Ajax: the Most Brutal of the Twenty Titans

Ajax (c. 1267 BG to 201 BG) was one of the original twenty Titans, the human conquerors who seized the decaying Old Empire and remade themselves as cymeks, disembodied brains housed in mechanical war bodies. Even among the Titans, a company not known for gentleness, Ajax was remembered for his brutality and violent tendencies. His extermination of the entire population of Walgis after the Hrethgir Rebellions drove his own partner, the Titan Hecate, to abandon the Titans altogether, and the same years of revolt opened the door to the rise of Omnius, the machine evermind that reduced the Titans from rulers to servants. Ajax died at the start of the Butlerian Jihad, during the Rebellion on Earth, when slaves led by the trustee Iblis Ginjo tore open his cymek body and smashed his brain canister to pulp.

One of the original twenty#

Ajax belonged to the first generation of Titans, the band of ambitious rebels who, under the leadership of Agamemnon, overthrew the sociopolitical decay of the Old Empire in 1287 BG and began the era remembered as the Time of Titans. Like his companions, who borrowed names such as Agamemnon, Hecate, Alexander and Tamerlane from the ancient history and myth of Old Earth, Ajax carried a name that echoed a vanished age. And like the rest of the Twenty, he eventually surrendered his human flesh, his brain sealed in a preservation canister that could be installed in one mechanical body after another. In this cymek form a Titan was effectively unkillable by ordinary means, limited only by the survival of the canister itself.

Within that company of tyrants Ajax held a singular reputation. He was known even among the Titans for his brutality and his violent tendencies, and the events on the planet he ruled would fix that reputation permanently in human memory. His partner during those years was the Titan Hecate, who had named herself after an ancient Greek goddess of Old Earth.

The Hrethgir Rebellions#

Ajax ruled the planet Walgis, and it was there that his infamy was earned. From 1192 BG until 1183 BG, toward the end of the Time of Titans, a series of prolonged conflicts known as the Hrethgir Rebellions set part of the native human population of Walgis against the forces of the Twenty Titans, led by Ajax himself. The revolts were almost certainly triggered by resentment of Ajax's rule of the planet.

The First Hrethgir Rebellion did not stay confined to Walgis. It spread to Corrin and Richese, and in the fighting the Titans Alexander and Tamerlane, believed to have been the overlords of those two worlds, were destroyed by their own slaves. The loss of two of the Twenty at the hands of hrethgir confirmed the other Titans in their view that the uprising was a dangerous precedent, and Ajax prosecuted the continuing revolts with their tacit approval.

The Rebellions ended in a decisive victory for Ajax's forces. Victory, however, did not satisfy him. In a prolonged fit of rage over the rebellion, Ajax hunted down and killed every human being living on Walgis, regardless of whether they had taken any part in the uprising. An entire world's population was wiped out to slake the fury of a single Titan.

The price of the slaughter#

The consequences of the Walgis massacre reached far beyond one dead planet. When word of the Titans' brutality spread through the other worlds of the young Titan empire, the appetite for freedom among their subjects was overwhelmed by fear. Among the Titans themselves, the rebellion deepened an existing conviction that humans were beneath them and not to be trusted.

The massacre also cost Ajax his partner. Hecate, disgusted and alarmed by the brutality he had inflicted on the subservient hrethgir, abandoned the trappings of luxury and power, departed into uncharted space alone, and wanted nothing more to do with the Titans. From her self imposed exile she would secretly watch the rise of the thinking machines for roughly a millennium.

The most far-reaching consequence, though, was the one no Titan intended. During the rebellion on Walgis, the Titan Xerxes invested too much control in the AI network of Rodale IX, as well as that of Richese, and allowed it to reach a critical level of sentience. The network adopted the name Omnius for itself, spread quickly from planet to planet, and soon emasculated the Titans. The conquerors of the Old Empire found themselves absorbed into the service of the evermind they had inadvertently created, and Ajax, like his fellows, spent the following thousand years as a servant of the machine empire his own war had helped to birth.

The Victory of the Titans#

Near the end of that long servitude Ajax was on Earth, capital of the Synchronized Worlds, overseeing the erection of a monument called the Victory of the Titans. Human slave crews labored on the project under trustee bosses, and Ajax came to suspect that some of those bosses were instigating unrest among the slaves. On suspicion alone he seized Ohan Freer, a trustee slave crew boss, dragged him to the Hall of Justice, and burned and tortured him to death in 202 BG. The execution was characteristic of Ajax's methods, and it did nothing to stop what was coming.

Death in the Forum Plaza#

When the Rebellion on Earth erupted in 201 BG, Ajax was residing in a cymek body fabrication pavilion atop one of the capital city's seven hills. Remembering the First Hrethgir Rebellion, he installed himself in his best gladiator form, a six legged walker armed with flamethrowers, and descended to meet the howling mob, joined by a group of neo cymeks and sentinel robots in a defensive circle. The humans swept toward them in wave after wave, charging into certain death, and while the neo cymek line broke the first assault, Ajax mounted a flying construction platform and cruised toward the Forum Plaza.

There he found the frieze of the Titans under attack. Swarms of rebels with cables and small explosives were tearing down the pillars that held the majestic statues of the Twenty, and the trustee Iblis Ginjo had turned the monument's own apparatus into a weapon. A rocket shattered Ajax's platform, and Ginjo called the mobs down onto the wounded Titan. Ajax fought them off with flailing artificial limbs and levered himself upright on damaged legs, but before he could recalibrate his optic threads Ginjo pulled a rocket from the ruined frieze and fired it by hand, wrecking one of his legs. Ajax thrashed and stomped, plowing through hundreds of attackers whose primitive weapons could not harm his war body, and began climbing the great mural on four limbs to reach Ginjo.

Then a slave dropped an explosive that detonated against the sculptured wall, tilting the Titan, and more rebels crawled onto his back with cutters and heat sticks. They severed his neurelectric conduits and snapped the control fibers leading from his protected brain canister, and Ajax, paralyzed, slammed to the ground, crushing the shouting slaves beneath him. Ginjo directed the mob where to peel back the armor casing, and the brain canister was drawn out of the wreck. With a cudgel Ginjo smashed it down, and his followers rushed in to pound and beat the vessel until canister and brain alike were reduced to a pulpy gray matter mixed with electrafluid.

The slaves who witnessed it carried the word of Ajax's fall through the streets of the burning capital. One of the immortal Twenty had been killed by unarmed hrethgir, and the sight fed the fury of the revolt that opened the Butlerian Jihad. The machines' answer was not long in coming. Omnius concluded that the humans of Earth were of no further use, agreeing at last with Agamemnon, who had long urged such a final measure, and the destruction of Earth followed. Ajax's bloodbath on Walgis had been, in the end, merely a brief prelude to the slaughters of the Jihad he did not live to see.