Iax's cold, efficient thought pulses answered Guilliman's request instantly.
Dealing with these xenos was a necessity for the Men of Iron.
The process, however, might differ somewhat from what the Imperium understood.
A Titan Ship fleet comprising several Radiant Conquerors and the Heart of the Forge reached the edge of the T'au Contested Zone and deployed in formation in the void.
Cold armor reflected the faint light of distant stars. The vast, incomprehensibly complex weapon arrays mounted on the hulls began charging, radiating unnerving fluctuations of energy.
The Titan Ships did not enter the star systems or even approach any world shrouded in the Enslavers' foul psychic power. They merely hovered far away, at the outermost fringes of the systems.
For these planets, utterly occupied by Warp xenos and reduced to breeding grounds of flesh, the logic of Iax's Men of Iron offered no such inefficient, unpredictable options as "occupation" or "purging."
Machine Bodies should not be squandered in infernos destined to become scorched earth. But total destruction was not the optimal solution either—the metals and minerals contained in those planets and their orbital installations were precious resources for expanding and maintaining the Men of Iron's war machine.
Doomsday Weapons such as Annihilation Cannons, Dimensional Collapse Bombs, and even Singularity Chain Devices could easily vaporize these planets completely, but their matter would disperse as streams of elementary particles, making effective recovery impossible. Iax chose another, "gentler" solution that was just as thorough.
"Activate the Matter-Fusion Ray Array. Targets: planetary surfaces and debris in low orbit."
Data flowed through the Titan Ships' core processors.
Beneath their hulls, rather than ordinary Lances or Macro-cannons, banks of strangely structured crystalline lenses covered in energy conduits began aligning and focusing.
This was a device from the Federation Era, a terrifying weapon known as the