He called the next thallax forward to the status bay. Seven hundred and eighty-eight were left to inspect. At two minutes, three

seconds an inspection on average, he was going to be on the thallax line for at least another twenty-six hours.

By the Machine-God, the work was very dull, and exactly the reason he had not settled into one role for long. Cawl never wanted to be bolted into one hole and forgotten about. It looked like it had finally happened.

He waved the next thallax through after the most cursory of examinations. Its tall ceramite war frame tramped forwards. The thallaxii were cyborgs like the skitarii, though you couldn't tell that from the outside. They looked like robots. Only the brain and spine remained of the original human, held inside an armoured amniotic tank. The rest was machinery. Cawl called them all 'he', although any one of them or indeed all of them could have been women. It didn't really matter what pronoun you used once they scooped out your brain and threw away the rest.

The icon for an infospheric digimissive blinked in the artificial display of his third eye. He opened it with a thought.

Cawl. Attend me now, it read. No sign off. No audio or pict. Aspertia Sigma-Sigma.

Another adept was already approaching to take over Cawl's shift. He had gone further down the road to union with the Machine-God than Cawl had, and wore rank badges several grades higher than Cawl's. The lower half of his face had been replaced, along with all four of his limbs. There wasn't much more of him that was flesh than there was in the thallaxii.

'Go,' the adept blurted. A single string directive of audible binaric.

Cawl handed over the medical omnispex and aspergillum without a word, and went away to find his mistress, glad to be free of the thallax line.

Domina Hester Aspertia Sigma-Sigma was in the Heptaligon's central data transfer nexus in Tria Station. The thallax line was in Seconda, so Cawl was required to take two low-pressure hyperspeed transit pods to get there. By the time he nudged his way through the throng of Mechanicum adepts clustered around the central hololith pit he was late again, and something momentous was already afoot. The room was dark. All faces were turned inwards. The adepts were silent, and resentful of his clumsy progress towards his mistress.

At the head of the crowd was the lord of the Trisolian forge world, the Viceroy Extractatorian Benician Mendoza. Sigma-Sigma was by Mendoza's side, as befitted her status as Taghmata Macro Clade Leader. She pulsed Cawl a disapproving data burst as he joined her.