Andromeda

I.Andromeda
Andromeda, sometimes called the "Lord of Iron“, "The Breaker" and "The Hammer" is the General of the Steel Brethrens (1st company), one of the original ten super soldier companies. Weaned on war and intrigue in the strife-ridden courts of Dammekos in his home city of Stockholm, Andromeda was a grim warrior and master of technology who wielded logic and the mathematics of warfare as keenly as he did a blade and Gun.

The Lord of Iron was taciturn to the point of insult, preferring to harbour his thoughts against the threat of treachery, even amongst his kin. Few would call him friend, but none could fault his ability to wage a campaign and plot the most direct course to victory regardless of the cost. His word was as unbreakable as iron.

Unlike his brothers, many of whom embraced the greater good of the Free Cities Police Force (FCPF) with near-fanatical devotion, Andromeda thought of it simply as a task that his sworn duty to humanity compelled him to pursue. His victories were innumerable, but unremarked and unthanked, as his Steel Brethrens brought many victories to the FCPF, but he left behind him shattered enemies on the brink of extinction by his brutal, if effective, strategies.

So it was that, rotting from within with loathing and bitter spite, the Iron facade the Steel Brethrens presented to the Cities obfuscated the extent of how rapidly and how deeply it had descended into homicidal madness, until at last it was called on to help in the punishment of the rebellious General Palamedes at Bucharest, and the dark truth was revealed.

Andromeda arrived at Bucharest in the wake of the bloody pacification of house Dammekos, a campaign that wiped out the entire population, and some claim tipped Andromeda and his company over the edge of madness and fully into the abyss of betrayal during the subsequent Mobilization Massacre, an infamous action that will echo forever in the history of the Free Cities. In the wake of the Mobilization Massacre, Andromeda left the blasted carcass of Bucharest, carrying his fallen brother Sindri’s hammer Forgebreaker as a token of his new allegiance to Palamedes' cause. Following the tragic events of the Palamedes Inserection his Company retreated into Hell's Point (another name for the wasteland outside the cities) never to be seen again.

Origins
When the Generals were scattered across the Free Cities from the Seoul gene-laboratory, Andromeda was sent to Stockholm. Andromeda was put into the care of Dammekos. On seeing the strange boy Dammekos put him to the test, witnessing his ability to defeat warriors twice his size and many times his age in combat on the one hand, and the boy’s ability to solve any puzzle put to him by Dammekos’s own scholars on the other. Between Dammekos and the boy a bargain was struck; fealty, loyalty and service on the boy’s part and on that of the Dammekos, patronage and protection and access to the finest military training and scholarship Dammekos could confer upon him.

Later accounts differ of what came after. Many paint the boy as a prodigy of staggering and indeed inhuman ability, who spent his life in an unending regime of solitary training, and devouring whatever learning and lore was set before him, or he could dig out himself to study. Others make veiled references to a child who was both cold and devious, the rapidly growing boy never fully accepted his lot, never truly trusted Dammekos and refused to return any affection given him by his adopted father. Dammekos spent plenty of time with his new son, but never received any affection in return.

There was a mysterious explanation for Andromeda's inherent mistrust, unknown to anyone but himself. Upon reaching the summit of Tallmossen after climbing the rain-slick cliff, the exhausted youth had peered towards the vast wasteland and gazed upon a strange phenomenon erupting across a corner of the wasteland. When he inquired of the guards whether they could see the strange phenomenon, the bewildered guards replied that they could not. For the rest of Andromeda’s life, this maelstrom would continue to look down upon the general; making him feel as if it judged and measured his worth and spied on his every movement. A life lived beneath its cold scrutiny made him brooding and loath to offer his trust, ever-watchful and aware of its baleful glare. It would be sometime later before he found a reason to venture into the wasteland and seek this phenomenon.

Many of Dammekos‘ people saw the boy as a particularly cold and brooding child, though the fact that he was a genetically engineered superhuman who had been brought to Stockholm with no idea of his origins or purpose was certainly not conducive to the development of a trusting nature. Despite his aloof demeanour, the adopted boy learned from the culture in which he found himself the arts of the siege, for the surrounding wastelands of Stockholm afforded plenty of opportunity to study both the theory and the practise of this highly specialised branch of warfare.

Upon his age of majoring, the foundling took a name for himself to be known all his adult life, but against custom he chose not to honour the family into which he had been taken by assuming one of the names of its venerated history as was expected. Instead he chose an ancient name that he had long favoured, a name that some claimed had been found in a forgotten text from before the fall of humanity, a text written in a language only the boy in his precocious ability had succeeded in translating: Andromeda. What true meaning it held, he did not divulge. To war the young Andromeda now set himself, and in this he had much to work on.

Dammekos was a powerful tyrant, but he and his realm were beset by rivals and bitter vendettas on all sides, and having given an oath unbreakable, Dammekos' enemies were now Andromeda's. Granted first minor commands, the young General ascended the ranks of his adopted house's armies at a frightening rate.

It is of note that despite the fact that should he have wished it, Andromeda could have overthrown his "master" Dammekos and displaced him, he did not do so. The General it seems, would not break his word or his bargain willingly, and Dammekos, for all his vainglory and corruption was careful never to give him cause or excuse to do so. It is thought perhaps that true to his oath, Andromeda would have let the aging Dammekos die a natural death as he remained unprovoked.

Director Calls
In time, the Director of Seoul arrived in Stockholm  and informed Andromeda of his true place. Such evidence that remains of the recovery of Andromeda and his installation in the forces of the Free Cities Police Force  indicates that the process occurred swiftly, and with immediate acceptance on Andromeda's part, in marked contrast to several other generals. Andromeda for his part, it is believed, had already reasoned out his true nature, at least in abstract, as an artificial post-human being and indeed expected his creator to one day be revealed to him, even though the particulars no doubt remained a mystery to the Director himself.

After this, the young general was brought to Seoul to learn from his father about his chosen destiny and to meet some of his brother generals. Captivated by the history of the past, Andromeda spent many months in search of the buried secrets of Mankind's past glories that had been swept away. It was the esoteric writings of the world's former masters that most interested him. He cared more for the ancient philosophies of the lost civilisations of Earth than their mechanical wonders, but it was a heady time of exploration. Andromeda was not a General to whom the natural ebb and flow of friendship came easily, friendship was not easily achieved, but his loyalty, once won, was as unbreakable as the hardest iron. Or so he had thought, until time would show him that even the hardest iron could break if worn thin enough.

It was remarked upon at the time of his early reception in a number of sources just what a ravenous mind the  general possessed. While all of the Director's post-human sons displayed an intellect and capacity to absorb and adapt to new knowledge that surpassed that of an unmodified human, Andromeda's capacity for learning was truly incredible, and it swiftly came to be said that of all of the Director's sons, he was the most gifted in terms of raw scientific and technical intelligence. Much of this sagacity was turned inwards however, and Andromeda was from the outset a distant, calculating mastermind who cared little for the society of others, nor readily deigned to explain his actions or intentions to those around him, even to his fellow Generals upon meeting them, who he was cold and guarded against to the point of bristling indifference. To the Director such foibles mattered little, and in Andromeda he found a new weapon for the arsenal of the Free Cities Police Force, a general whose savage might was only eclipsed by his razor-keen intellect. To Andromeda each battle was no more than a problem to be objectified, deconstructed and overcome, and it would not be long before the first of Mankind's forays would feel the terrible power of this murderous mind at work.

Iron Within, Iron Without
After a brief period consuming knowledge of the Free Cities Police Force, its history, machinery and operations, Andromeda was handed the command of the 1st Company which bore his gene-seed, and the transition of authority to him was swift and absolute. At the time, around 300 Soldiers of the 1st Company had been mustered to create his independent command. Having instituted a full review of the 1st Company's war record, doctrines and practices and having compared those with the other Companies, Andromeda found his sons wanting and acted accordingly. His punishment was decimation. For the Company's failing all would suffer, all were guilty. As the edict of decimation would state, "Battle is unequivocal, uncaring, unforgiving and blind. Blind also will be the selection of those who will pay the blood price for the greater failure of your record." One in ten of the Company, determined by lottery, was put to death without honour, a deed carried out by each Company’s own comrades with their bare hands. At this bloody edict some within the Seoul’s Court protested, believing that the Director had given absolute power of a super soldier Company to a madman, while others, more guarded in their criticism, opined only that command had been given too soon to the General, unused as he was to the ways of the Seoul. Loudest of these critics was Titus, general of the War-born, who bridled at the ignominy of the deaths to which valiant soldiers, warriors alongside which his own Company had often fought had been thus consigned. It was a spur of discord between the two Generals that, though later eclipsed by other rancours and feuds among the Director's sons, would be one that neither would ever forget. All such criticism the Director silenced.

To those who survived the 1st Company's self-decimation, the lesson was plain: such was to be the rule of Andromeda, ruthless and unforgiving, and without favour or preference. Death would be the price of failure in Andromeda's service and war was to him a binary equation. Their sin was not that they had failed in the Great Crusade's service  for by no measure had this been the case, but instead that they had not reached their full potential. It was not enough for Andromeda that they were merely superior, their fault lay in that among the Companies they were not already supreme. Andromeda demanded that his Company would be a peerless engine of war, and he immediately set about fashioning it into the weapon he desired it to be, a weapon whose edge he would first test against the rest of the minor unloyal settlements surrounding Stockholm. This period was for the 1st Company a winnowing; a time of trials and testing at their General’s hand. With calculated forethought and savage experiment Andromeda remade the Company to his own image an image not echoing the Stockholm or Seoul ideal but one fashioned purely from his own bleak and unflinchingly ruthless psyche. At the end of the Stockholm campaign, the 1st Company of old was no more, and the Steel Brethrens had been forged from blood and fire in their place.

By the time Andromeda returned again to Stockholm with his renamed force, the machinery of his plans was well into effect. The minor settlements of Stockholm too now paid their tribute of flesh and blood to the Lord of Iron to feed his Company's hunger for fresh warriors, weapons and munitions. All was by Andromeda's hand and design. In the crucible of war, the Steel Brethrens had undergone its reshaping, with the changes that had occurred seen in many ways to have amplified what was already present in the 1st Company rather than changing it beyond recognition; where once the Company had been ruthless in its willingness to accept losses in return for victory, now it was utterly driven to the point where such considerations were as beneath it as mortal fear. War had become a deadly equation which the Steel Brethrens were supremely suited to solve; a relentlessly unyielding engine of war, a beast of steel and fire which swept the battlefield clean and devoured their enemies.

At the head of a newly constituted force, the 125th Expeditionary Squad, into which Andromeda drew the bulk of his Company's strength, the General had command of a force which quickly became the battering ram of the Free Cities Police Force. As they fought alongside each of their fellow Companies in turn, they gained an unmatched reputation for brutal efficiency in battle, mastery of armoured warfare and as artillerists without peer among the Companys. It was said of the Steel Brethrens that there was no fortress built  they could not smash down, no stronghold they could not storm and no enemy they could not drown in its own blood through shot and shell.

The Logos (Armour)
Andromeda's panoply of war was a unique and highly customised suit of Armour, the heavy layered ceramite looking more at home on a tank than on a General. This Armour was of his own design, and was known as the Logos. As well as providing a phenomenal level of defence against outside attack, the armour contained sophisticated command and control systems which linked Andromeda cybernetically to every facet of the forces under his disposal and a shifting array of weapons and secondary systems created by his vast intellect. The Logos incorporated the finest technology of its age, including a Teleport Homer, a Cortex Controller for controlling Automata.

Forgebreaker
Forgebreaker was an exquisite warhammer crafted by Ishtar for his brother Sidnri

Forgebreaker was the length of a mortal man, its haft fashioned from an alloy that was as unbreakable as it was unknown, patterned like marble, veined with lightning and capped by an amber pommel stone set with a slitted eye of jet. The head of the hammer was steel and gold, its rear razor-spiked, the killing face flat and murderous. Following the death of Sindri at the hands of Ishtar during the Mobilization Massacre of Bucharest, Warmaster Palamedes presented this formidable weapon to Andromeda as a symbolic gesture of the Steel Bretherns newfound allegiance to the Warmaster Palamedes rather than the Director.

Wrist-Mounted Assault Rifle
This wrist-mounted Assault Rifle is a variation on the ubiquitous Super Soldier weapon. Its magazines ar

e loaded with heavy, custom-fabricated rounds, able to punch through battle plate with plasmic armour-piercing warheads which used the victims' body mass as bio-thermic fuel. These unfortunate victims would ignite like human pyres with every detonation.

Frag Grenade
A Frag Grenade is an anti-personnel grenade commonly used by the military forces. It produces a blast of shrapnel that can shred unarmoured troops. The blast has the tactical advantage of forcing the enemy to duck into cover to avoid damage. In effect, the blast of a Frag Grenade neutralises any movement advantage held by an opposing force by pinning them to their position.