Cawl arrived as an image was wavering into being. It took its time in focusing, until hovering over the imaging pit was a Mechanicum tech-adept clad in black robes. The birth-gender was indeterminate. The figure had altered itself far from the human norm. Odd angles under its garments suggested little of the original body remained. The face was invisible. Reflections on lenses hinted at multiple bionic eyes beneath the hood.

There was nothing out of the ordinary about that there were far more extreme cybermorphs in the Mechanicum than this person, but there was something about the adept that was wrong. Although many in the room with Cawl were similarly enhanced as the figure, the messenger seemed arachnid in ultimate origin rather than mammalian, and its uncanniness did not stop there.

The adept had a trick to play, as shameless as any dazzling feat performed for the benefit of feral-worlders by an explorator fleet. The hololith's projection ribbons wavered in a way that they should not. Heavily striated mote strands evened themselves into a true-pict-quality image. Frameshift technologies made flaws inevitable; they could not be ironed out. That was physics. At close range and in good conditions, the best holocast provided a phantom figure, and yet here the adept in the image was totally lifelike, and that was beyond the ability of the Martians. As surely as a conjuror ostentatiously performs progressive stages of his deception, each limitation of hololith technology dropped away. Audio buzz crackled to silence. The jag and tear common in long-range holocasts smoothed itself away. The blueness particular to the Trisolian comm grid melted into vibrant colour. Distortion flicker in the beam alignment faded to zero oscillations per microsecond. The instruments used to monitor the hololith - in that particular case discreetly hidden in the pit around the base of the projection aperture - ceased their symphony of quiet hums, leaving the tech-adepts manning the device staring in confusion.

And then, the finale: a subtle conclusion, and more powerful for it. There was more to the image than visual veracity. Somehow, Cawl wasn't sure how - and judging by the noises the others witnessing this technological marvel made, nor was anyone else - but somehow it ceased to be an image, and became real.

Until that moment lifeless, the figure's robes stirred in a warm breeze that blew, impossibly, from the image. Incredibly, they could smell the sacred oils greasing the adept's augmetics, the incense, the holy unguents of operation coating machine parts. The quality of the audio band approached, then exceeded, that of a hardline vox. It was all impossible.

Vocal murmurs and bleeps of binaric filled the room. They were wondering how it was done. Cawl was. Everyone was.

And then the figure spoke.