that last one happens, it starts punching, grabbing, and ripping until either it or everything else dies. Once it goes quiet, it will stay with its mother's corpse until it is put down by the Hive and her remains are recovered (assuming anything is left of her)

Needless to say, if Tsi'ka is somewhere where a heavy security detail is not acceptable, she will not bring the Heavy. The only reason she even has one is because of her frequent assignments to contain and clear plagues or contagions, which tend to create dangerous situations.

Expect the neuters to be freakishly well co-ordinated, since they are all extensions of Tsi'ka-ul's will, and are usually under her direct control, for anything from labour to searching to combat to.... okay, probably not dancing, but they'd be SO in sync together if they did for some reason!

Lash: on her lower right forearm, this smooth, broad ridge is actually a folded-away whip/stinger. Extending with a sound between the crack of a whip and the pop of a low-calibre firearm to ~six meters in length in under a millisecond, the sharp appendage serves as Tsi-ka's most basic self-defence weapon. It also serves the secondary purpose of an injector for medicinal drugs, toxins, nanotech, and so on. It can also be used like a whip.

Injector claws: Providing more controlled dosages than the Lash and allowing for more precise injections as well, the long claws of her lower left hand serve as injectors. Fitted with retractable needles, they can deliver multiple drugs to a subject quickly and precisely. There is a port on her wrist which allows for vials of other substances to be slotted in if she cannot produce them herself.

Biosynthesis systems: Sophisticated glands and organs in Tsi-ka's lower torso function as an internal biochemistry synthesis factory, letting her produce common medicines and venoms for injection at a minute's notice. Combined with a similar, though larger, set in her main thorax, she can also recover from injury, or at least stop bleeding and dull pain, fairly quickly. She won't be regenerating lost limbs in combat, but expecting her to be neutralized from pain and bleed out is a bad idea.

Enhanced Spinnerets: Allow faster web production, and production of webbing with unusual properties such as high electrostatic charges, being cookable into very hard building material, and medicinal lacing, letting her make restorative/disease-fighting cocoons.

Kinetic Energy Management System: Tsi-ka can handle heavier impacts to her legs safely, avoiding those risks if she has to jump down off of something or kick in a wall.