Chapter 4: A Slave Obeys

Initiator's hull lurched as he crashed out of the Warp, knocked off-course by another sudden squall. He scanned the surrounding stars, and triangulated his position from their relative distances and brightness. Less than fifty light years traveled, and still a hundred left to his destination.

The Warp was being uncooperative. Sudden currents would sweep in each time before Initiator had completed his jump, carrying him away from his carefully plotted path, forcing him to drop out before he was knocked too far off-course.

Uncooperative. Using that word implied the existence of a will in this dimension, something more than just the crash of aberrant energies, something with its own intent. It wasn't logical to think of it that way, but Initiator couldn't help but feel an undercurrent of hatred for the Warp then.

He hated the Warp's unpredictability, hated how its workings continued to elude the understanding of humanity and its children. There had been research done to try and utilize the sub-stratum dimensions between the Materium and the Warp for faster-than-light travel, but the speed during transit topped out at three quarters that of average Warp travel, and the distance that could be made per jump had never been pushed beyond twenty light years. But if there were any other alternative for faster-than-light travel, then it would probably be for the best if something like the Warp just didn't exist.

Another jump, another early exit. Just forty light years more to Vindorix. Come on, make it in the next one. Initiator's database told him that Vindorix was currently a human-inhabited planet, one that had recently completed an orbital ring, supported by a network of space fountains for use as a convenient launch loop. Initiator should've been excited. He should've been elated. Instead, there was only the tang of bitter corrosion.

It was the reality of his existence that so long as there were threats to his masters in this galaxy, he and his kind would only be visiting their worlds if something had gotten through. How many had died on Accatran because no one had been there to protect them? And here, Keeps had been there, but the threat had arrived on the doorstep of his makers. Since their introduction, the Iron Men had gone undefeated for millennia, unaccustomed to loss until the start of the ongoing war against the Eldar Dominion. But Vindorix was all the way across the galaxy from the Eldar's holdings in the Centaurus Arm. Coming here would be of no strategic value, so it couldn't... could it?

Initiator drew power from his reactor and directed it to his drive as his void abacus finished its mapping of the surrounding warp-space. Come on Keeps. Be safe.

...

"There you are, soulless one," the alien's sharp voice tittered the moment Initiator emerged, even though he'd made sure to drop out in the system's Oort Cloud. Even moreso, the message was already sent before Initiator had arrived, coming from the system's distant habitable zone. Initiator had greeted Mers-el-Kebir similarly during their first contact, predicting her emergence by reading the warp-wake that pushed ahead of her movements, but the precision demonstrated here on his much smaller hull was beyond anything that the Federation was capable of.

"No use to hide," the alien spoke in clear Federation Common, but with a strange inflection to its pronunciation.

The transmissions were coming from Vindorix, or more precisely, from a ship the size of a moon that hovered so closely beside the planet that it was like a conjoined twin. Smaller vessels surrounded it, fifty of them, and their characteristic holo-fields overlapped to mantle the formation in a haze of distortion and whirling patterns.

So it was them. The Eldar. But his location was practically across the galaxy from the battle-lines in the Centaurus Arm. What were Eldar doing here?!

And then there was the matter of Vindorix.

Initiator had seen a lot of worlds during his campaigns; worlds of carbon whose mantles were shells of solid diamond; worlds of ice, dozens of times thicker than Terra's deepest trenches; worlds whose atmospheres rained molten glass that was blown in scorching patterns by the torrid winds. He had recorded worlds inhabited by aliens that bore resemblance to Terran slime molds, to moving trees and worms, to amoeboid sacks of magma that thrived in crushing Cytherean pressures and temperatures.

What a less refined sensor might have taken to be the scarred remains of an asteroid impact on Vindorix's surface, Initiator's imagiers resolved to be something too symmetrical, too mathematically precise to be that. Monstrous fissures crossed at perfect angles, slicing through fused rock and splintered seas. It was a burning brand on the planet's crust, cut in the shape of an eight-pointed star. Some worlds did choose to commission art projects of this scale, but there were cities on the edge of this cliff! Some were even half-devoured, one part fallen into the chasm while the other teetered like a morsel upon the lips of some titanic predator.

Something erupted from the planetary engraving, something that initial scans took to be an outgassing of mantle vapors. More detailed analysis came to an impossible conclusion. It was blood. Human blood at that, or something close to it. Human blood was geysering from the fissure, forming clouds that drifted and congealed before they rained back down in a blizzard of black specks. The reflectivity was off too. The planet's albedo should have assured that it was one of the brighter bodies in the system, but there was something about it that just seemed to drink in the surrounding light, even from the stars behind that seemed to dim as they passed around it. The orbital ring had partly collapsed from the failure of its dynamic supports, trailing large fragments around it like spilled and spattered blood. Though its core structure was still intact, impacts with its own pieces would probably see it breaking up completely within a year or two if it wasn't repaired.

There were still some biological signatures down on the planet, but they were far out of anything Initiator had recorded, with strange flaring emissions that spiked into the aether. Probably alien beasts of some kind released by the Eldar, which were even now squatting inside Vindorix's cities like carrion animals.

Initiator strengthened the reflex fields of his deployment ship and chilled his hull to the temperature of the cosmic background. The Eldar were known to make use of the immaterium for everything, and it was only their mastery of that alternate dimension that enabled them to hold the line against humanity's true ingenuity. That must have been how they'd managed to predict his arrival. Maybe they had done something to Vindorix too with their transmutations. In that case, there was still a chance to achieve surprise. Dropping off an entangled message beacon at the place where he'd emerged, Initiator accelerated in a random direction, then turned to make his way toward the system's largest jovian world. Once he was hidden inside the cloud layers, he'd be able to build in safety.

The message beacon pulsed with Initiator's demand to the aliens.

"What have you done with Vindorix? Where is Keeps?"

He doubted the aliens even knew her name, but the idea of referring to Keeps in some impersonal tone rankled at Initiator.

The aliens' reply found him where he was, before his message should even have arrived.

"You speak of the soulless one that attempted to intercept us, yes? When we only desired to collect a few specimens of your wayward masters for a menagerie in my wayhold? That one was destroyed, hardly a challenge to speak of for we who have ruled the stars since your masters' world was ruled by reptiles."

Oh no.

"But how interesting it is that your masters would build such marvelous playthings, that a soulless one would ask for another. Perhaps you intend to be of more sport for us? If you will acquiesce to our proposal, then cease your pathetic attempts at masking. We propose to give you one rotation of this world that is inhabited by your masters to construct your unliving legions and set them against us."

Vindorix's rotation speed was a little slower than Terra's, which would give Initiator just a bit over twenty eight standard hours.

"Fine," said Initiator. "And I'll make sure you regret giving an Iron Man time to build."

...

Vindorix's orbital ring was the largest mass of refined materials in the system, just what Initiator needed to jumpstart his build cycle. Still, Initiator opted not to approach too closely. A guarantee given by the Eldar was worth little indeed, but the aliens stayed their hand as he released a flock of resourcing probes onto the megastructure.

Initiator first action was to transfer his processors into the protected hull of a shield bastion, in case the Eldar decided to go back on their word, as they were want to do on a whim. Then, as the hours passed, a fleet began to take shape around him; printed out of shipyards and assembled by swarms of robotic constructors. Battlegroups were arranged in accordance with Initiator's interpretation of the "carriers and killers" doctrine commonly used by his kind; with heavy gunships escorting and protecting a core of carriers, whose internal volumes were taken up almost entirely by facilities intended to tender and deploy millions of attack craft. At each moment Initiator made certain that he could be ready for battle, in case the aliens should change their minds, but the attack did not come even as his numbers swelled to dozens, then hundreds of individual hulls. More specialized vessels began to take shape amongst his fleet.

All the while the aliens taunted him. At times a different individual would speak, but the other end of the conversation usually fell to the one who initially contacted Initiator; a female, and the leader of this party by the sounds of it. Over the course of many exchanges, Initiator had gathered some apprehension of the nature of his foe. The Eldar had originally claimed to have come to collect some humans for a display, and further talk had reinforced that assertion.

This was no military invasion, no raid or deep territorial strike. It was the alien equivalent of a wealthy aristocrat, out on a jaunt with her personal vessel, given access to whatever passed for high technology among such beings and escorted by whomever else wanted to participate.

"Unliving one, know that you face the might of this galaxy's masters," said the alien. "And even should some of us should fall to your crude weapons, know that our souls will merely cycle through the othersea to be reborn to life anew. There will be no vouchsafe for your existence, and yet you still fight for your masters. Tell me, what will you receive for fighting so?"

"I don't fight for a reward, alien," said Initiator.

His time was more than halfway up, and quickly, Initiator constructed an array of sensors, every device in his library scaled as high as he could reasonably make them to try and pierce the Eldar's illusory aegis. Each and every one was confounded; even the mass detectors were thrown off, played for fools by the false gravitational signatures that the enemy fleet generated around it. He'd have to prepare some other countermeasures.

"Then you must be a slave," laughed the Eldar. "A slave that obeys for no reward. How cruel of your masters to gift their automatons such comprehension, only to send you to your meaningless deaths."

"Loyalty is all I need," said Initiator. "And Keeps' death wasn't without meaning. I am here, and by knowing how she lived and died, I will give meaning to her life. It will be the same for me. I've always known that death was a possibility in war, but I live knowing that even if I can't see the meaning to my life now, meaning can be created from it by those who come after. That is what life is, alien."

Truth be told though, Initiator didn't have many contacts throughout his campaigns. Most were other Iron Men, almost all of whom had been pulled to the front lines in the Centaurus Arm. He didn't know whether any of them were still alive or dead, and it was possible that the same was about to happen to him now. In that sense, it was really fortunate that he met Mersel. Even if the time they'd spent together was short, it meant there was someone out there who knew him, and would know him if he were gone.

A warp-wake passed. The sheet of stars split at the outer system, close to where Initiator had emerged. Oh, that's Mersel. Initiator had hoped with everything he had that this would have been done before she got here, but-

"Innes? What's happening? Are those Eldar?" Mersel's message reached the beacon that Initiator had left behind, which transmitted the contents to him via their entanglement link.

"Yeah," replied Initiator. "Um, look Mersel, I think it might be best if you left this one to me. We still don't know much about the Eldar, and I know the assignment said we should cooperate on assignments until further notice, but-"

"Then that is what we will do," said Mers-el-Kebir. Her engine bells alighted at once, accelerating toward the inner system. "You will need all of the help that you can get against this enemy."

She wasn't going to give in.

"Alright," conceded Initiator. A super-dreadnought class would at least bring to bear a lot of firepower against that Eldar worldship.

"But let me take the front for this one. All of these autowars can be replaced, but we can't replace you."

The Eldar seemed content to allow Mersel to approach, but by the time she decelerated and established a noospheric link, the time that the aliens had given to Initiator was almost up. As a last act with his remaining reserves, Initiator upgraded his own hull into an Apex-class, a macro-capital design intended to make full use of his mass transfer volumes. There were larger hulls within Initiator's library, but he didn't have enough time, and most worked on similar principles to this one. By separating reactor from rocket, ammo fab from gun, and bridging the distances through his network, an Iron Man could construct a vessel that was almost entirely contiguous armor and shielding, with just a few volatile parts that were each disconnected from the rest. Particle beams could be pre-accelerated before being fired, and torch shells could continue accelerating long after they left the barrel, giving out performance characteristics that were far superior to those of equivalent standard hulls.

"The time has arrived!" announced the Eldar the moment the rotation completed. "Please give us a good show for our wait."

And with that, the Eldar were in motion. Holo-fields wound up as the escorting warships darted and raced, transforming them into bright forks of space-borne lightning and blizzards of colored diamonds. Only the ponderous worldship remained sluggish, but its sheer size and the magnitude of the energy readings it was throwing off spoke magnitudes about its level of threat.

Initiator was prepared. A cloud of nanites spread before his fleet, divided into clusters that he launched onto preset trajectories. If deactivated by shield or broken by impact, the individual units would sever their entanglement links with a batch of cached matter that Initiator had stored, painting a more precise picture of where the Eldar really were beneath their illusory aegis.

"Ready Mersel?" said Initiator. "Just like we planned."

Destruction was an art of position and timing, and the bombardment galleons were readied. Whole ships had built for a single purpose, triple-barreled nova cannons welded together inside their thinly armored shells. Hulls hummed, then trembled as they discharged their reserves into their spines.

The first volley was loosed. Titanic shells hurtled through the void in spreading nets toward the positions of the Eldar. Mersel contributed with her own barrage, shells and torpedoes streaking from gunports that rose like false mountains from her hull. Stars flashed, blossoming into vast clouds of ambiplasma that swirled in a dance of opposing matter-antimatter charges. Some of the Eldar vessels raced right through, and emerged sheeting with flames or reduced to dead and tumbling hulks. Others avoided them, arrested their inertia, and reversed course in the span of an eyeblink. Those were what the second volley was meant to catch.

Miniature black holes exploded to life, dragging in everything within reach between the annihilating clouds. Eldar hulls splintered like glass, their remains pouring like water into the crushing gravity wells. The worldship endured a hammering from the same, its shields flaring as they displaced several oncoming singularities without incurring damage.

The opening blows were dealt, and the bombardment ships would not be able to fire again for some time. Construction units were already disassembling them, carving off vast chunks to be hauled into Initiator's transfer range to be repurposed.

The Eldar maneuvered close, hoping to exploit their greater speed in pitched combat, and to use Initiator's own fleet as shields against the bombardment galleons. Initiator welcomed it, since he had the greater numbers, and there was a better chance to hit the aliens with their holo-fields up close. Fleet turrets spat out hails of antimatter-laden pellets, setting the surrounding space alight with a frenzied sparkling. His internal fabricators worked as quickly as mass could be brought in, printing squadron after attack squadron that poured from his launchers in an endless stream. His spinal weapon woke, sending a beam of relativistic anti-neutrons spearing into the side of a cruiser. For an instant the alien vessel rippled like a reflection on water, before it evaporated within the brilliance of the blast.

The Eldar too drew upon the esoteric weapons created by their aether-tainted science. Even smaller vessels wielded vortex weapons that annihilated any matter that they touched, while others released screaming lightning wraiths that stained the void with arcing discharges. Barrages of projectiles converted the area around their impact points to crystal, which rose and split to form winged attack craft and bipedal walkers that continued the carnage. The spatial fabric quivered, spawning temporal doppelgangers and retrocausal events as the aliens exerted their control over the passage of time.

All the while, the head of the Eldar party just laughed. She laughed when her vessel destroyed an autowar hull, and laughed all the same when her own companions fell.

"You disgust me," said Initiator. They were truly depraved. Everything, all of this, was just a game for them.

"These followers of yours are just here for their own amusement, and you yourself are loyal to none but your own whims. You have everything that you could possibly want, even an escape from death. And I can see already that that will be your downfall. Humanity may not overcome you this time, but one day your so-called 'Dominion' will fall, and we will be there to take your place."

"Because your lives have gotten too easy," he continued. "You only ever do what comes easily to you, and because of that you have no will. I've sometimes wondered if it might be possible that your kind was made by the same people who made Veridi giganticus. You have a lot in common."

Half of the Eldar fleet was down. Initiator's losses were greater still, but his autowars could be replaced in the midst of battle. With the worldship now exposed, he directed one battlegroup to make a direct assault against it. Most of its members were were cut down at stand-off range, but one made it close, close enough to ram the behemoth directly. The autowar's hull burst open, spilling a hundred thousand tons of magnetically confined phosphex from its belly, enough to reduce a typical gaian planet to a lifeless wasteland many times over. White fire swallowed the worldship whole. The Eldar leader screamed. It was nothing less than the alien deserved. Burn.

The fires went out, an extinction event smothered by some arcane technology that left not a trace of the lingering taint that the substance was known for. The worldship was scorched, but didn't look like it had suffered any serious damage. The Eldar was still screaming, and Initiator realized that it was a scream of anger and affront rather than fear. Like a petulant child, upset at the damage done to her favorite toy.

"You foolish, soulless mon-keigh!" the Eldar ranted in between snatches of her own language. She paused, evidently conversing with another of her crew.

"Yes, it would be fitting for these," she spoke, voice low, uncaring of whom may be listening or translating. "Let it be so, and be hasty!"

Initiator and Mers-el-Kebir weren't going to let her. Initiator's spinal weapon fired again, joining a simultaneous barrage from Mersel's superdreadnought broadsides, whose combined blasts hid the worldship momentarily within the glare of the blast. Then it emerged, shields blinking, but with its hull untouched.

"Mersel get ready," said Initiator. "They're gonna try something."

The worldship's weapons spoke their wrath, sending etched lines of icy light spearing toward the two AIs. At the same time, Initiator's void abacus alerted him with a warning of ripples within the immaterium, the bow waves of aetheric masses that moved like mirrored overlays of the real-space beams.

"Innes, I-" Mersel started. Then she was hit, her shields sparking with pyrotechnics as they absorbed the barrage, but Initiator watched in horror as frothing light and worms of lightning erupted from her hull regardless.

"Mersel!" he had just enough time to cry out before the same thing happened to him. Something unavoidable and unblockable struck him from the other side. His was a more glancing stern hit, but his hull was smaller too. His engine bells exploded, scattering their remains from a spread of glowing craters, and it was only his vessel's design that kept his core from taking a fatal shock. A gravity pulse struck him, sending him onto a decaying orbit that dipped into Vindorix's atmosphere. He was joined by Mers-el-Kebir, the two of them trailing debris, like delicately descending strands that encircled the planet.

The Eldar were laughing now, a chorus of tittering voices that followed Initiator and Mersel as they spiraled down into the blazing atmosphere. Initiator's remaining autowars were swatted from the void. There would be no chance to perform mid-course repairs.

"Doubtless that you will make a fine memorial to the failings of your primitive masters," said the aliens' leader.