Editing Spheres of Expansion (section)

=== Fourth Sphere - Mission Failed ===
The Fourth Sphere was a colossal and utter failure mostly brought about by terrible luck...and sheer fucking idiocy.

See, since the Damocles Rift was now on super-fire, going FTL through it was next to impossible, and had effectively put the entire Tau Empire into a playpen that the Imperium wouldn't have to deal with for another x-thousand years. Or, that was the idea anyway. Had they bothered to clean up any of the ships that'd been perforated by Railguns, they might've been able to stop what happened next, as the Tau reverse engineered parts of a Warp Drive, and fitted that into their new Armada, with the hope that they'd be able to cut through the Gulf again and get back to spreading the word of the Greater Good. And to do that, they set up their armadas right on Numenar Point, a place close to the Gulf, and had a big long broadcast about how much fun this was all gonna be and all the new places that were gonna be in on the greater good, and at the end of the speech, every single one of those '''experimental, not entirely well understood''' warp drives fired up at once just as the Great Rift opened, and every single one of those warp drives helped create a sudden, violent hole in reality that ate the entire fleet in front of an audience of billions, and while the Etherials worked overtime to ensure nobody was truly aware of what was going on, they decided that something like that ever happening again would be a deathblow to their credibility, and basically disassembled any further prototypes.

But then there was the matter of that hole, which had roughly healed into a wormhole known only as the Startide Nexus, from which the Etherials were ''very'' concerned if anything at all would come out of there. After all, they were now fighting against some warpfuckery that was dragging their Gue'Vesa and their non-Tau auxiliaries into total madness that they now had to deal with, as well as all the other things that usually came looking for a piece of the Tau, and they declared that the space around the Nexus should be well-defended, creating an enormous interconnected ring of fortress-space stations that basically had more guns than breathable spaces trained on it, just in case. It was said only T'au had more fortifications at the end of construction.

And then something unusual happened. A probe came out of the Nexus. A Tau probe.

From the Fourth Sphere Expedition Fleets. They'd survived after all.