Shivak

A common shivak is a headless egg-shaped body covered in thick gray leathery hide, and that hide goes all the way through: there are no organs inside. Its limbs, of the same stuff, are arranged so that each variety vaguely mimics one of the races aboard the ship. They glide forward, backward, or sideways as smoothly as if on wheels. Each variety also has its own special attack usable at will.

Shivaks fight as one body regardless of shape, simply overwhelming intruders with numbers and hauling them away. Their main job seems to be keeping trespassers out of restricted parts of the ship. They appear linked to the vessel and to each other: attack one, and 1-8 more usually arrive 3-6 rounds later. Their orders are narrow, so they fight only when attacked, when someone enters a forbidden area, or when someone blocks their routine work, which includes delivering food and dismantling ships. Otherwise they ignore the other residents and are ignored in turn.

They are immune to illusions, light-based attacks, poison, polymorph, paralysis, charm, and all enchantments including sleep, as well as to their own and other shivaks' special attacks. Rather than seeing, they constantly sense life as by detect life, so invisible or illusion-masked living beings stand out clearly, and they know every hall and warren of the ship by heart. Unliving animate things, such as undead, golems, and the clockwork swarms of the void, are invisible to them; a shivak cannot target what it cannot sense and can only flail about at -4 to hit.

Shivaks exist only aboard the Great Starship, about 500 at any time, and are little more than limbs of its will. They follow their routines unless the captain commands otherwise, and a captain's orders are obeyed only when they do not contradict the shivaks' core functions; no captain can, for example, forbid them to attack a trespasser in the warrens.

Shivaks grow inside huge wall-hung pods in the shivak terminal, a dim place well away from the sunlit gardens where the ship raises its seedling skiffs. Their only need is a starhelm, which the terminal consumes within a few days to produce 1-10 new shivaks; the helm is lost for good. Shivaks bring any starhelm they find back to the terminal. Extras not needed at once go into storage, sustained on trickles of the ship's energy, and replacements are grown as others are destroyed or wear out.

The largest shivak appears only in the control room, a chamber that exists only when a would-be captain is aboard and that moves randomly around the ship, rarely in the same spot twice. It forms only while a sovereign starhelm is on the ship, specifically to challenge whoever carries it, and the challenger must beat it to claim the captaincy and bond with the vessel. Should that helm be carried off or destroyed, the guardian melts back into the ship, reforming each time a sovereign starhelm returns.

Instead of an egg shape, it takes the form of the previous captain's worst fears, and it keeps that form no matter how many times it reappears. At present it looks like a gigantic mind reaver and has a psionic blast much like one. It is made of the same organless leather as its smaller kin and shares all their immunities and resistances.