I don't know about you, but the sight of my opponent setting up a Tyranid swarm across the table always fills me with dread. Not content with gigantic, psychotic scythe-armed monsters, he also has wave upon wave of smaller nasties who are no slouches in the close combat department. My pitifully outnumbered Space Marines have to watch as hundreds of the monsters are positioned in front of them. Then my opponent has the nerve to complain that he is running out of room to deploy his creatures! Against the Tyranids my army would usually be reduced to piles of bleeding flesh before the day was out, devoured by the rapacious extra-galactic predators, and thus I decided that enough was enough. If I couldn't beat them, I would join them...

Never has there been a better time to become part of the hive mind. The release of Codex: Tyranids and the superb new range of models that accompanies it convinced me that it was time to surrender to the inevitable. But first I needed to know more. Where had these creatures come from and what was their purpose? What were they doing in our galaxy and what, if anything, could be done to stop them? Surrendering my genetic material to the hive fleet, I set out to discover what I could before becoming a clawed monstrosity in the service of the hive mind.

FROM BEYOND THE GALAXY
The edges of the galaxy are unknown regions and only the most foolhardy of explorers have ventured into these mysterious realms. The area of space at the Eastern Fringe lies beyond the furthest reach of the Astronomican, a thin veil of the Old Stars gleaming weakly from the halo zone beyond. It is from these haunted depths of space that the Tyranids have come, a region of space that has never known the Emperor or the Imperium of Man. The Tyranids are so immeasurably old that it is impossible to tell exactly how long they have existed. Similarly, exactly where the Tyranids originate from is a mystery. Each Tyranid hive fleet consists of millions of living craft that have come to our galaxy from beyond the known reaches of space, across the icy interstellar void, travelling for millions of years with but a single purpose. To consume, to devour, to absorb. The Tyranids are voracious super-predators, acting in fearsome concert with one another and never pausing in their need to absorb fresh genetic material.

A swarm of Tyranids overrun the Imperial defence line.

One of the most terrifying aspects of the Tyranid race is the gestalt consciousness that drives them. This vast overmind casts a shadow of smothering static throughout the Warp, known to Imperial scholars as the hive mind. It allows the entire hive fleet to act as a single entity, each creature pursuing the hive mind's ultimate goal of consumption. Every organism within the Tyranid hive is part of the greater whole, a collective consciousness that infuses every creature from the largest bio-Titan to the lowliest Ripper with single minded purpose. While the hive mind functions, each creature in the Tyranid swarm will fight to the death, its own instinctive behavioural patterns subservient to the greater need of the hive mind. But should the link to the hive mind be broken, the smaller creatures become disorientated and will revert to their basic instincts.

The Tyranids are unlike any other race encountered by Man. They have no technology as such and every need the hive mind detects is met by the spawning of a creature evolved to satisfy that need. Weapons, attack ships, creatures; all are grown within the enormous hive ships. Weapons are simply smaller bio-creatures with their projectiles formed from shards of bone, teeth, acids, viruses or even smaller burrowing organisms. The belly of every hive ship is a grotesque biological nursery, an evolutionary hothouse where creatures are grown in primordial vats of raw genetic material to carry out specific tasks. Creatures can be evolved to be fighters, workers or simply bio-constructs designed to replicate the performance of a piece of technological equipment. As each threat to the hive mind is met, the Tyranids evolve in response to it and adapt to defeat it. How such a hyper-evolutionary species could even come into existence is another mystery that remains unexplained, though many Imperial Genetors have their own wild theories.

ULTIMATE PREDATORS
The need to absorb fresh genetic material is the one and only instinct that drives the Tyranids. It is all that they have evolved to do and, as such, they cannot be negotiated with, bargained with or made peace with. The only thing that Tyranids react to is force. When the hive fleet attacks a world, the sky darkens with poisonous spores and screeching, bat-winged creatures. Days of tense anticipation and sudden death from the choking darkness follow. Then millions of mycetic spores, each carrying a Tyranid organism, rain down on the planet's surface and break open on impact, disgorging swarms of sickle-armed beasts. These Tyranid creatures spread rapidly across the planet's surface, enormous bio-Titans following in their wake.

The doomed defenders are overwhelmed by wave after wave of implacable, ferocious monsters that fight with razor-edged chitin and corrosive, envenomed bio-weapons. Terrifying creatures, bigger than a Space Marine Dreadnought, shrug off hits from lascannons, smash through defensive walls and toss armoured tanks aside like children's toys. Screeching beasts bound forwards with powerful leaps and tear men apart using their deadly claws. The sheer horror and scale of the alien invasion drives men mad with terror and, unless a world can be reinforced very quickly or already has a large standing garrison, it will undoubtedly fall. In such cases the only solution may be the ultimate sanction of Exterminatus, destroying the planet from orbit before the Tyranids can assimilate its biomass into their hive ships. Despite the horrific nature of the Exterminatus, it is not always certain to succeed and the sacrifice of a world may be in vain.

When the Tyranids have destroyed the defenders of a world, the vast hive ships move into low orbit and begin feeding on the planet's biosphere. The Tyranids strip a world completely bare, reducing verdant worlds thriving with life to barren, airless rocks. Feeder tentacles rise from digestion pools, pumping broken-down organic matter into the geno-organs of the hive ships. Every single biological organism, the oceans and even the atmosphere are stripped away and ingested by the Tyranids; nothing is wasted. Once a world has been devoured, the hive fleet moves onto the next, sensing fresh genetic material. No one knows how many galaxies have already fallen before the Tyranids, but it is certain that they have exhausted their own. Our own galaxy, so teeming with life, provides the Tyranids with an almost inexhaustible supply of gene stock. The threat to the galaxy is beyond measure.

Next: Part 2