Suisxing stared fixedly at the mech, his mind racing through calculations. He concluded that it could not last three minutes under such concentrated fire. Its only value was to draw everyone's attention away from his flanking assault in the most gruesome way imaginable.
Yet just as every gaze-T'au, Ork, and Gretchin alike-was fixed on that tragic charge of one against a million...
No one noticed the sky quietly darkening.
It was not cloud cover blotting out the sun. Jade VII had a thin atmosphere, and its skies remained clear year-round.
This was a kind of... higher-order darkness.
As though an invisible hand were slowly, gently dimming the "lamp" that illuminated the entire star system.
The light grew dim and yellow, uncanny. An indescribable odor began to permeate the air. Without warning, the temperature fell.
The first to realize something was wrong were not the mortals fighting furiously on the ground, but the observation posts of the T'au Empire's fleet in orbit.
"Alert! Dawn Messenger! Massive Warp translation activity detected in high orbit! Signals... unidentified! Numbers... impossible to estimate! My heavens... they're... they're blotting out the stars!"
Suisxing jerked his head up.
Through the command ship's enormous viewport, he saw the deep, star-studded backdrop of space being swallowed by an immense, writhing shadow that seemed alive.
They were a swarm of nauseating organisms. Their chitinous shells resembled rotting bones, covered in twisted tentacles and orifices that constantly opened and closed. Silently, like ghosts, they seeped out of the Warp and hovered in synchronous orbit above Jade VII.
It was a splinter of a Tyranid Hive Fleet that had lost its way.
The Waaagh! energy on the battlefield and the immense biomass of hundreds of millions of Gretchin and Orks were, to this starving fleet, nothing less than a glittering temple in