‘I am not Cawl. I simulate Cawl. Familiar complaints act as social bonds between members of the human species. I seek to emulate this interaction to make you comfortable with my aberrant existence. This preamble is to ease tension and re-establish bonds between Belisarius Cawl and Roboute Guilliman.’

‘You make poor conversation, machine. Deliver your report.’

Cawl had lived ten thousand years. Such a great span of time would wear out all but the greatest of souls. The changes he had wrought upon his body to support his mind through it had stripped most of his humanity away. His emotions had become ghosts in the great mechanism his mind now inhabited, and here, mediated through the Cawl Inferior, they should have been practically absent. But Guilliman could never shake the feeling of intense superiority hidden in Cawl’s emotionless pronouncements, nor ignore the touch of sardonic humour that revealed itself from time to time, even in this soulless facsimile.

‘It is not the report of the Cawl Inferior. It is Archmagos Belisarius Cawl’s report.’

‘It is easy to forget,’ said Guilliman, ‘that you are a mechanism, and that such large amounts of information can be conveyed by such simple encoded messages.’

‘The information does not come from the message. The information is innate to my construction. The code unlocks the appropriate response. My creator supplied me multiple likely scenarios that he, in his great wisdom and genius, mathematically extrapolated. The messages I receive merely modify these prognostications to fit the actuality of current circumstances. My programming is pre-loaded. These linked brains and the logic engines in the greater portion of this chamber contain all eventualities relevant to the tasks undertaken by Lord Roboute Guilliman and Archmagos Belisarius Cawl. All probable futures are within me.’

Guilliman looked around at the heads. They were too individual to have come from vat-born slaves, and there was no sign of the penal coding tattoos worn by servitors drawn from criminal stock. He did not want to know where Cawl had sourced his grisly collection.

‘I am impressed, as always, Cawl Inferior,’ he said. This was also a conversation they had had many times before.

The machine’s voice changed, becoming hectoring. ‘Then my master repeats his request that you install him as Fabricator General of Mars. You replaced five of the High Twelve upon assumption of the regency of the Imperium, and hundreds of the lesser high lords. You have done this several times since. What is one more?’

‘For the hundredth time, I will not do this. The Imperium does not exert so much control over Mars that I may appoint my own Fabricator General, and they would never accept you even if I could. The tenets of your creed forbid such artificial consciousnesses as this. Your experiments–’

‘Archmagos Belisarius Cawl’s experiments, not my experiments,’ said the machine pedantically.

‘Very well,’ conceded Guilliman. ‘Cawl’s experiments have made him many enemies.’