Kaion

Kaions hound miners and shippers across the galaxy, feasting on starship hulls and mined ores alike. These mollusk-like creatures produce their own energy via chemosynthesis. As a kaion scrapes up inorganic minerals from nearby rock with its radula, symbiotic bacteria in its shell produce energy and excrete any unwanted metals as a metabolic byproduct. These metals accumulate in the kaion’s shell as well as in the numerous metallic sclerites that cover the kaion’s many tentacles and two long arms. The kaion’s armored surface also produces powerful magnetic fields that respond to the creature’s bioelectric impulses, often visible in field lines of metallic dust that adhere to the creature’s shell, expanding and contracting in rhythmic, breath-like movements.
By using a nearby metallic surface as an anchor, kaions can propel themselves via magnetic levitation. As space travel has increased, kaions have expanded far beyond their native habitat of the Diaspora by hitching rides on unsuspecting starships. By creating a magnetic gradient down its arms, a kaion can detach one of its sclerites and accelerate it to railgun speeds. These projectiles lodge in or adhere to targets; subsequent magnetic pulses can reel prey back as though they were harpooned.
Kaions are a social species organized into a pod structure, and whole pods cooperate to bring down larger prey. When multiple kaions in a pod have reached a sufficient level of size and strength, they can instead become magnetically aligned with each other and form a single multichambered chimeric organism called a multipole, that can fly through space unaided.