Commander Farsight - The Beast Rears to Strike: Though many of T'au central command quietly congratulated each other on a war well prosecuted, most of the Ork invaders yet lived. Throughout both the populace of Arkunasha and the counter-invasion force, the T'au now universally knew their leader as O'Shovah, or Commander Farsight. Despite this honour, he was not satisfied with their progress, and knew the fight was far from over. The more organized of the tribes had begun systematically looting the comms networks, guns and armour of the fallen T'au that lay scattered amongst the rust dunes. Wherever a burning hulk that had once been a T'au skimmer hung suspended above the desert on still-functioning repulsors, the Orks would extinguish the flames with buckets of rust-particulate and repurpose it, fitting it with smoke-spewing engines and solid shot weapons. Monitor drone recordings showed that the Ork caste known as Meks were having their slave races dig deep into the oxide dunes to unearth scrap metal. The T'au would never stoop to use this raw material, but the Orks found it useful in the extreme. As more and more Ork vehicles became armoured in, or even wholly constructed from, oxidised metal, the hordes blended with the desert itself with a form of accidental camouflage. Worse still, surprise attacks from Ork hordes were becoming more and more frequent. The Air Caste soon uncovered why: those veteran Orks that had been fighting upon Arkunasha since the first invasion had grown skin that was thick and gnarled enough to protect them from the abrasive effects of the rust storms. Each time these bands allowed a storm to overtake them, a handful of greenskins were snatched up and killed by the red tornadoes, but the rest marched in relative safety in the eye of the storm, protected from the T'au Hunter Cadres that roamed the desert. When the storm broke upon a T'au base, these wandering packs of elite Orks would appear from the swirling clouds with a vicious anger worthy of an enraged Knarloc.Commander Farsight had expected the Orks to be resourceful, but he had not come to fully appreciate the advantages afforded by their uncanny physiology. The number of Orks on Arkunasha was actually increasing rather than being slowly whittled down. O'Shovah and his Ethereal masters were forced to consider the matter of Ork reproduction, a train of thought no civilised species should have to follow. Farsight's most trusted Earth caste advisor, the young genius O'Vesa, believed that the Orks had a fungal component to their genetic make-up. He maintained that the spores that they continually shed were flourishing in the oxide deserts. If his theories were to be believed, every morning, the rust dunes, covered with a film of dew, would shiver and collapse to reveal a clutch of immature Dune Orks, low in tech-level but spoiling for a fight.When word got out that the Orks' numbers were actually increasing, it hit morale like a megaton bomb. The Ethereals present in the expedition insisted that it was impossible to channel more resources to Arkunasha; the T'au stationed there would have to overcome this foe on their own. Farsight was forced to abandon his program of assassinations and turn his attention to his own camp. Morale was on the brink of crumbling, and with it, any chance the T'au had of claiming back the planet.