She rushed into the room like a metal wind, sure-footedly evading all the many hazards her poor maintenance practices created. Her mechapeds made a menacing clatter on the harder parts of the floor. When they encountered softer ground, it was more sinister still, a padding rustling with predatory overtones. The relict animal parts of Cawl's brain filled him with terrors of fangs and multi-limbed things hurrying over leaf litter.

She arrived over him, and her immobile, silver face seemed to wear a mocking smile. The flasks swinging from her chest clacked together. In the privacy of her rooms, she did not bother to cover them with her robes, giving Cawl an unwelcome sensation of intimacy.

'I have reviewed your service records,' she said. 'You are old for a tech acolytum, of the age that suggests one of three possibilities - lack of enthusiasm, incompetence, or guile. It can't be the first, or you would not have bothered to learn what you evidently have. It can't be the second, or you would not have been able to do it. Logic dictates that it is the third.' A run of floating text scrolled through the air, displaying Cawl's gene-code, upgrade serials, images, preferences, psychological profile and other, precious secrets. 'Mars, Ryza, Antioc, Belacane, Verica VII, Trisolian,' she said. 'Six forge worlds in nineteen years. You have delayed promotion to a higher rank, although your command of the mysteries entitles you to a grade four above the one you possess. In each world, you have had many masters. I am your third dominus here. Did you plunder all their knowledge before moving on, I wonder? You have mine, I know,' she said with quiet menace. 'How have you managed to move so freely?'

The war, Cawl did not say, and before that, the Great Crusade. Adepts travelled all over the galaxy on missions to recover old data, unlock the secrets of xenos technologies before condemning them to the pyre, minister to the machines of the colony fleets, build the

technical infrastructures of conquered worlds, and a million other things. Personnel were always in short supply, and Cawl was very good at ingratiating himself. It had been remarkably easy to move about.

He kept his silence about all that. Aspertia waited patiently for him to speak. He stared back dumbly at her mirror mask.

'So that is the way you want to go. Your choice, tech acolytum.' Metal tendrils pushed themselves from the table, infiltrating his data and utility sockets. Their cold invasion made him tense.

She leaned down, and asked her first question.

'Cawl, what am I to do with you?' she said.

'Let me go?' said Cawl.

'Do not be glib with me,' she warned.

A burst of agonising electrical force rushed through his nervous systems, both native and grafted. A high current like that, so many delicate connections, so much electronic arcanery nestled within flesh…

It hurt a lot.