Common space roaches, as Hercules Medical identified them, are isopod-like vermin up to about a metre and a half long that bite through metal and bleed ichor. A colony can regrow from a single egg pairing, so it has to be wiped out completely. In 3200 they infested the Agri-Deck of the Hercules and were destroying crops. The team sent to clear them out "by any means" followed them deep into the ventral decks, past stress cracks in the ship's superstructure, to a corridor abandoned since the evacuation behind a welded bulkhead marked Cycler Unit C-46-Y, where a seething mass of them could not be thinned by gunfire. The roaches defended their territory but did not give chase, so the crawlway was sealed and the nest reported.