M. Faragrah

A species of microbes mostly well known to cause lighting strikes mainly within the vacuum of space, but also within several atmospheric planets.

The microbes, while not able to produce a lot of power on their own, can collectively release powerful electric shocks with a large number of them. Clusters of this microbe will occasionally cause such lightning strikes in order to reproduce. They can be seen in several galaxies, but not all of them, and even within such galaxies, they are only encountered in roughly 1/10 star systems.

Their spread seems to be fairly random as they are incapable of FTL travel which somewhat implies they were engineered and placed intentionally to rather than evolved from some exotic ecosystem. They can survive on some planets as well, where they can cause lightning strikes to happen well outside of thunderstorms which can potentially damage infrastructure and cause heavy damage to objects they hit. Factions settling on such planets would normally either attempt to remove the microbes or design their infrastructure with Faraday cages. The microbes are quite light so they can be easily thrown into the air via the wind.

To cause lighting, they will initially gather in large clusters which can perceive each other. They can communicate within a cluster with very low power electricity, and always trying to accumulate an electric charge. When a cluster choses to reproduce with another with a sufficient, opposite charge, they discharge by gathering a stream of microbes to 'chain' themselves onto and reach for the other cluster, forming a conductive path. This costs all microbes in one group to lose all accumulated electric charge and the vast majority in the larger group to lose the charge but the powerful energies through their bodies causes them to split and effectively undergo mitosis. The microbes prefer to keep their clusters at a relatively similar size so they will form into groups of 4 and each group would then fly away from each other to gather energy and grow back to adult size, getting ready to cause more lightning strikes.

This can lead to some systems producing a large amount of lighting for no obvious reason, which has initially puzzled hyperionite scientists before they discovered the microbes. The harki in particular were fascinated, and they later found some uses for it in purposed organisms. They used it as a weapon through symbiosis with bioships as a powerful type of shield cracking weapons. This concept has proven it's worth in a number of battles as, within that battle, Harkas ships became the primary method of draining enemy shields and allowing the other ships to strike enemy hull. They have also used it to bombard enemy planets by seeding these planets with large amounts of the microbes who would damage enemy structures and injure their people. They developed an unethical variant banned by the Hyperion Ethics Committee which would specifically target people by gathering in their bodies and electrocute them by messing with their nervous systems. This does not effect species like Suons though, who rely on photons rather than electricity to transmit information. 

Though most groups have not developed sentence, some have established complex communication pathways and have developed a crude form of sentience. It is very difficult to establish communications with these types of clouds but it has been done using advanced technologies and through a lot of study. The STP (read Phelke) has proven to work on very selective clusters, but not on most. The communication pathways and sentience are usually destroyed on reproduction because of the powerful electricity which would be flowing through it at the time, but newer clusters might redevelop it as they maintain a memory of their prior life.

One particularly famous cloud was named Emily by hyperionite scientists who managed to have an entire conversation with one. It was quickly found that the clouds think very slowly to preserve energy but it has been found that they do not give names to each other, or any objects at all. Emily died when they reproduced with another cloud many years later...