Today Is the Day You Die!
Inside Kaides’ assembly plant, the mutants worked through every component with meticulous care, excited but careful as they operated the machinery, leaving no corner unchecked.
The mutants were deeply grateful to both Kaides and Andrallo.
They’d originally been marked as “xenos” for extermination, but Kaides had vouched for them to Andrallo, and in the end, their lives had been spared.
As far as Andrallo and Kaides were concerned, these mutants thought like perfectly ordinary humans.
Their genes had just twisted their bodies into something unrecognizable.
Anywhere else in the Imperium of Man, an ordinary citizen who spotted something with a snail-shaped head, an eel-like body, or facial features twisted into knots would be screaming “xenos” without a second thought, and it wouldn’t be long before someone showed up to wipe the mutants out entirely.
But to Andrallo, someone who’d tinkered with genetic ascension plenty of times before, mutations like these were nothing at all.
He was the kind of person who could casually engineer a plant-hybrid new humanity as a serious project, to say nothing of the sheer weirdness of something like an Evolutionary Hunter, splicing in xenos DNA to reshape itself on purpose.
As long as these mutants still thought of themselves as human, and lived their day-to-day lives no differently from anyone else, Andrallo was happy to accept them as they were.
Once things settled down, he figured Kaides could run them through a gene clinic and sort the rest out.
That kind of tolerance was exactly what the mutants had craved most and had least of in their lives.
Under Andrallo, they’d found a kind of salvation they’d never known before.
Every mutant looked on Andrallo and Kaides as their saviors.
Andrallo was their leader, and Kaides, naturally, became everyone’s chief in turn.
Add to that the fact that Andrallo had first arrived on this planet as an Astartes, and it was only natural the mutants had come to see him as the Emperor’s own herald.
What’s that?
You’re saying Andrallo came from a Chaos warband, that he’s a traitor and a heretic?
Don’t make people laugh.
If there were more “traitors” like him around, the mutants and the Imperium’s ordinary citizens wouldn’t have had to suffer nearly as much.
The Governor was, in fact, still cursing Andrallo as a traitor and heretic at every turn, and he cursed the mutants loyal to the Emperor as xenos on top of it.
By now both sides despised each other outright, each wanting nothing more than to tear the other apart.
Today, Andrallo’s group made their way to the fabrication plant.
Kaides’ first batch of mechanical war-bodies was about to roll off the line, and he’d invited everyone to come watch.
The mutants worked carefully along the assembly line, checking every component with precision.
These mechanical war-bodies were built to exacting tolerances, and every part had to pass both a human and a machine review.
It served two purposes: a safeguard against error, and honest work for the mutants, something that let them actually learn something along the way.
Andrallo had once discussed the Imperium’s education standards with the Westminster sisters.
According to Maen, most knowledge stayed locked away with the nobility, entirely out of reach for anyone lower down, and the sisters had advised him not to expect much from ordinary Imperial citizens when it came to skilled positions.
At first Andrallo hadn’t thought much of the warning.
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If anything, he’d always felt short on population, not short on capable hands.
How much worse could Imperial civilians really be?
Then Andrallo learned just how naive he’d been.
For the first time, he discovered the gap in understanding between two humans could actually be wider than the gap between a human and a dog.
The Imperium’s ordinary citizens weren’t just uneducated in some minor way, most of them were fully illiterate.
Plenty had never learned so much as a single letter, and even those who had been to school couldn’t handle a position requiring even the slightest technical skill.
Thankfully, the factories and machinery Kaides built were automated to such a degree that even a fool could operate them, which at least let these civilians take part in something.
As Andrallo turned these bewildering memories over in his mind, the very first mechanical war-body officially rolled off the production line.
Its frame was sleek and rounded, every joint fitted with flawless precision, its design minimal without sacrificing an ounce of beauty.
Every single person watching found themselves in awe.
“Can a machine really be this beautiful?”
Maen and Charlotte murmured the thought aloud.
They’d seen plenty of Imperial machinery in their lives, but never anything built this beautifully before.
For just a moment, the sisters felt like they finally understood the Machine Cult.
If their so-called Omnissiah really took forms like this, their obsession with machinery suddenly made a lot more sense.
Andrallo felt none of the awe that struck the mutants and the sisters.
All he was thinking about was how much damage output the thing could actually put out.
The war-body stood six meters tall, built along a humanoid frame.
Its bionic limbs moved just like a normal person’s, though its chest and abdomen bulged outward, packed full of engines and sensors.
Kaides guided a drone to install two cylindrical cores into the war-body’s back, one a cold fusion power core, and the other, glowing with brilliant violet light, the psychic core drawn straight out of Andrallo’s own body.
With both cores in place, a faint hum rose from the war-body’s chest, its engine drinking down power and murmuring something close to a quiet cheer.
A click sounded, and the bionic skull atop the war-body’s head lit up blue, two cartoonish blue eyes appearing on a strip display.
The war-body flexed its limbs faintly, its mechanical musculature, modeled after real human anatomy, moving with the fluid grace of a dancer’s arm and the coiled violence of a warrior’s strength at once.
The towering war machine turned its gaze around the room, its intelligence core processing at the speed of light, mapping every structure and every intelligent life-form in the entire factory in under a second.
The war-body raised its right hand to its chest and gave a small bow, a synthesized voice speaking up, humble and gentle.
“A-001, at your service, Chief Andrallo, Science Officer Kaides, my fellow humans.”
Silence.
The mutants stood frozen for a moment before it finally hit them, and then they erupted all at once into a roar loud enough to shake the whole building.
Andrallo and Kaides both broke into satisfied smiles.
Finally, they wouldn’t have to keep feeding living bodies into the front line to hold it.
But amid all the celebration, Maen and Charlotte stood frozen in place.
The moment they’d heard the war-body speak, every ounce of strength drained out of them, and a sudden, cold fear crawled through every inch of their bodies.
“This is…
an Abominable Intelligence?!
Lord Andrallo, why, why would you build something like this?!
Betraying the Imperium outright would have been better than making one of these!”
The Westminster sisters had studied history.
They knew exactly how much devastation the Men of Iron uprising had caused.
Andrallo turning against the Governor hadn’t concerned them much before now; a rebellion was just a rebellion, as long as it didn’t cross into heresy.
But touching anything remotely resembling the Men of Iron was an entirely different matter.
If word of this ever got out, the whole Imperium really would come hunting them down.
But the worst of it was still to come.
Maen and Charlotte noticed the other production lines were still turning out more war-bodies without pause, these six-meter mechanical monsters rolling off the line at a rate of one every few minutes.
Maen couldn’t hold herself back any longer.
She refused to watch Andrallo walk down a road with no way back.
Tampering with anything like the Men of Iron only ever ended one way: death.
Charlotte broke out in a cold sweat, her mind racing faster than it ever had in her life, trying to work out how to keep this whole thing hidden, while Maen, already in tears, begged Andrallo to abandon the production of these Men of Iron entirely.
Neither Kaides nor Andrallo understood why the sisters were reacting so strongly to a synthetic soldier.
All they could do was keep explaining how useful the machines were, and how AI-driven war machines had been used successfully in the past.
Maen tried to explain further, but a deafening crash cut her off.
The factory wall exploded open, and a figure came flying through the gap.
It was a warrior clad in black armor and a red robe, a fully enclosed helmet covering her face in white with glowing red eyes.
Her breastplate bore two raised contours, clearly modeled on a woman’s own form, and her armor was adorned with fleur-de-lis, blades, and crosses.
A jump pack rode on her back, its exhaust vents shaped like an eagle’s wings, letting her move freely through the air.
The instant her eyes found Andrallo, she screamed out in fury:
“Heretic!
Today is the day you die!!”