Vrio, Chalnath Expanse
Three spires of crudely carved sandstone rose from a black plain. Graven idols from an elder age, thought Shadowsun, soon to be replaced by the edifices of a sleeker, more efficient future.
Despite the glinting waves of motion that crawled across it, it was no ocean that she descended towards, but a parched land boiling with trillions of omnivorax beetles. According to the earth caste, the carrion creatures had been starved of their usual diet by relentless human over-hunting. She had seen the footage of the insect swarms’ hunger. Its voracity was hard to forget. In the fire caste’s previous sorties, t’au skimmers gliding too close to the ground had been covered by a thick coat of leaping beetles in moments.
Shadowsun dropped from orbit, eye-flicking through her compile one last time. With one hand, she expertly boosted from one thermal to the next to spare her XV22’s power core for the coming fight. With the other, she punched in optimal approaches for her team, identifying enemy gun nests and overlaying their triangular fields of fire to find the negative spaces where their approach could be made in safety. She felt alive for the first time in kai’rotaa, the warrior part of her soul buzzing with energy.
Is there any other part?
The sunrise across the wild, barren vista had a cold beauty; reds and golds glinting from a million carapaces below. The aesthetics were irrelevant to Shadowsun, though. The dawn’s illumination was the important thing, a countdown and a weapon both. She would use it as efficiently as she had the false eclipse that had earned her her name during the K’resh Expansion – after all, in the final analysis, the barbaric races of orks and humans were not so different.
Crude, hateful, and always ready for a fight.
Her battlesuit’s command screens glowed bluish, a calming light split by informational hexes. She parsed the information with incredible speed, drinking in the data of the warzone before her.
Her water caste contact Rivertell’s serene blue mask glowed between a data-hex showing trade reports and a drone-generated map of the stone pillars’ integral structure.
‘The gue’vesa of the pillars have recently turned from the light of the Greater Good,’ she said. ‘They claim to have seen visions from an ancient harvest deity they call Nerg’hal, and are using that as a reason to refute us. They have spurned every one of the Seven Protocols, and turned heavy fire on any who approach. I’m sure you’ve seen the debriefs.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Shadowsun, eye-flicking a slight course correct for her drones. ‘Imperial firepower is an avalanche set to kill a single rock lynx, and just about as accurate. An example must be made, my brothers and sisters.’ She unfurled the fingers from her battlesuit, the digits straying to the disc-like charges mag-clamped to her waist. ‘We shall answer their indiscriminate rage with crisp precision. Note that once on the cusp of victory, we will likely be providing footage for the water caste. Be prepared to cancel stealth mode at my signal.’
‘Acknowledged, commander,’ said the leader of her stealth team, Shas’vre Delata. The other four members blipped gold symbols of assent, and Shadowsun’s spirit burned brighter at the sight. Just a little longer, and everything would be simple again. Simple, stark, and within her power to destroy.
The crossing of the Great Rift had been too strange, and taken too long. She still hadn’t shaken the suspicion there were sentient ghosts in the weird, barely understood space between the two halves of the galaxy, and the rumours she had heard about the Fourth Sphere Expansion had done little to allay them. For what seemed like entire t’au’cyr, she had yearned to make planetfall and touch solid rock. To do her part, make her mark, tear down the false idols of the Imperial faith and its bastard, backward offspring.
But she would not rush it. Haste had never been her way; quite the opposite, in fact.
The humans here were once allied with the T’au’va. Packed into close confines, they had elected to stay in their crude stone pillars rather than join the cities on the far side of the planet. They were a nation of three towers, voluntarily trapped by the dog-sized beetles that they roasted for their prime form of sustenance. They had no infrastructure more advanced than crude electric wiring, and no hygiene to speak of, slinging their waste from their tunnels to coat the walls with slurry. Haloes of crackling electricity surrounded the base of each pillar, keeping the omnivorax beetles from climbing the rock. Inside, disease was rife. Being gue’la, they had prioritised offensive weaponry above their own health. The sites were famously hostile to outsiders. Even from this distance Shadowsun could see long-barrelled cannons and rotary guns jutting from near every hollow and escarpment, ammunition crates stacked high.
They could not see her in turn.
As the silent t’au drop-ships left their contrails high above, the humans’ flak batteries hammered fire upwards with an overlapping crack-crack-crack of solid-shot cannons. Muzzle flares sparked by the score. Shadowsun’s olfactory relay carried a faint tang of Imperial cordite. Much good it would do them, she thought. For all the noise, light, and waste pouring out of the gun emplacements, their gunners were achieving next to nothing.
The Projection of Force – the Manta missile destroyer from which she and her team had debarked – shimmered high above the thin layer of clouds. Long tendrils of tracer rounds wound after the smoothly contoured gunship as the human gunners tried in vain to find their marks, pivoting and leaning back in heavy quad-barrelled artillery chairs as they hammered wasteful ammunition into the skies. Shadowsun raised her brows in disbelief as she realised not one of them was leading the target effectively, something even the rawest fire caste cadet knew how to do.
Still, given the mettle of the ship’s hyperalloy, it would have made little difference even if they had. The only weaponry that could have troubled it, that being the high-calibre point defence guns bristling from the spires’ shoulders, was vastly limited in its elevation. The three giants were crippled from the start, rendered obsolete by the myopic vision of their creators.
The Projection of Force was a distant decoy, a big and obvious target to keep them occupied whilst the real blow fell elsewhere. The strike of the Patient Hunter, invisible and all the more lethal for it.
Shadowsun felt a fierce sense of elation as she turned her glide into the descent of a perfect bell curve. Her own XV22 formed the point of an arrow whilst her drones and stealth team operatives came in close behind her. Aiming for one of the triangular sections of raised ground mapped out on her ballistics analysis suite, she watched the sea of skittering beetles come into sharp focus as the ground loomed close. She settled deftly on a mesa jutting from the insectile mass, her team alighting behind her.
A textbook insertion in the blind spot of the enemy. Not a single gun was pointed her way.
Even the standard-issue stealth battlesuits of her team were wonders of the earth caste’s art. To the humans, their camouflage cells would appear as shimmers in the dawn haze. Better yet, on the electromagnetic spectrum their innate bafflers made them no more than ghosts to the crude scanners of the Imperium. Her XV22 was the cutting-edge version, essentially invisible and with dual fusion blasters dialled up to the most exacting specifications. Nonetheless, their vector of approach had been calibrated after long and diligent study, using the closest spire as optimal cover against the two beyond. Shadowsun knew from hive-hunting on Mu’galath Bay that Imperial behemoths were all too often blinded by their own bulk. She had not made the rank of high commander by–
A sudden blaze of machine-gun fire from midway up the nearest rock pillar crashed into their formation, its impacts forcing Shadowsun to stagger backwards. Explosions blazed around her, flinders of sharp rock and the carapace-thick bodies of omnivorax beetles flying high in all directions. Shas’vre Goroda fell backwards as a volley of finger-thick bullets slammed into her, toppling to writhe in a pool of her own blood. More gross Imperial firepower found its target, tearing her arm from its socket.
‘Move!’
Her stealth team were already scattering. They boosted up and away, spreading out to the limit of her proximity protocols to draw fire from their commander.
‘How?’ said her shas’ui, a veteran known as El’aut. ‘How did they see us?’
‘The Imperials use weapons too debased for us to fully understand,’ said Shadowsun, her tone grim. ‘This we found to our cost on Dal’yth. Keep an open mind, and wherever possible, make your reaction more lethal than the event that triggered it.’
Her drones, Oe-hei and Oe-ken-yon, came up and around to offer a more direct protection. Oe-hei’s little hex on her suite flared white, the advanced guardian drone boosting his wide-projection shields to maximum.
‘At your service, high commander.’
‘Get in close,’ said Shadowsun, her throat tight. ‘We must close the angle. Hammerhead squadrons, cycle systems to full readiness. Do not breach cover until I give the signal.’
A moment later, a set of gold symbols flickered around the edges of her displays.
Leaping in her haptic harness, she triggered a solid boost from her jetpack. It carried her to the next mesa, then the next, her stealth team not far behind. More gunfire came in, one volley catching Shas’ui El’aut in mid-air to send him thumping backward into the sea of skittering beetles. He fired into them at close range as he struggled to right himself. Pellets of fusion energy annihilated a swathe, but there were too many. They boiled around him, mandibles clacking, anxious to feed as they swarmed over his battlesuit to make him little more than a mound of cochineal carapaces.
‘No.’
Shadowsun slid her fusion blasters to their weakest, widest intensity and bathed the whole area in blue-white energy, microwaving the beetles around El’aut but doing no harm to the pilot inside. Or nothing that the earth caste could not reverse, in any case… Screeching, the beetle-things skittered back. El’aut rolled, kneeling first and then getting to his feet before boosting away with only a single creature clamped to his waist. Shadowsun adjusted her blasters once more and cut its head away with a scalpel-thin beam.
‘Utmost thanks,’ said El’aut.
‘Just get back in the shadow zone.’
As soon as she had said it, Oe-hei’s invisible force field flared bright enough to trigger Shadowsun’s blacksun filter. Heavy firepower, this time from multiple sources: her fusion blasters’ emanation had pinpointed their position as effectively as if they had sent up a flare. The sun’s rays were rising, and the dawn’s mist – formerly a useful tool of obfuscation – was swiftly being burnt away.
‘Flechette cloud,’ said Shadowsun, her suit responding immediately with a soft tink. She set a delayed detonation timer with the movements of one eye whilst sketching a new approach vector with the other. A cloud of miniature munitions whirred like a swarm of fire-gnats from the shoulders of her battlesuit. Twenty feet behind her the tiny projectiles detonated in a roiling cloud of flame and shrapnel, covering her team’s retreat.
It worked. The Imperial guns were still focusing their fire on the site of the decoy explosions as the stealth team regrouped a stone’s throw away.
‘Make for the electrofield at the closest pillar’s base,’ she said over the cadrenet. ‘There’s a thin band where these arthropods won’t venture. I want a close, tight assault from hollow to hollow, shortest route on my mark. If we get separated, rendezvous on the diametric opposite of our current position. That is where we will find our fault.’
Affirmative symbols blipped gold, with even El’aut managing a silvery grey tone.
‘Go then, in the name of the T’au’va, and make it count.’
Shadowsun leapt once more, a faint ripple in the air the only outward sign of her passage. Above her, the cliff-like monstrosity looming up from her position cast a cold shadow. She felt as if something vast and malevolent were leaning over her, rendering her no more important than a beetle herself, with its hard carapace a pitiful shield for the blue-grey flesh within.
As she approached the closest pillar’s base, she saw angular runes had been finger-etched in the thick layer of algae and human waste above the crackling girdle of pylons that protected them from ground assault. Amongst them was a tri-lobed device of three circles abutting one another, repeated over and over. Whoever had put them there had risked electrocution to do so.
She took a quick eye-still of the sight for Rivertell, bunched her muscles, and leapt for the first of the many man-made hollows that honeycombed the pillar’s outer layers. A weightless moment later she was inside the cave. Something skittered back: a human child, all staring eyes and emaciated limbs covered in a mottling of algae.
The gangling creature gaped for a moment, skittered back into a fissure at the back of the cave, and was gone.
Another leap, this time out into the lee of the giant pillar. Her battlesuit’s jets boosted her in a tight circle around its cliff-face edge. Seeing another hollow, she touched down at its lip. A pair of artillery positions were mounted inside. Six filth-encrusted human infantrymen were painstakingly cranking their artillery towards the site of her flechette launch.
Sliding her fusion guns to tight beam, she slashed one arm left, the other right. Four of the rune-tattooed humans staggered backwards, the nearest two neatly cut in half even as the barrel of their prized gun fell into two smoking, cherry-red sections.
Those behind were not clean kills. One had his brainpan opened to the dank, murky air. The stink from her olfactory relay turned her stomach. The other human, a gawky-looking youth with olive-green warpaint, screamed long and loud. He had lost three fingers and a leg from the knee down. She boosted forwards, her knee raised, and slammed him against the mildewy rock with an audible crunch. The shrieking stopped.
The last two humans circled her, long knives drawn and their faces contorted into masks of hatred. Already one was behind her. She braced a hand on the wall and blasted her jetpack’s rear jet at maximum, sending him staggering away and clutching at his half-melted face. A sidelong ram from Oe-ken-yon’s rim, and he fell, thudding down to bounce from the electropylons in a crackle of energy so harsh she could see it even here. The omnivorax beetles would do the rest.
The other charged her, froth at the corners of his mouth.
‘– – DIE – – DIE AND BE REMADE IN NURGLE’S NAME – –’
She had her ballistic solution. Her missile pod made a brief blipping sound. A thin cylinder sped out, veering in a tight circle to blast the charging human apart in a spray of scattering gore.
‘Zone clear,’ said Shadowsun.
‘And here,’ came the reply from El’aut. ‘Ready to proceed.’
The stealth team was boosting up to her position even as she leapt from the cave’s edge and circumvented the massive wall of the rocky pillar in a series of tightly controlled jet blasts. To her, the problems and opportunities of the cliff face were easily solved, her hard-earned instincts won from a youth spent climbing the harsh slopes of Mount Kan’ji, picking out the optimal path as if it had been markerlit for her use. She used the overhangs above her as a shield from enemy fire, each guano-stained fissure or indent used to its full advantage. At one point she saw a pair of long-hafted grenades spin down. Their explosions did little more than buffet her suit, forcing her thrust/vector suite to course-correct; behind her, the rest of the stealth team returned fire. A pair of human bodies toppled downwards, smoking holes bored through their torsos.
‘I have echo-located another emplacement, commander,’ said Oe-ken-yon. ‘Would you care for Oe-hei to go first, perhaps?’
‘I would not,’ she answered, pushing her thrust/vector suite to maximum. ‘The timing has to be perfect, and stealth is the best shield of all.’
The sense of power she felt as the battlesuit spiralled upwards was intoxicating. Her targets gave no more reaction to the shimmer in the air than baffled frowns. She triggered her fusion blasters, all but vaporising the artillerymen clever enough to scramble for their sidearms.
Her next shot was a low burn at the ammunition blocks of the giant guns themselves. They turned grey-orange, then red. By the time they cooked off, she and her team were already boosting past. The explosion that blossomed in their wake roared out from the cliffs. She rode the thermals high, a fierce expression of elation conquering the rock face of her features.
Another alcove lay beyond, this time harbouring nothing more than a nest of veiny-headed burrow vultures. The carrion birds burst outwards as she clung to the wall, a riot of feathers and noise. She placed a foot in the indentation and leapt onwards. Desultory firepower came from above: autoguns, slugger pistols, and the odd lasgun shot. Nothing that would trouble an XV22, even if it could somehow bypass Oe-hei’s shieldsphere.
‘Continue at pace, team,’ she said. ‘Not far now.’
She fought back the urge to laugh, to cry out, to give vent to a war cry older than the fire caste itself. As fond as she was of grand strategy, this was what she had been made to do.
‘This day,’ said El’aut, sensing her mood, ‘the Imperials will learn what it is to forsake the light of the T’au’va.’
‘Quite so,’ she agreed, mirth in her words. ‘The water caste will never let them forget it.’
The next burrow’s occupant was betrayed by the tip of a jutting barrel. She sketched a bespoke course for one of her missiles, set it to heat-seek, and in another plume of flame the gue’la sniper was gone.
On she went, tongues of fire licking in a vortex behind her. Another artillery emplacement next, within a much larger burrow. This time she spared one of the spherical charges at her waist. Choosing her moment, she threw it forward to bounce from the cave mouth and roll deep within. She leapt vertically, riding the explosion as she went. Time was running out.
The far side of the giant rock pillar was still cast in shadow, with traces of mist clinging to its lower reaches. They were exposed to the facing side of the next pillar, and perhaps a third of the last one. Still, thanks to the wonders of the earth caste, they would be all but invisible to the human eye.
‘Commendable optimisation of ambient factors,’ said Rivertell. ‘This will make for good footage.’
‘Happy to help,’ said Shadowsun. She climbed, boosted and climbed again, not upward, but laterally, until her position correlated with the highlighted zone on her geological map. Adjusting her suit’s exosensors, she bounced a set of echo-pulses from the cave’s edge and back again. A split dec later the ghostly blue image of a cavern blossomed on her command-and-control suite. An industrial curl-ramp furled against a metal floor, hydraulics twitching, but other than that, no movement detected.
‘It’s in here,’ she said to her team. ‘Place charges and leave.’
A faint shout came from the cliff face of the rock pillar opposite. She punched it up on her audio: the voice was guttural and full of hate.
‘– – I SEE YOU – – XENOS WITCH – – YOU CANNOT HIDE FROM THE THIRD EYE – –’
A fat-bodied missile shot towards them from some distant gunner’s nest. Oe-hei raced to interpose himself, but Shadowsun had already analysed the incoming fire’s trajectory, sending another missile looping out on an intercept course. Her shot took out the crude Imperial munition in a burst of flame, but another was inbound, and a burst of machine-gun fire was chipping rock from the floor of the cave.
Her stealth team were already moving in, Oe-hei shielding their ingress. A volley of hard rounds left blazing orange pulses across his dome-like energy field. In came that looping missile, but the artillerist’s aim was off, and its warhead shattered rock some ten feet beneath them.
‘Goodness,’ said Oe-hei. ‘How embarrassing for them.’
Shadowsun was the last inside, her suit’s illuminators sending a tight beam onto the cracks at the back of the cave as she went.
There, sequestered at the back, were three of the lumpen Imperial tanks that embodied the Imperium’s approach to war. One was huge, a true giant of war that made a Hammerhead look like a pleasure craft in comparison. Its oversized laser cannon was complemented by a stubby bombard, and lesser guns bristled at its sides. Her recognition hex flashed a match – IMPERIAL SHADOWSWORD.
The monstrous tank was flanked by two Leman Russes: lesser, squat-bodied crawlers named for some ancient warmonger. Slow, easily outmanoeuvred, and cheap to make, but rugged and with a surplus of firepower.
The Leman Russ tanks were under tarpaulins, but the Shadowsword was uncovered with its cupola still open, engines already churning out a pall of greasy smoke.
‘Active asset! Move!’
Her team scattered as the super-heavy tank turned its main gun towards them. A column of ruby-red light blasted out. The shot struck Shas’ui Malea, obliterating her but for a scatter of blackened debris. Her teammate Daem’ta was caught in the discharge. Half his body disintegrated, killing him instantly.
The cupola was closing, its crew finally looking to their own defence now they had blooded their sword.
Grabbing a disc-charge from her waist, Shadowsun armed and hurled it with a single motion. It sailed through the air, clattering under the lowering cupola hatch just as it slammed closed.
‘Blast protocol!’
There was a dull crump as her charge detonated. A split microdec later the entire tank seemed to lift into the air, flame blasting from the stubby barrels of its lesser guns as spall, scything metal and blown-out rivets hurtled in all directions. A storm of noise and violence filled the cave as the bombard shells within the super-heavy tank detonated with bone-shuddering force.
The sonic dampeners on Shadowsun’s suite slowly faded to inactivity.
‘My compliments on the footage,’ said Rivertell. ‘I will use it well.’
‘High commander,’ added Shas’ui El’aut. ‘Will it still be possible to place the charges?’
The smoke and wreckage of the destroyed tank seemed to fill the cave, the blown-out remnants of its chassis unfolded like some kind of mangled flower sculpture. Its remnants glowed cherry red as it plinked and hissed a metallic death rattle.
‘A moment.’ Shadowsun slid her fusion blasters to maximum yield, turning them on the first of the intact Leman Russ tanks in a searing blaze of light. She bathed the thing in a steady, slicing net of the most intense energy the earth caste could devise, her blacksun filter cutting out the actinic glare of the weapon’s blade-like beams. Her power reserves were dropping fast, but still she poured fire into the tank in relentless, pitiless profusion. With nowhere for the heat to dissipate, the war machine melted as if it were a wax sculpture before a blowtorch.
‘Proceed,’ said Shadowsun. She picked her way through a slow-moving delta of molten metal, leaping deftly over the steaming remnants of the tank and motioning for her teammates to do the same. When she was in position, she placed the last of her detonation discs in the deep crack that had been exposed by the melted, smoking wreck of the Leman Russ. Wordlessly her team followed suit, unfolding hands from their off-weapon arms and carefully placing their own disc-shaped detonators in the same fissure.
‘Deployment complete,’ said El’aut. ‘Though my suit is registering dangerous levels of radiation. I fear some of us will need healsphere interment upon mission’s end.’
‘You will get it,’ said Shadowsun. ‘If we survive, you will find promotion, and all lead teams of your own. I have my own path to follow. Though we still have one thing left to do.’ She sketched a route out, one that made the most of the smoke billowing from the cave mouth.
As they moved out of the cave and skirted the pillar once more, they took heavy fire from the rock spire opposite. Oe-hei flared his shield, sparing them the worst of it. His display registered bronze, turning to copper, then grey steel, but it was power well spent.
Only when they were at maximum missile range did Shadowsun turn back.
‘Stealth fields off,’ she said. ‘Just for the moment. We have a secondary role here. Hammerhead squadrons, fire on my signal.’
Glancing at Oe-ken-yon, Shadowsun loosed all three of her remaining missiles from the pod at her shoulder. They shot towards the cavern on a curving path.
‘Heavy fire. Detonate.’
With impeccable timing the hypervelocity projectiles of a score of Hammerhead railguns punched into the base of the rock pillar, striking at carefully designated weak points. At the same time, flame roared once more from the cavern’s maw, the disc-charges blasting open the fissure at the back of the cave.
There was a crack so loud it could have been the world itself splitting apart. Then, slowly, impossibly, the entire rock spire leaned to one side.
Shadowsun’s heart burned as the titanic, impossible edifice toppled over amongst a cascade of rock and crackling electricity. It struck the pillar beyond it like the hammer of a primal god, caked muck and splintered stone arcing in all directions from the impact. That second spire, too, leaned over to smash into the pillar beyond it.
‘Come on,’ muttered Shadowsun, as the cadrenet slid silent. ‘Come on. Please. Three for three.’
For a long, strangulated moment, nothing happened.
Then, with an awful, echoing snap, the third pillar too began to lean over. Its groaning submission to the colossal weight upon it sent the other two leaning even further. Like dominos they crashed one upon another, a mile-wide cloud of dust billowing from their shattering demise as they shuddered like calving icebergs on the shivering, parched earth.
Shadowsun heard thin, screaming human voices on the wind. Already the omnivorax beetles were swarming, finding their way into long-hidden caves and fissures to start a feast long denied.
Blasting backwards amidst a roiling tide of dust, Shadowsun cast one look behind. Thousands of burrow vultures had taken flight from their nests as the pillars had crumbled, whirling and flocking above the billowing debris clouds in a dusktime murmuration that reminded her of her home planet, Vior’la.
For one single, horrifying moment, the birds seemed to make a horned mask of a face. It was obese in form, an impossibly wide maw leering straight at her. Something black and awful was coming out from between its lips, a shard-like form made of hundreds of scabrous birds all flying as one. Somehow, she could hear its laughter in the back of her mind, a gurgling, guttural sound like a blocked sewer grate finally drained. A nameless entity. A foe that defied logic altogether.
In short, the t’au race’s long-feared nightmare.
Then the birds dispersed, and the vision was gone.
The Chalnath Expanse
The darkness of space splits obscenely, like a slashed gut. There is a gush of light, and a vomitous tide of effluvium pours out, generous enough to drown a world.
The spilling cloud swallows the stars behind. Half-matter reaches out from the slick of fluids. Every bead and wobbling sphere of it is noxious and foul. It keeps coming, an endless ocean of beige streaked with yellow, puce and red.
From within that awfulness is born a cluster of long shapes, bloodied shrapnel sliding out from a maimed abdominal cavity. As their slicks of filth spatter away, they resolve into ridged castle-ships, crenellations the size of a hab-block. Their leading edges are eroded by time, for these spacefaring vessels are no normal craft, but impossibly huge ships that arrow from the immaterium with a single, deadly intent.
The warships are beyond ugly, the antithesis of beauty and grace. Stylistically their design owes more to that of ancient basilica, fortresses and bell towers than the shapes of conventional vessels. Buttresses jut like exposed ribcages and crenellations ridge the upper surfaces, like teeth jutting from greenish-grey gums. Trailing sludge, the warships are blurred by clouds of tiny droplets lit by the distant, glimmering wormhole at the system’s heart. Even their hulls glisten in the sickly light of the rift that disgorged them towards that second portal.
Their edges are fleshy and organic in parts, rusty and furred in others. At each prow is a vast wedge like that of a steam-dozer, a jutting chin that has more to do with pugnacity than aerodynamics. Though ancient and foul, gnawed by time and near-constant war, each battle-scarred leviathan is a powerhouse, solid as a mason’s pride and with an array of massive engines to propel it irresistibly onwards. Their battering-ram facades bear only the barest traces of their former heraldry, for even the ships’ once proud aspects are covered in a thick coating of rust, half-sentient warp slime and encrusted filth.
In the distance, sleek-hulled t’au craft pivot slowly to assess the newcomer fleet as if in disbelief. They are pods of distant, smooth-skinned dolphins in awe of the crusted leviathans that have suddenly appeared from the abyss. In all the records of all the castes, their pilots find no correlation, just as their probing, punching fire finds no purchase upon the thick, greasy shimmer of the strange ships’ void shields.
The leading vessel of the invading fleet is a city of the damned that happens to wear the shape of a spacecraft. Twisted statues jut from its back like weird vertebral protrusions, rendered all the more grotesque by millennia of debris impacts. Massive lance batteries bristle from the ship’s forequarters, each slowly stirring to life with a low hum of raw menace.
This ship is the death of fleets. By the vast battle scars ploughed across the metal of its hull, it has seen countless battles. Should it ever make berth, its sheer foulness would kill all living things for miles around without firing a single shot.
Upon its prow, emblazoned in letters the size of fortress towers, is a single word.
NEPHYLUM.