Cawl pulled out a steel-cased communion cable and slotted it into a socket behind his ear. The spring retractor was overwound and the cable pulled annoyingly at the side of his head, forcing his neck into an uncomfortable position.

He partitioned his consciousness, parcelling it out between the three automata and the flight desk. Facilitated by his superior intelligence core, the view in his mind's eye split into quadrants. The top of his field of vision was occupied by the view of the operations room gathered by his mortal eyes. The lower half was split into three pict fields, each showing a view from one of the automata's augurs. In the sharp images, the world of Etrian loomed large.

'Stand by for clamp retraction!' The domina half sang the words. They were accompanied by a data-rich stream of binaric. A quartet of eyeless servitors began a hymn of safe launching. Tez-Lar joined his rich voice to the song at a silent command from Cawl.

The real world retreated. Screed rolled up the side of Cawl's view; the back and forth between the domina and the provost acquisitor rendered into glowing green text and the runs of zeroes and ones of rapid, augment-to-augment binaric.

A larger panel of text blinked through his awareness.

<Extractors launched!> it announced, demanding he acknowledge. Pulses of electricity ran seamlessly from the organic pathways of his brain into the nano-wires grafted to his nervous system and out into the machine world, confirming he had received the message. Truly, the Machine-God worked marvels.

He swivelled Automaton Two's visual array downwards. Five extractor scows were dropping fast towards Trisolian A-2, They were massive things, not true spacecraft but large, raft-like structures crewed by adepts garbed in huge, armoured environment suits. Bulky servitors and rad-hardened automata assisted them. Reminiscent of the baleen of extinct Terran cetaceans, the scows' fronts sported huge, spreading vanes of copper, between which were threaded thousands of kilometres of fine wires. These 'jaws' projected a magnetic funnel that directed the desired gases into separation units. From there the harvest was pumped into bulbous clusters of containment tanks running the length of the vessel.

Dozens of massive hemispherical directional impellers occupied the scows' undersides. Viewed side-on, the grav-motors and the power plants to run them dominated the craft, like the hidden portions of icebergs. They made up the majority of the craft's mass. Etrian had a hard pull.

The extractor scows dropped fast towards the racing clouds of the gas giant. The tiny figures walking the decks dwindled to dots.

'Flight release,' commanded the domina. And by her thoughts and her words, so it was done.

'All praise the Machine-God. All praise the Omnissiah who is his messenger. All praise the Motive Force by which he moves among us,' the drone operators chanted.