As for hive mind and nomad NPCs. Well, I suppose they have telepathic network to communicate and control their fleets. They may as well not have a root node, but several units forming top node. In case top node collapses units fall back to lower nodes and so forth until no upper node exists which results in very primitive behavior as they are apparently quite dependent on collective knowledge that guides them.
Personality of Blix was never explained and it's very vague on his actual affiliation. Remember, Nomads are very good at deceit and using humans to push their goals, they may as well used that trickery to get locations of rebels to spread out web and plan ambush, and ambush is what exactly they did. That duo of him and his parter might as well just be higher up agents. Even for Order to employ someone who has been touched by Nomads and can easily read mind in a distance is certainly too much of a risk.
