part 7.5 Tau
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Week 3
ROU Gunboat Diplomacy to GCU Peacemaker
Tyranid hive fleet sighted around IoM system, proceeding along standard engagement protocol.

... Hive fleet destroyed. No Tyranid prescence on IoM world detected. IoM fleet seems to be inoperative. There is an unidentified ship at the edge of the system, was being chased by a small force of Tyranids that have now been destroyed. The ship is remaining still, no signs of detection of this ROU has been found.

Effector readings of the ship are as follows. Preliminary identification: Tau scout ship, Messenger Class (IoM name), confidence level 88%.

Should I open direct contact?

...
Request to await your arrival is acknowledged.


Two days later
GCU Peacemaker
The Tau ship has jumped out of the system while the GCU Peacemaker was on its way. The loss of this chance at contact is disappointing but Gunboat Diplomacy's scans of the IoM planet has retrieved an approximate map of Tau space in the local region.

This GCU will head to the nearest Tau-held planet to analyze and possibly make contact with the Tau. The ROU will remain with one Contact citizen to continue investigations into the Astartes chapter in this space.

The GSV to arrive in a week's time will establish a presence in this local region of space. As imperialistic patterns go, the IoM does not appear to be an exception to the distance problem. This far from Sol, we may be able to find peaceful contact.

A general question:
How does 40k treat things like black holes and neutron stars? Are there anything special near them or does basically everyone avoid them because there's nothing special to see and they're actually kinda dangerous? (pulsars are... rather unhealthy, and neutron stars have a stupidly strong magnetic field, which is also unhealthy; but it also makes them incredibly scientifically interesting)


Tau: When the Messenger gets back and reports about this, what might the likely Tau reactions be?
(this update is not over, direct contact happens before this ship returns, so the question is really, how would the Tau view the Culture when the report of the Culture's military capability reaches them)


More interestingly, given the size of the milky way (100 thousand lights in diameter), even if we say Macragge is only halfway across the galaxy from Sol, there's no way the Culture could actually have gotten here this fast.
But... *handwaves* never mind that.

I've been reading about this Guilliman guy on the Lexicanum. I note that he doesn't appear to be psychic (nothing of psyker powers were mentioned of him), is that correct?

And the other thing is that he appears to be frozen in time right as he was fatally poisoned. Which means he isn't actually dead.. right? Just poisoned by something the Imperium can't cure.
There might be a very good chance the Culture can actually save him if only they could poke at the body. The problem being that it's in a stasis field which abrogates poking and even if the IoM could be persuaded to turn it off, that'll just kill the guy anyway. (and it's not like the Culture has a backup of him) So it might not be possible until the Culture learns to poke into a stasis field.

The other thing is that very little is written about his attitude towards xenos. While his obsession with information and organization does mildly align him towards the Culture (this is not a man to miss what the Culture means for the balance of power in the galaxy), I do not know how he might react.