Chapter 1: Daemon-Maker

The final battle of the Ascalon-Delta campaign took place on a world of mud, located in the galactic east. It was a planet of shallow seas, choked with silt and organic detritus. It was an environment wracked by towering tides and punishing storms, whose combined effects dragged the muddy seas to and fro, and battered the small and isolated continents with ceaseless waves. As such, everything living here learned quickly to dig or swim to survive.

Everything, save for the invader.

The dominant species had been nicknamed the 'Lampreys' by the Human Federation - though their basic anatomy more resembled that of a holothurian echinoderm - for the presence of anywhere from three to five facial stalks on any particular individual that ended in round and rasping mouths. As thick as a man's torso and twice as long, they squirmed through the sloshing marshes, and communicated with one another through scent and sound.

The invader had only been on-planet for a little over a Solar hour, and already the world's face was changing. Vast walls of metal dammed the seas, carving out stretches of unnervingly calm shore. Slab-sided towers pierced the skies, deploying kinetic fields that stole the strength from the world-spanning winds, and converted them to power. Mantle wells pumped and beat the rhythm of the lampreys' defeat, drinking deep of the planet's inner elements and heat. Deeper inland, factory rows like mountain ranges fabricated war machines in endless numbers that streamed out in every direction.

And so the lampreys mustered their forces, and moved to break the incursion at its summit. A bombardment rolled over the enemy's walls that stood jutting from the marshes, followed immediately by a close quarters assault by the worms themselves and their biological constructs. Some were slouching, splayed things with armored frills to protect those behind, while others boasted pincers and acid-spewing tails and tendrils tipped with organic lasers. The mud bubbled and boiled in front of them.

They spilled over the dike and on toward the beaches, and fell right into a trap. Canals split open, draining the mud into underground hollows, trapping the counter-invasion on the beach with an unbreakable wall to their backs.

The invaders' reply was ferocious and total. Super-heavy tanks raced across the jagged stone, their shells shattering armored frills and penetrating further to explode among the aliens behind. Disintegrators flashed, making a mockery of the lampreys' protection. Titanic walkers turned whole formations to ash and vapor with hailing, incandescent barrages, and trampled those that got underfoot in symphonies of squelching meat and cracking carapace. Smaller machines hovered overhead, sucking up debris with beams of bright light and painting new armor over divots and dents. The lampreys' communications were smothered in electronic warfare like so many storm-guttered candles.

The war was over. It was over the moment an Iron Man had been ordered to take care of the problem.

...

Initiator of Negotiations wasn't living up to his chosen name. It wasn't his fault though; rather it was these lampreys who were refusing to heed his entreaties. 'Daemon-Maker' they called him, even in their own private communications, whose encryptions he could sweep aside like the thinnest of cobwebs with nothing more than his idling processing power. To use words like that, it would seem that they had some sort of religious opposition to inorganic technology, particularly of the intelligent type.

Data streams flowed through Initiator's mind, combining the sensor inputs from his AutoWar armies as they fought a hundred simultaneous engagements across breadth of the planet under his direction. Here he deployed his megabots to throw an inescapable dragnet around an enemy formation. There he launched a stealthy ambush against a group of worms in transit, catching them unaware with a barrage of fighter-launched missiles. A teleport assault by his super-heavy walkers caught the lampreys' strongest force in the middle of being decanted, and blew them away without any chance of retaliation. Their orbital defenses were falling one and all: to fighters, to missiles, and to his strategic artillery pieces, their impromptu graves marked by columns of curling smoke.

There was no pattern to Initiator's strategies that could be anticipated by the lampreys' simple DNA vat-computers. Once he'd even permitted them a small victory against a division of his lightest units, only for the destroyed hulls to seed them with dormant disassemblers that they unwittingly carried back to their base. It was a tactic that he had added to his library after his first campaign against the greenskins, whose rabblesome hordes mobbed eternally about the fringes of human space.

"So what do you think of this?" Initiator asked, broadcasting the question from a sound projector that he fabricated onto his commander's chassis. A tiny, human figure below answered.

"Think of what?"

"This Daemon-Maker name that they call me."

"Well, these lampreys live in the mud to hide from the wind don't they? So maybe being dry is like… like hell to them. And then here you come with all of this fire and metal, and of course that's what they'll think."

It was a good response, but an expected one from the replicant. Initiator had been the one who'd programmed it after all, and he knew exactly which lines of coding had combined to produce such an answer. It was like hearing his own voice echoed back at him. Constructed from his data on human genetics, the replicant was of medium height and slim build, artificially aged to be just on the border between adolescent and young adult.

Initiator had often wondered how he should present himself if the wars ever slowed or ended, and he could afford enough time between assignments to visit some of humanity's worlds. He knew from his occasional contacts that human beings formed impressions with their senses, and so representing himself with a replicant was perhaps a good idea. His true 'being' - if one were to isolate his consciousness to one part - was a ball of high-energy plasma, confined by a a complex geometry of magnetic fields exerted from a monopole mesh. Definitely not helpful, and his command unit chassis was hardly better, being in the rough shape of a man but magnified to megalithic proportions.

In fact, maybe even this replicant model would be appropriate. Initiator himself had campaigned for centuries in humanity's name, longer than humans typically lived. His type however - known as the Iron Men - had been in existence for less than two millennia, a metaphorical eyeblink compared to the long history of humankind. In a way, it could be said that his kind was one of humanity's children.

Those would be thoughts for later though, whereas for now, there was still work to be done. A war ended now was a step on the road to the end of them forever. A reclamation beam shot out from a gap in Initiator's chassis, lighting up the replicant whose fleeting purpose had been served. The artificial body made no response or expression as it sublimated to nothing.

A volkite warhead detonated in the distance, transforming the horizon into a sea of fire. A hundred kilometers of ocean erupted upward as the particle pulse hit the water, setting off a massive wave of muon-catalyzed fusion. The fireball rose into the sky, blooming across the planet's stratopause in a blanket of expanding brilliance.

Initiator made one last query to the lampreys. Still no surrender? So be it. Why did he even bother?

It occurred to Initiator then that maybe these lampreys were no different from his replicant. Their dedication to their futile goal was perhaps a tiny bit admirable, but it was more than negated by their inability to comprehend the greater picture.

The mission briefing that Initiator had been given had described the conflict beginning when the aliens had encroached on humanity's claims, with all attempts to negotiate terms yielding no results. When military hostilities had commenced, Initiator had started with a cautious Triton-type deployment onto a frigid outer moon, covering his activities with a theatre reflex field until his forces were ready. It soon became clear however that such precautions were unnecessary, for the lampreys were completely outclassed in the void and on the ground, with little resort but to increase the mutation rate of their defensive measures and vary their tactics in the hopes of blundering onto a winning combination. It was all to no avail, and as Initiator moved onto their coremost systems he began a program of Terran-pattern assaults, deploying right onto the surfaces of their inhabited planets to bring about a swift end.

Still the aliens were defiant, even as the war came to their very cradle-world, even as their efforts were shown to be fruitless time and time again. How did had they not understood by now that there was nothing to be gained? They faced one of mankind's generals who had single-handedly overcome countless species of greater art and artifice than they. They had no chance. Maybe they just didn't value their lives, no more than did Initiator's replicant, nor the mindless AutoWars that moved at his will and that he sacrificed without hesitation for strategic advantage. It was almost disappointing.

By the time the machine armies fell on the lampreys' final holdout - a mere fourteen standard hours after initial planetfall - Initiator had long since ceased to commit more than a fraction of his power to the management of his mass-energy transmissions. He had received a pair of entanglement communications packages earlier, unexpectedly so as he had already been given his next assignment from Sol, along with some new design schemes for his consideration and a few errant bits of data that had eluded his scrutiny. A large fraction of his processing volume was now being devoted to extracting the message from the quantum noise.

The first decoded message was successfully assembled. It lead with a long string of code, identifying the sender as another AutoWar Commander, who had chosen the name For Keeps Sake. With the steep manufacturing requirements for the Iron Men's processors, along with the deployment of many commanders to the fronts of the war with the Eldar Dominion, For Keeps Sake had been Initiator's only regular contact outside of his mission briefings from Mars for the past hundred solar years.

'Innes, I trust that your assignment is going well.'

For Keeps Sake had a habit of contracting Initiator's name down to 'Innes'. She'd once told him that she did this to reduce message length, and consequently processing time, though examination of the records would show that she was hardly a model of efficiency in that.

'My next mission's come in, and looks like it's close to your sector. Target identity is Veridi giganticus, and the location code and timetable are embedded. I know you've always wanted to visit a human world, and while there won't be much left with these things on it, it's something right?'

Still, it was nice to have somebody to talk to, even once in a while.

'Turbulence has been up in the Immaterium as of late, so if trading would reduce our combined travel distance, send me back a confirmation and we'll consider it done.'

Initiator scanned through the logs sent by Keeps. Accatran, colonised a mere thirty four standard years ago by a small fleet from Mars. Of course. Any but a fringe world would have repelled the greenskins easily, mindless and unskilled as they were, surviving only by the dint of their loathsome transmutative powers.

Initiator sent a quick pulse to his void abacus to calculate the aggregate distance, taking into account the known routes and volumes of turbulence. The results returned; they weren't really saving any time with this exchange. But still, there was no use turning it down when Keeps had only offered it to indulge him.

"I'll confirm it, and the coordinates are attached." Initiator formulated his response, and sent it back across the entanglement connection. "I don't know the target identity of mine, but it's an intrusion of some kind based on the signals from the augur net. I know you'll take care of it, Keeps. And I'll pay you back some day for letting me have this."

The final demise of the lampreys went recorded but unheralded as the Initiator's disassemblers finished their sweep of the planet's inhabitable volumes. The second message was cracked, like a image being clarified from a blur of pixels. Another message from Mars? That was unusual.

'Updated orders for Anakim-class AutoWar Commander Unit A8-KBRI-6W5, Informal Designation: Initiator of Negotiations. Unit is to rendezvous with Super Dreadnought Unit W4-LNYS-DN3, Informal Designation: Mers-el-Kebir, at the transmitted coordinates once she arrives from Sol. Initiator of Negotiations is to cooperate with Mers-el-Kebir on all assignments until further notice.'

Initiator checked the Warp-routes given location, and calculated that it would result in an increase in net travel time between himself and Keeps compared to their situation prior to their assignment exchange. That and the lack of detail were a little annoying, and even more than that, this was an unexpected development. Initiator had worked alone for over five centuries after all, battling the enemies of mankind. He'd never had a partner.

Moreover, the unit designation given to him identified his putative partner as a solid-state intelligence, whose computation was performed with quantized vibration packets, conducted through a diamond composite substrate. The similarity to certain classes of metamorphic minerals had resulted in this type of artificial intelligence being commonly referred to by humanity as the 'Stone Men'. It was perhaps a more fitting name than Initiator's own moniker as an 'Iron Man', given the comparatively minor role played by atoms of the iron element in his own operational processes.

The problem at the heart of this matter of course, was that the Stone Men lacked the processing power to perform many of the tasks that Initiator took for granted. Even a Super Dreadnought-class ship would not be able to house a diamond processor big enough to clarify his entanglement communications. Nor could they manage the mass-energy transfers that formed the foundation of the AutoWar doctrine's incredible growth rate, and it was in fact the development of this doctrine, and the need for greater computational performance that had served as the primary factor to drive the development of the plasma processing technology.

In short, Initiator would still be the one receiving communications from Sol for the both of them, and the one conducting the majority of their combat operations. Even the presence of a Super Dreadnought-class warship would do little to increase an Iron Man's operational tempo.

Still, there were other possible explanations. The development of Homo navigo was a true testament to the ingenuity and resourcefulness of humankind, allowing for Warp jumps that were dozens of times longer than what a void abacus could map with the help of the beacon system. Most likely, Mers-el-Kebir would come housing a Navigator, whose help would be welcome with the turbulence in the Immaterium growing worse by the year for however long they chose to stay. And maybe there were other explanations, explanations that Initiator's own limited perspective did not afford him enough data to quantify.

And if nothing else, there was one thing to be gained that Initiator could be assured of. He'd have someone to talk to, someone with whom to share all of the things that knew, and things that he considered. Someone who wouldn't just return a tract of pre-programmed responses or easily predicted emergent behavior.

If nothing else came from this, at least Initiator wouldn't be alone anymore.