So often, individual human desires undermined collective human effort. Cawl could easily progress to a higher level with the priesthood. Doing that meant taking a specialisation, pledging allegiance to one of the Mechanicum's myriad factions and all the limitations those things brought. At higher levels, his work would be more heavily monitored. At some point he would have to rise through the ranks. But not yet. He had so much to learn. For the time being he chose to operate under the auspex beam, as it were.

Trisolian was a major transit hub for the Mechanicum. Aboard the Heptaligon there were biologians, astromancers, genetors, artisans, magi, logi, transmechanics, lexmechanics, cyberians, cogitati… Tech-priests of every conceivable type. Cawl had spent the last few years going to each kind that interested him. He flattered his way into their confidence, learning all he could of their knowledge before proclaiming, with great regret, that his talents were not fit for their specialisation, and that he must humbly take his leave.

Then he would move on to the next, and begin his learning anew.

Cawl was smart enough to know this had been noticed. Some tech-priests took their time in choosing a cult to follow, so such behaviour was not out of the ordinary. Unless, of course, it had been going on for years. Cawl fit into the latter category. For the time being, it did not matter he had been detected. A certain capability for schemes was a requirement for a talented adept. Besides, the data logging his movement tended to get lost when he went on to his next posting. He had nothing to do with that. Organisational inefficiency was to blame. The data would exist forever, but sanction would only fall on him at the Heptaligon if someone went looking for it, and were successful in finding it.

He had pressing problems to solve before he must embrace the Mechanicum's abstruse power games.

All the data he accumulated required storage. If knowledge gave the man the power of a king, storage was his kingdom. Cawl wanted to be a powerful king, therefore, he required a large kingdom.

It was for that reason that Cawl had his intelligence core out of the socket in his head, and in pieces on the table in front of him.

He had the device divided neatly into two. Cogitation unit on the left, memcore processor on the right Delicate mechadendrites flicked out of burrows on Cawl's wrist manipulating tiny components he amid not trust his fingers with.

The main feature of his desk was the massive magnification unit mounted on an armature clamped to the side. Status screed ticked up the display integrated with the glass. In the centre a complex arrangement of diagrammatical graphics guided his actions.