Vespid Stingwings

The Vespid hail from a violent, high-pressure world of drifting rock islands and endless storms, where they evolved as agile fliers amid churning cloud seas. Those who serve the Greater Good as Stingwings make superb flanking troops, descending in sudden swarms to strike where the enemy is weakest before darting away again on humming wings.

Each Stingwing carries a neutron blaster forged by the Earth Caste around a crystal harvested from the deepest reaches of Vespid's cloud seas. The weapon spits a short-ranged stream of radiation that eats through all but the sturdiest plate and reduces flesh and delicate machinery to smouldering ruin. Crucially, only the Vespid may wield it, for the ultrasonic tone thrumming from their wing-casings modulates the crystal's volatile energies, and its neutron radiation would swiftly kill a warrior of any other species.

Binding these fierce aliens to the Empire proved no simple task. Their language of wing-vibration, pheromone and possible telepathy long defied the Water Caste's envoys, and the two peoples kept warily apart until the Earth Caste devised the communion helm. Issued to the Strain Leaders who guide each swarm, this device renders Vespid meaning into a form the T'au can grasp, allowing Stingwing and Fire Warrior at last to fight as one for the Greater Good.