K'O'L was the first to recover from his shock. Though he could not begin to understand how the enemy had done it, his soldier's instincts drove him to let out a piercing roar: "All ships! Sound the highest alert! Enemy attack! It's the Imperium of Man's fleet! Bring all weapons systems online! Missile Destroyers, begin beyond-visual-range interception immediately!"
He still tried to respond with the tactics he knew. To his mind, as long as he maintained his distance, the Gravitic Missiles and Railguns he took such pride in would be enough to tear these lumbering "flying cathedrals" apart before they entered effective range.
But the Imperial Navy's warships gave him no chance to "maintain his distance."
At Admiral Yanis's cold command, several Dictator-class and Gothic-class cruisers at the forefront of the Imperial Fleet's formation had already finished charging the fearsome energy-focusing arrays on their prows, each resembling the eye of some monstrous beast.
"Lance Batteries, fire!"
Several enormous beams crossed a hundred thousand kilometers of void in an instant!
Wherever the beams passed, space itself seemed to warp under their searing heat.
The moment the Lances struck the T'au fleet's Deflector Shields, they collapsed and dissipated like thin paper pierced by a red-hot iron, without so much as a ripple.
A second later, several Garliax-class exploration vessels on the perimeter of the T'au fleet were cleaved in half by those devastating beams before their alarms could even sound! Their enormous hulls silently split in two in the vacuum. At the severed edges, metal buckled and boiled like melting candle wax. Then secondary explosions flared inside the ships, consuming them utterly and turning them into brilliant, deadly bursts of fireworks.
The first volley-just the first volley-had cost the T'au fleet nearly a fifth of its ships!
**"This... this is impossible! Their