O'Dara could hear nothing but frantic, overlapping reports screaming through the command deck's vox-casters.
"The enemy armor is too thick! We need more heavy ordnance!"
"There are too many of them—they're everywhere! They're in the vents!"
"Agh! By the Ethereals—!"
Some communication channels dissolved into static-laced screams before falling deathly silent. O'Dara frowned, her mind racing to formulate a counter-boarding strategy against the swarming nightmare.
"Prioritize the boarding appendages! Sever the tentacles before more can latch onto the hull!"
The T'au ships swiveled their secondary batteries, focusing their fire on the fleshy bridge-tubes extending from the Leviathans and the Infested Imperial cruisers. Simultaneously, swarms of Razorshark fighters and Barracudas roared out of the hangars to escort the fleet. They strafed the biological umbilicals with ion fire; in an instant, dozens of tentacles were sheared off, venting thousands of Zerg organisms into the cold vacuum of space.
This provided a momentary reprieve for the T'au crews fighting inside the ships. However, the external pressure remained staggering. Several T'au vessels had been battered so severely they were listing in the void, their engines sputtering.
The T'au are masters of the long-range "Mont'ka" or "Kauyon" meta, but they are notoriously poor at close-quarters grinding. Their ships follow the same philosophy: massive forward-facing firepower, but dangerously thin broadside and rear defenses. In a chaotic, point-blank brawl, they had no advantage.
In truth, the T'au aren't a "weak" race—they've conquered or integrated dozens of species—but they suffer from a lack of scale. Compared to the Imperium's million worlds, the T'au Empire is a tiny blue dot of only a few dozen colonies. They face the same hurdle the Zerg Swarm once did: insufficient mass.
Their technology can trade blows with the Orks, the Imperium, and even the Zerg in a fair fight. In this fringe sector, where the Imperial Navy is spread thin, the T'au can usually hold their own. But today, the Overmind was watching the tactical display with genuine amusement.
"Alright, I don't even need to micromanage this. Zasz has the T'au well in hand."
The Overmind was practically laughing. It was like watching a Harlequin troupe perform a tragedy entitled The Greater Good Meets a Greater Hunger.
"Surely no one thinks the Swarm is actually struggling here, right? There should be a back-and-forth, sure—you take a trench, I clear a corridor. But getting overrun and eaten within six hours? That's not a 'give-and-take.' That's a buffet."
"I will admit one thing, though," the Overmind mused, watching a sensor feed of the boarding action. "Those T'au battlesuits are quite the lookers. They really do have that 'Gundam' aesthetic going for them."
Despite the impressive firepower of the T'au suits, the Overmind remained unfazed. He knew the Imperium was the true "early game" threat because they could simply throw a hundred billion lives at a problem until it went away. If the Imperium had found the Swarm this early, they might have just crashed a battle barge into the Hive World and called it a day.
But the T'au? The T'au were still struggling with the basics of Faster-Than-Light travel. At this stage, they could barely cross the Damocles Gulf without a struggle.
Back on the front lines, the battlesuits were putting up a hell of a fight. While their physical durability didn't match the ceramite of a Space Marine, their long-range output was superior. The overlapping fields of railgun slugs, pulse plasma, and smart-missile pods were fierce.
But that was before the Roaches arrived.
Once the heavy armored units joined the fray, the XV-8 Crisis suits hit a wall. Railguns could punch holes in a Roach, but they rarely dealt fatal damage to the four-meter-long beasts. Missiles had the blast radius, but the shockwaves dissipated against the Roach's sloped, regenerative chitin.
The Roaches were slowed by the sheer weight of fire, but they weren't dying.
"Get out of the way! Heavy support moving up!"
From the rear of the T'au defensive line, a larger silhouette emerged—an experimental variant still in the testing phases.
The XV-89 "Broadside" variant (or perhaps a precursor to the XV-88) was a dedicated fire-support platform. It looked like a miniature Thor from StarCraft II. It carried massive, shoulder-mounted railguns and an absurd array of cluster-missile pods. For anyone suffering from a fear of insufficient firepower, this suit was the cure.
"Fire!"
The volley didn't just liquefy the lead Roaches; the sheer kinetic energy collapsed the corridor walls and buried several adjacent passages in tons of debris.
"Now that... I want one of those," the Overmind thought enviously. "Shoulder-mounted railguns and cluster missiles? Who could say no to that? The T'au might be squishy, but their toys are top-tier."
The Overmind knew the T'au would eventually develop even larger suits—colossi sixteen meters tall—but those hadn't reached the front lines of this era yet. And even then, the fundamental weakness of space warfare remained: you cannot out-attrition the Swarm.
Another T'au cruiser vanished in a blinding white flash. The crew had detonated the warp core, taking an entire Zerg boarding party with them. But the Overmind didn't care, and Zasz certainly didn't.
The Swarm had the T'au beat in both quality and quantity. The fleet was collapsing. It was becoming a race to see if the ships would be husks before the planetary defenders were all digested.
"What are these things... what kind of monsters are they?" O'Dara whispered. Her face, quite handsome by human standards, was pale with terror.
The tactical display showed that 30% of her flagship had already fallen to the boarders. They hadn't even been fighting for six hours. The collapse was happening faster than she could comprehend.
"This is the Greater Good... this must be a dream. I'll wake up, and the stars will be quiet again."
"Commander!" her adjutant's sharp voice snapped her back to reality. "This is no dream. We are surrounded. A distress call is out, but we have to hold until the Sept fleet arrives!"
O'Dara took a jagged breath and steadied her hands. She knew the fleet battle was a lost cause. The only thing left was to save as many souls as possible.
"Abandon the hangars and gun decks," she commanded, her voice cold and decisive. "Concentrate all forces on the ammunition vaults and supply warehouses. We need food and fire; the rest is scrap. Barricade every entrance with whatever we have. Leave only the main kill-zones open."
As a seasoned commander, O'Dara realized she could no longer win the naval engagement. She shifted the entire focus to a brutal, room-to-room survival defense.
"Don't worry about the ship's structural integrity. Don't worry about ammunition conservation. We have one objective: survive by any means necessary until the reinforcements arrive!"