'Check your emotive responses,' whispered the tech-priest at the command desk next to Cawl's. 'You are modus unbecoming. You shame us all.'

'Shut up, Basken,' said Cawl.

Cawl's machines passed over the central scow. Flashing lights blinked warnings that he stay away. Screed and infographic told him the same story of exceeded proximity limits. He ignored them, overriding his robots' idiot impulse to obey the data shout, and he pushed them closer.

He had to get nearer.

Like the leviathan of ancient myth rising from the ocean, a gigantic specimen of the Trisolian xenos broke through the cloud by the lead extractor. Plumes of vapour and chilling gas cascaded from its dathrate shell. It was immense, two hundred metres across. A swarm of smaller examples accompanied it, waving their transparent, bladed limbs in the epitome of alien menace. The grav-waves of the repulsor motors caught on the giant's shell, rocking the scow I dangerously. Cawl watched helplessly as an orange-suited adept flipped over the guardrails and went plummeting to his death.

<Ware below!> Cawl widecast, cutting through Aspertia Sigma-Sigma's dominance protocols to contact the raft directly, bringing a wave of electronic enmity from the domina. If she had a verbal rebuke to follow, he did not hear it.

His mind sped to lightning alacrity by his modified intelligence core, Cawl took in and assimilated all the data he could. His Vultaraxes' limited minds were preparing to unleash their weaponry in a standard suppression pattern at the giant, an action that would have as much effect as discharging a laspistol into the ground. Cawl summoned up a flickering succession of data overlays, settling on a sonar map showing pressure differentials in the creature's gas capillaries. They had no nervous or circulatory system as the Mechanicum understood it. They were attuned to the world they inhabited; violently tempered creatures of ice and gas.

Cawl slaved all his maniple's weapons to his own will. The targeting arrays for the three machines lay atop one another. This was the sort of thing a man needed a good intelligence core for, and Cawl's was superlative.

He selected pressure nodes within the beast, stripping the clathrate armour off with hammering volleys of autocannon fire. Cawl conducted an interlaced auspex sweep of the armour. It had cracked, no more. Cursing, he put all the machines' engines on full reverse burn. Engine pods rotated to the inverted position, and the Vultaraxes sped backwards. Cawl preferred to have his Vultarax speed by their targets on these guardian missions, out of range of the Trisolian xenos' shard claws, but there was no time.

Urgent ringing distracted him. The left engine of number two was burning hot. No time for that either.