Six Kai’rotaa
Previously Unknown Coordinates (Sub-Realm)

High Commander Surestrike stared out from the viewing dome, focusing upon the tiny flames that flickered in the nothingness of the sub-realm. He had lately found them hypnotic. He could not shake the suspicion they seemed to move all the more when he focused on them.

Folly, of course. No living thing could survive out there, let alone detect his thoughts. Not even here, in the otherworldly space that few understood.

The Fourth Sphere Expansion had been sent out from the sept worlds to great fanfare and rejoicing. Like its last two predecessors, it had one of the Students of Puretide with it. This time, though, the Kan’jian alumnus had been in stasis instead of at the helm.

The Second Sphere Expansion had been led across the Damocles Gulf by the now-infamous Commander Farsight, specialist in the Mont’ka school of warfare, and the third led by the avatar of the Kauyon, Commander Shadowsun. The fourth carried with it the genius Monat known as Kais, but he was with them more as a totem than a leader, an exemplar of the Greater Good embodied in a soul that had sacrificed everything else.

Kais was the third of the trinity of young protégés that had studied under the Master atop Mount Kan’ji. It was said he had become so devoted to the Monat way of war that Aun’Va decreed he be alone at all times, lest others sully the purity of his vision. He was only to leave his cryostasis cylinder in times of desperate need. Though that seemed odd to a race that thrived on communality, the fire caste had of course respected that command.

Leadership of the Fourth Sphere Expansion had instead been entrusted to Surestrike. He had fought alongside Shadowsun on Mu’galath Bay, Voltoris and beyond, and earned the trust of the fire caste in doing so, earning the position of High Commander. Yet where Farsight had found infamy and Shadowsun earned undying glory, Surestrike had found his destiny swallowed whole by the vast interstellar anomaly known officially as the Greater Axial Rift.

Of late, the t’au had been using another term for it. The Mont’yhe’va. The Devourer of Hope.

Now the Fourth Sphere Expansion floated like a fleet expelled from a storm in foreign waters, carried like flotsam upon currents they had no way of understanding, let alone controlling. They were directionless, at the mercy of forces they barely understood. Only the grace of the T’au’va could carry them to their target now.

During the First Sphere Expansion, the earth caste had experimented with how to briefly oscillate between reality and that strange half-reality the gue’la called the warp. They had limited success, utilising only the surface of the deep, mysterious dimension they had first encountered in the Damocles Gulf.

Intrigued, but still not fully comprehending that which they were dabbling with, they toyed with the breakthrough technology, never truly understanding it, making short jumps as a stone skims along the surface of a pond.

During the Damocles war, the scientists and metatheorists had looked with awe and no little envy at the Imperial warships that disappeared from the void in a pulsing, roiling explosion of light, diving wholly into this alternate dimension, travelling great system-spanning distances upon its underwater currents and then surfacing again in real space without warning.

More often than not they did so specifically to rain hell upon their foes. It was just such a tactic that had seen the gue’ron’sha launch the invasion of Dal’yth.

Dal’yth, a war so violent, so sudden, so epoch-shattering that even its debris had yielded the key to a new future. That future had seen the Fourth Sphere Expansion built, modified for sub-realm travel, and now lost with all hands, Surestrike at the helm.

The high commander screwed his eyes shut hard as if to banish his failure. The Aun should have never trusted him to break new ground, to lead an expedition of billions of lives, let alone to find new horizons in the quest to expand the T’au Empire for the good of all. He was no Student of Puretide. He was a talented leader – he had to be, or else he would never have achieved O-rank – but when it came to the genius needed to lead an entire expansion, he could not help but feel that he fell short.

The nebula-like sub-realm outside the viewing dome roiled and spun. It seemed to Surestrike that it formed faces in the ether, hideous visages that grinned and howled and screamed. It was amazing how the systems of the mind played such tricks, enforcing pattern recognition on the most abstract of sights. Yet the phenomenon seemed strangely frequent, happening more and more with every passing dec.

Lights danced in the eyes of the phantom skulls out there, spinning like Vior’lan fireflies caught in specimen flasks as they played around the Fourth Sphere’s becalmed fleet.

Surestrike could not shake the feeling the skeletal faces were mocking him.