The deathly silent void suddenly split open, and the detection station swiftly captured the event and relayed it to the planet's data center.
Zhanwa knew this was what the Imperium of Man called a Warp engine. He tried to use the detector's viewing scope to make out what exactly the rupture was. If these things could be properly studied, the T'au Empire's faster-than-light travel technology would advance by leaps and bounds.
But aside from the immense fleet, he could see nothing. The ruptures appeared on the screen as unobservable white spots, as though both the display and the eyepiece had suffered catastrophic damage.
Monstrous ships emerged from the rifts one after another. The longer Zhanwa watched, the more alarmed he became. Some of those warships were vast enough to blot out the sky, several times larger than the most advanced battleships the T'au Empire had currently developed.
The detection station ran at full power, scanning the fleet directly without any concern for concealment.
That was what Zhanwa and the others had come to do. Detecting the fleet alone was already an incredible feat, but they had to go further. There was never such a thing as too much intelligence.
Data on the largest warship was transmitted to Zhanwa's computer and analyzed two seconds later.
It confirmed a vast number of lifeforms and provided a relatively reliable estimate.
There were also outlines of some war machines, such as the knight armor seen in the previous war, as well as enormous tanks clad in heavy armor.
Zhanwa could even hear waves of cheering from aboard the ships through the sound spectrum. According to Water Caste cultural researchers, this was a ritual in which the Imperium of Man praised The Emperor and the Machine God.
The fleet paused for a moment, then tore