A new T'au fleet? Lin Fan looked at Shadowsun and found her equally puzzled.
"Our fleet has already been annihilated... The reinforcements we called for cannot arrive now..."
"Fine. Detain all the surviving T'au. Be gentle—don't kill them all while locking them up."
Delia nodded. She understood what Lin Fan meant, then flew back down.
Once the White Scars' Thunderhawk broke through the atmosphere, they sped toward the fleet.
"Oh... What happened here?" Kor'sarro could not believe what he was seeing.
The beastlike ships were riddled with holes. Great fan-shaped chunks had been torn from their hulls, as though something had taken bites out of them.
Metal debris drifted through the cold void, along with all manner of blood frozen solid. When they struck the Thunderhawk's armor, crisp clinks rang out inside.
"After we lost contact with the ground, we suddenly detected massive Warp corruption in Mugula Gulf. Then the continent split apart."
A White Scars neophyte explained as he activated the display showing the surface.
Several chunks were missing from the planet. Through the Thunderhawk's windows, Lin Fan could see enormous craters across the continents and clearly visible lakes of magma.
The planet looked as though it had been mined by an Adeptus Mechanicus mining order, with gravitic instruments and cutters tearing away huge swathes of land before sending them into an ark for storage.
"The torn-off land fragments became living creatures, displaying the corruptive traits unique to Warp entities. But they had no intention of attacking the fleet. They simply broke through our defenses and fled."
"Amalaga must have been aboard..." Lin Fan could tell that much. "Then why is the Mechanical Ark missing? Where did they go?"
"They went after the escapees. We couldn't stop a Mechanical Ark."
That was probably the idea of the tomb technician