'Check the infosphere,' said Cawl. 'You will see. The Space Wolves make war on the Warmaster around this very station. The grand traitor Horus came here at her invite.'

'Domina?' asked one of the guards in confusion.

'She turned on the Viceroy,' continued Cawl, 'and gave him to the traitors.'

'Lies!' said Aspertia. 'Kill him!'

'I shall give you the truth. Exloading,' said Cawl.

He sent a data-squirt ripe with evidence of the domina's betrayal into the skitarii's minds. It took a fraction of a second for them to process. They raised their guns again. This time, they pointed them at the domina.

'Are these records true?' asked the skitarii.

'Absolutely. You can verify them yourself,' said Cawl.

Cawl heard the data-wheels whirring in the skitarii's head as he ran the check.

'Wait!' said Aspertia on all frequencies.

Cawl pulled out his volkite serpenta.

The skitarii opened fire on their mistress. Radium bullets smacked into armour plating. She reared up, and cut one of her erstwhile bodyguards in half with a focused particle beam that sliced through metal and flesh as if they were air.

A round caught her in the face, denting the mirror-metal and snapping her elongated head back. Cawl shot out the cybernetic link nexus revealed at the base of her throat and she fell down in a tangle of metal and cloth, leaking fumes from her joints.

The skitarii looked at Cawl. The tech-priest caught a little of the data traffic incoming to the warrior's cognis array. Sudden confusion had gripped the entirety of the Taghmata of Trisolian. Calls for aid and clarification went out from skitarii and thalaxii clades all over the Heptaligon. Without a word the skitarii departed, the curved prosthesis they had for feet loud on the deck.

Cawl smiled to himself. 'There, that wasn't so hard,' he said.

Friedisch had drawn his gun. He looked at the laspistol as if he had no idea how it came to be in his hand.

'How did you override their neurosync? How did you do all this?' Friedisch said, looking at the dead adepts. The smell of cooked flesh rose from their heads. 'And where did you get that?' He pointed at the orb on the floor, which lay there innocuously, activity light blinking.

'The code patterner? Like everything I possess, my friend, I made it. I've been working on it for some time actually, out of interest,' he stressed. 'I never thought I would have to use it, but I was concerned by weaknesses in the Trisolian data-net and I wished to demonstrate how it could be compromised from within In the end, they proved useful to me. That is how I burned out Aspertia's command suite, set her skitarii free and slew these aberrant techno-mancers. The warriors of Mars will be able to choose who to fight for now. I imagine it won't be the Warmaster.'