The heart of each Feron fleet is its supercarrier, known as a Hive. There were only seven built, each serving as flagship for one of the seven fleets’ grand admirals. While each Hive follows the same basic design, they all were heavily modified during the War to incorporate both captured Malleon and Isan technology and Feron engineers’ own advances in materials and energy. In particular, each Hive has a different energy-based superweapon built into its weapon segment where the smaller carriers use melee weapons, developed separately by each fleet’s engineers to support that fleet’s preferred tactics. The most famous of the Hives is the Vendetta, Admiral Nazzaretes’s flagship, that carries an experimental Nephelium-enhanced EMP capable of disabling enemy ships at short range or firing into a planet or moon’s magnetosphere to devastate unprotected electronic systems with an enormous blast zone.

Before the Eminence-class, the Hive was the largest ship in the War, at 1770 yards tall. It has the same three-segment “totem pole” design language as the other Feron capital ships, but the Hive’s command segment has two wing-like sections protruding at 90 and 270 degrees. From the front, the command segment resembles a bird on top of a totem pole with its wings held straight out on each side. These two wings provide quarters for each fleet’s Falconroost operatives and its top marine commanders. Both the wings and the main command section have a large concentration of light and heavy turrets. The honeycomb segment is similar to the Rhino’s, with an exoskeleton and moving armor plated on rails, but it also has shield generators at points along the exoskeleton. These generators are powered by the Hive’s massive reactor, and even then they can only be activated for a few seconds every few minutes and protect only about half of the honeycomb segment at a time, but if timed correctly, the Nephelium field can “block” an entire broadside by draining the projectiles of enough momentum that they strike the Hive harmlessly. Each hive has a unique energy-based superweapon housed in its weapon segment, drawing energy from the command segment through the honeycomb segment’s web of energy relays. The Hive’s massive engine has three large exhaust ports in a triangle shape and a ring of small exhaust ports around them.

Each Hive served as a mobile base for one of the seven Feron fleets, housing the grand admiral’s staff, the fleet’s marine commanders, and its Falconroost operatives, but it also played a key role as the fleet’s “queen” during combat operations. Until the commissioning of the Malleon Eminence-class, the Hive was the largest ship fielded by any side in the War. Between its legions of launch craft, its banks of heavy turrets, and its energy weapon, a Hive could effectively engage multiple Venture-class battleships at once. For fulgressus tactics, the Hive operates as a reserve: The grand admiral waits for the Wasps and Rhinos to break enemy formation, and then, when the enemy is in disarray, brings the Hive to a target-rich part of the battlefield to eliminate as many enemy ships as possible before they can reorganize to mount a counterattack. The exoskeleton’s armor and deflector shields allow a Hive to operate with impunity in a chaotic battlefield because it required multiple ships attacking with sustained fire from multiple angles to overwhelm its defenses. The energy weapon, while custom-engineered by each fleet’s scientists to varying levels of power and cooldown times, could substantially damage a Venture-class in a single close-range direct hit. The Malleon only managed to take down Hives during the War by focusing enough fire on the honeycomb segment to overwhelm the armor plates and score hits in between shield activations, damaging enough of the energy relays to render the energy-hungry weapon segment inoperable. But because the Hive uses the same kind of redundant energy infrastructure as the other Feron ships, even this could backfire if the Malleon attack didn’t destroy enough of the honeycomb segment to depower the weapon segment: Admiral Nazzaretes’s Vendetta, the Malleon Navy’s number one target, defeated multiple such ambushes.