'Are you not interested, Space Marine, in how your new friend came to find you? Are you not interested in my knowledge7.'

'Call me a Space Marine once more, worm, and I'll cut out your tongue and choke you on it,’

'Het-het-het, no, no... Not my tongue. Not while I know what I know,’

The spiral electoo? Who wears it? His name!'

'Het-het-het...'

Sahaal hissed his anger through the grille of his helm and hooked a claw into what little meat remained of his captive's belly. It was a hopeless gesture - the man had demonstrated nothing but contempt for the notion of torture - but at the very least the moist noises of slicing helped to calm Sahaal's mood.

Never before had a mere human occupied a position of such influence over him. Pahvulti refused to divulge what he knew until Sahaal vowed to spare him, and to offer him such an oath would shatter every code Sahaal believed, tear to shreds every ounce of his dignity and sully every corner of his authority. Under other circumstances he would have laughed at the very suggestion.

Nor could he merely make, then break, the oath: Pahvulti had made it clear that he would deliver his information only from afar, well beyond Sahaal's punitive grasp.

For the twentieth time since bringing his captive to this dark, deep well, Sahaal cursed Pahvulti's name, cursed the ill fortune that had gifted him with such leverage, and cursed the warpshit filth that had stolen the Corona Nox and placed him in this situation in the first place.

Zso Sahaal was not accustomed to fear or uncertainty. His natural response to each was to grow angry, and in his increasingly violent gashes at Pahvulti's guts, some small portion of his venom was assuaged.

Until-

'Het-het-het... not that it bothers me, Space Marine, but you should be aware...' Pahvulti made a show of grinning, '...that impervious to pain I might be, but invulnerable I am not. Continue to cut me and I am eighty-seven-point-six per cent certain that I shall

perish.' His remaining lens-eye twinkled. 'Just thought you should know. Het-het-het.'

He was a calculus logi, or at least had been. Over the previous hours Sahaal had been treated to the man's life story at least three times - a repetition which was not helping his mood.

Pahvulti had begun as a human savant-computer of the Adeptus Mechanicus - whose brittle thoughts had aided administrations and diplomats, tacticians and explorators all across the sector. On the day of his fiftieth birthday he was presented with the highest accolade reserved for his kind: the puritens lobotomy. This ritualised surgery removed from his scarred brain what little trace of humanity remained, amputated his subconscious, and burned away his pain.

It should have made him pure, mechanical, perfect. It should have brought him closer to his god, and sheltered his weak biology from the predations of temptation. To say that it failed would be a quite spectacular understatement.