'Greetings to you all, faithful of the Machine-God.' The voice was female, and passionate - strangely emotive, to say it came from such an augmented being. Cawl did not let it fool him with its missionary zeal. It was her only trace of humanity, and though the voice was beautiful, there was a phlegmy catch to certain words that was not human at all. 'I bring word to you from Mars. I am Sota-Nul, emissary of the new Mechanicum to Warmaster Horus Lupercal, saviour of the Imperium.' Consternation greeted this latest pronouncement.

'The false Mechanicum!' the Viceroy Extractatorian exclaimed. 'You reveal your allegiance. Terminate this conversation!'

The tech-adepts in the machine pit poked unsurely at their machines. They raised faces of pallid flesh and oily metal to their master.

'We cannot deactivate the projector, my lord,' whispered one who was healthily afraid.

'Disconnect it!'

'My lord, it already is disconnected,' said another, more fearfully than the first.

The hololith's attendant adepts began to chant. The highest of them picked up a bronze hammer on a chain, kissed it, whispered ritual words over it, and smashed the glass front of a box attached to the pit wall to retrieve the coil of emergency incense kept inside. An alarm rang at the insult.

'You cannot disengage this channel of communication. Only I have that power, and you will hear me out,' the she-thing said passionately.

Cawl had thought Aspertia Sigma-Sigma horribly unnerving. This Sota-Nul was far worse.

'My colleagues, my brothers in the faith, I am a servant of the true Mechanicum. The Mechanicum of Mars. Do you not see those you follow are of Terra, and not of our kind? Zagreus Kane is a puppet.

'A lord without domain. You are homeless, cut off from the wellspring of all knowledge. We offer you leadership and unity under the Fabricator General, he who was appointed by the will of the holy synods, who operate under direction of the Motive Force, the Machine-God who moves among us.'

Cawl sniffed. Smell was a neglected sense in a people who disdained the body and sought the higher purity of machine life - it was too animal a sense, too vulgar - but he retained the use of his nose, and something rank caught at it, crawled inside and clung like bad oil to the back of his throat. His machine senses registered nothing wrong, indeed, they detected no unusual olfactory input at all, but his birth smell caught a taint on the air blowing from the image, if indeed it was an image, that turned his stomach. Rotten meat, and blood. There was something moving in the background behind Sota-Nul, something unclean.

'Ties!' exclaimed the Viceroy Extractatorian. 'Hal turned his back on mankind. I will not do the same.'