The Portuguese man o’ war is a fascinating organism.
From Wikipedia: “The Atlantic Portuguese man o’ war (Physalia physalis), also known as the Man-of-war, bluebottle, or floating terror, is a marine cnidarian of the family Physaliidae. Its venomous tentacles can deliver a painful sting. Despite its outward appearance, the Portuguese man o’ war is not a common jellyfish but a siphonophore, which is not actually a single multicellular organism, but a colony of specialized minute individuals called zooids. These zooids are attached to one another and physiologically integrated to the extent that they are incapable of independent survival.”
But what really caught my attention was this line in the “Predators and prey” section of the article: “The blanket octopus is immune to the venom of the Portuguese man o’ war; young individuals carry broken man o’ war tentacles, presumably for offensive and/or defensive purposes.”
And that’s where this Prompt comes from. The idea that an alien race might use biological weaponry to go against human technology.
I imagine a human ship meeting an alien race with chitinous armor covered with luminescent circles and stripes. One touch incapacitates, and the human crew is quickly overcome. They are taken back to the alien ship where they are examined and dissected by the curious aliens that communicate via pheromones and don’t recognize human speech as a language.
As a result of that first disastrous meeting, humans attack the alien ship. It becomes a catastrophe when the aliens respond to the loss of their scout ship by sending in the Armada (swarms of ship able to change color and block all radiation, rippling to match the space around them, seeming to disappear). Every meeting between humans and the aliens result in the humans losing, either when their ships are destroyed or when the boarding parties meet and every brush against the alien armor “shield technology” results in agonizing pain and death.
Human scientists focus on a technological reason for the aliens’ offensive/defensive capabilities. It takes a while for the biologists to step in, and that only after one of the aliens is killed and its body is brought back for examination. (A fast-ship bringing precious cargo back to the premiere science station. The alien body is stored in a foam-filled container as the armor continues to react to anything coming into contact with it.) It’s then that humans find out that everything the aliens use, from armor to ships to their “pulse” weapons, is organic in nature. They have been modifying living creatures for their own use.
By that time, the aliens see humans as weak prey. With their living ships, they come into Earth Space. Humanity must fight or die…
A. Antlike colonies expanding territory.
B. Beginning in the sea to grow on alien shores.
C. One mind, many bodies, all of them focused on destroying the human threat.
D. The aliens conquer Earth colonies that turn to guerilla warfare to fight back.
E. The space marines are called in to battle the Armada.
