Adam the Iron Man's birth had been nothing more than a minor interlude. Lox naturally could not expect a little one whose soul had only just been born to lead the other war-model Iron Men on a rampage through the Blackstone Fortress.
In Adam, he saw a kind of potential, and the direction this potential led was a different path running parallel to the Iron Men legion controlled by the central Cogitator.
In his design philosophy, the Iron Men legion commanded by the central Cogitator would operate as a gestalt. Every individual would serve and devote itself unconditionally to one vast whole.
Its way of thinking would be entirely mechanical and rational. To achieve a preset objective, the central Cogitator would exhaust every scrap of computing power, finding the optimal route to that objective even if it had to use brute-force enumeration.
So long as it had sufficient matter and energy, the central Cogitator could spread across the galaxy like a plague. When that time came, hundreds of millions of Iron Men would plunder all matter, commanding planet-sized megastructures to devour stars while endlessly replicating themselves.
The war potential of the Iron Men legion would be directly tied to the available material resources. It would be an even more extreme form of war by mass, where mass and power became synonymous.
That form of warfare was already beyond the imagination of the current Imperium. Humans would no longer need to spill their own blood and make sacrifices for victory, because the storm of machines would sweep away every enemy.
At that point, the Astartes might continue to exist as special-operations troops for particular environments, but the main force of war would be borne by the various Iron Men legions.
As for the mortal auxiliary forces, Lox believed that with the