Jeff had many names, mostly depending on what mood the Great Mother was on that day. Sometimes he was Jeffrey, sometimes Jefferson, sometimes ‘my adorable space snake’, or ‘you beautiful monstrosity, you’. He didn’t really care for the words themselves; words were for those tiny pink things living down on the big rock-balls. He mostly cared for the feelings he could always sense suffusing those words. Affection, pride, amusement, excitement.
The Great Mother was always so kind, trying to help him become a better version of himself. She also never aimed any disappointment at him, even when he failed, and he did fail sometimes … often. Her disappointment was always turned entirely inward at herself.
It shamed Jeff that he made her feel that way, and his own disappointment in himself always eclipsed the Mother’s. She sensed it, of course, when she was near enough for their link to be more than a thin thread at least, and so Jeff tried to suppress it whenever she was near enough to sense his emotions.
It didn’t work. She always knew and always aimed such fond and gentle emotions his way. Perhaps it was foolish to feel as he did; the Great Mother said he had done excellently, and that doing his best was all she expected of him.
As for what exactly it was that the Great Mother had him do? Destruction. Jeff was a Leviathan of the Stars, a World Serpent large enough to curl around some smaller planets and bite his own tail when he expanded his body as much as he could. He was the Great Mother’s Fist, her Wrath. She had her small warriors, those things she called Draugr and lately those weird pointy-eared tiny pink ones, but they were surgical implements of destruction. They killed people one by one. They removed one target at a time, maybe a dozen or as much as a hundred at once if they pushed themselves.
The destruction Jeff was tasked with tended to be a bit more grand in scale. A primary aspect of his role was to strike fear, to be the monster the tiny pink ones fled from into the Great Mother’s embrace. Thankfully, there were times when it wasn’t fear that the Great Mother wanted, but destruction itself. True, utter and thorough destruction.
Jeff liked those tasks. He knew he was truly made for those ones, because those were the only missions on which he could truly utilise himself. He was a beast of war, designed to induce terror in the hearts of lesser creatures but not to the detriment of his capability for violence. He was a beast of war, not some mutt who could only bark but not bite.
He was also a prototype; he knew. If he proved himself, if he could prove to the Great Mother that he could fulfil his tasks exceptionally … then maybe he would get some siblings. He knew the Great Mother had other children, tiny pink ones, but he wanted another like him. He also knew the Great Mother was working on a sibling for him already, though that ‘project’ of hers wasn’t getting much attention.
His Kraken sibling was an empty shell for now, a body without a mind, a soul, emotions or dreams. It was fine. The Great Mother would complete the sibling in due time, but Jeff wanted to show her it wouldn’t be a waste of her time. He knew she would do it out of pity if he asked, but he didn’t want it to be so. He didn’t want pity.
The Great Mother had once said that he was — technically — a type of dragon; he didn’t know what that meant at first, but then the Great Mother told him stories, and he had been enthralled by that idea ever since. Dragons were prideful; they were strong, and they were mighty. They didn’t ask for pity or beg; they proved themselves worthy.
He, of course, ignored the tiny ‘dragons’ the Great Mother had made and let loose upon Vallia. They were tiny. Everyone knew that the bigger the dragon, the better — at least according to the Great Mother, and she was always right — so he obviously had them beat. Jeff would become the best dragon. He might not have been able to breathe fire, but he had something much better (after a great deal of begging and pleading, but it was oh so worth it).
He felt it rumble to life in his chest as his many slitted eyes fixated on the distant form of the Enemy. Those twisted things the Great Mother called daemons, and their tiny pink worshippers have been causing much trouble lately. Jeff loathed them; they had the gall to displease the Mother, and yet … he also felt grateful to them.
They were so stupid. Again and again they came, popping up on planetary surfaces, or coming from outside on big Void Ships. Something the Mother had done apparently annoyed these stupid things, and now they came in droves despite the fact that the Mother exterminated them time and time again.
After the first few times, the Great Mother had allowed Jeff to take care of them, and now she had grown to trust him to a level where he was allowed to hunt this latest batch all by himself!
That made this a joyous occasion all by itself, but when this also gave Jeff a stellar opportunity to test the Mother’s latest gift … Well, he would thank these miscreants if he could. This one would be a fine day indeed, a memory he would treasure for all eternity.
Five Void Ships sailed towards him, either blind, inept or horribly arrogant. Jeff’s magnificent scales had some properties that helped him blend in with the deep, dark Void of space, but he was hardly invisible and colossal in size besides. Sure, the sensors might have been thrown off from accurately gauging his size or the distance between him and the ships, but his massive void black shape should have shrouded half the stars they could see by now.
Feeling the rumbling core of fire reach a crescendo in his chest, the great World Serpent opened his maw. Light, a bright radiance that blinded men and overwhelmed sensors, bloomed as a beam of condensed plasma leapt from the colossal beast’s jaws.
The five Void Ships of a ramshackle pirate band worshipping Slaanesh vanished under the wrath of an unleashed star, not so much as a single inch of hull plating remaining to commemorate their pitiful existence once the beam petered out.
Jeff shut his maw, feeling the tiny star in his chest wind down and disperse. That had taken a lot out of him; the Great Mother had said it was a prototype, and it showed, but that had been magnificent all the same!
Why would he envy those pitiful tiny dragons for their fire breaths when he could breathe solar wrath upon the Mother's enemies?
Jeff snorted, the last wisps of fire escaping through his nostrils as he turned around and began his ponderous journey towards the system’s primary star. He would need to replenish his energy, which meant a few days of slumber while his body absorbed solar heat and radiance in Low Orbit of a star.
It was slow, but infinitely faster than any of the alternatives.
*****
Manpower. It was such a strange thing that I was short on manpower when I could quite literally make an infinite amount of it. The problem was that I needed manpower to send delegations to every planet and oversee their transformations into worlds befitting my Dominion.
Alas, that required free will, since I could hardly send automatons or drones, and if I gave my newly-made creations free will… then they suddenly became my children. They would no longer be just disposable bodies I could throw at problems by the thousands without guilt.
Alternatives. Maybe something like organic-AIs? No, that’s just asking for trouble. A human society can’t be governed by an emotionless machine. So then … maybe clones? I would only need a single loyal, dependable and competent would-be governor, and I could just replicate them as many times as needed. They wouldn’t be my children then, right? Right. Just copies.
I bit my lower lip in thought, not feeling nearly as certain about that as I would have liked. I didn’t like that idea much either, to be honest. Clones had weak souls, same with artificial creations like my daughters. That was fine when they stayed on a planet warded from the horrors of the Warp by a Blackstone Pylon network, but elsewhere? On planets where daemon-worshipping cults popped up every other week? How long would it be before one of my appointed governors got corrupted?
But what if their weaker souls would be a boon like it is for the Tau? The Daemons can barely sense those blue cunts and seem to disregard their existence entirely unless provoked.
I would just select some from Vallia and send them elsewhere to carry out my will, but Vallia itself was also short on manpower among bureaucrats and higher-echelon decision-makers. They had a skeleton crew of a government at best, if even that. I couldn’t take anyone out of there for many years still, and even then they would likely remain barely trained and untested. Not the type of people I would throw at a Hive World with billions of inhabitants to handle its rapidly disintegrating societal framework.
I was growing food myself in abundance and transporting water to planets in need, which was probably what kept most of my new planets in any semblance of order since the Imperial supply lines had vanished into thin air. But still. Revolts, genestealer cults, daemonic cults and just regular assholes taking advantage of the chaos.
It’s gotten to the point on some planets that I’d dispatched hundreds of kill-squads filled with my newest hunter-killer drones. Using the surveillance networks in place, those drones would do their bloody work and ensure no one who broke any of my constitutional laws would live to see the next sunrise. If people insisted on behaving like animals — raping, killing, stealing, raiding — then they would be treated as such.
I knew my creations were immune to subversion by genestealers; doing that much had been hardly a challenge, but I’ve made sure that all of them would self-destruct if an actual Tyranid invasion was about to take place on a planet. I couldn’t allow the Hive Mind to get its claws on even my simplest designs.
Octavian was a godsend in maintaining order in the Iron Collar, to be perfectly honest, and I’d confirmed that he had some retired comrades working in the shadows with him to ensure a reasonably stable transfer of power. Well, as stable as one could realistically be when the population was filled with bloody zealots who thought dying horribly in the name of the Emperor was a divine virtue.
For the moment, I'd decided to do nothing. It wouldn’t do for me to demolish what little goodwill Octavian and Amberley’s presence and tangible support for me had done for the stability of a fair few systems. The nobles and the ecclesiarchy had run off, but good riddance. The PDF — planetary defence forces — and most of the bureaucracy that had kept the worlds running were still present. I just needed them to continue doing their jobs.
Funnily enough, Hive Worlds were the quickest to fall in line and to eat up the excuses Octavian prepared for them. Most of them never had a single bite of food that didn’t come from something half-rotten or diseased, so when they suddenly had a steady weekly supply of rationed foodstuff that I deemed suitable for a stable and healthy diet … Well, let’s just say cults worshipping me as a new Imperial Saint had been popping up all over the Reach, entirely unrelated to each other. Some had done away with the Imperial Cult entirely to worship me.
It was incredibly annoying, but Selene convinced me not to nuke them to hell. I loathed being worshipped, but she was very convinced that beating them down, those who’d begun to so fervently support me, would be rather counterproductive. I, however, did insist on being vocal about my disdain for being worshipped, and that while worship itself wouldn’t be punished, attempting to convert others publicly very much would be.
It just drove the cults underground, or made them a more private affair, but at least it slowed their spread a great deal. Which was the goal all along.
I’d also spent an entire day setting up psychic profiles and templates for my mind as it was at present, saved it all into mind-cores and had them keep me updated on any substantial changes. Especially ones that coincidentally matched the picture any one of the cults had of me. If I could actually be changed by worship and fervent belief that I was something, then I would go on a killing spree. Cause fuck that. I’d sooner glass a planet full of my ‘worshippers’ — were they even my worshippers when it wasn’t me they worshipped but an idealised image of me that they conjured up in their heads? — than be made into God-Emperor 2.0. The more of these cults that popped up, the more I understood the Emperor’s actions on Monarchia and the more I found myself tempted to mimic them.
Selene called me an idiot for expecting anything else when I gave proper food and safety to a citizenry that had never even dreamed of such a thing. Soon they would get proper shelter and homes that wouldn’t collapse on them if they breathed the wrong way, filled with air that wouldn’t poison them with every breath they took. Arcologies weren’t all that costly to build, after all, and I had bio-energy in abundance now that I had massively upscaled my solar-energy farming to nearly every star under my Dominion.
Then I would build machines that didn’t have stupid mercurial spirits, machines that actually obeyed their owners like the tools they were. Then I would make sure their owners understood them. How to maintain them, and perhaps even repair them, without going to an engine-seer. I would train mechanics, not superstitious tech priests.
And after that … perhaps I would give them Void Ships. I could make some harmless commercial freighters to restart the interplanetary economy once the planetary societies got back onto their feet. I finally had time for such long-term considerations, and even to act on them, which I had Valenith, Kaylith and my adorable space noodle Jeff to thank for. They were all so very enthusiastic about murdering the shit out of any and all of my enemies.