Regulus nodded, and Kelbor-Hal saw that he had anticipated the question, the prepared answer flowing smoothly from his vocabulator.

'A shrewd question, ambassador,' said Regulus. 'Horus Lupercal has given me an answer that I believe will satisfy you.'

'And that is?' asked Malevolus.

Regulus seemed to swell within his robes. 'The Warmaster will lift all restrictions on research into the forbidden technologies. To that end, I bring the protocols that will unlock the Vaults of Moravec.'

A heavy silence descended on the gathered adepts, as the weight of the Warmaster's offer hung in the air like a promise too good to be true.

'The Vaults of Moravec have been sealed for a thousand years,' hissed Chrom. 'The Emperor decreed that they never be opened.'

'And that means what to us?' sneered Malevolus. 'We already plot against the Emperor, what does one more betrayal matter?'

'The Warmaster has the power to open them?' asked Melgator.

'He is the Emperor's proxy,' pointed out Regulus. 'What the Emperor knows, the Warmaster knows. All it will take to unlock the vault is your agreement to the Warmaster's designs.'

'And if we do not agree?' asked Kelbor-Hal, already extrapolating what great treasures and as yet unknown technologies might lie within the ancient vault. Moravec had been one of the most gifted of the ancient tech-adepts of Terra, a man who had fled to Mars to escape persecution at the hands of superstitious barbarian tribes of the radiation wastelands of the Pan-Pacific.

'If you do not agree, I will wipe the means of opening the vault from my memory coils and it will remain sealed forever,' said Regulus. 'But that will not be necessary, will it?'

'No,' agreed Kelbor-Hal, his pallid features twisted in a grimace of a smile. 'It will not.'

'No, at that length the pin can't be that thin,' said Dalia. 'It'll melt at the temperatures we're expecting inside the cowl transformer.'

'But any thicker and it won't fit inside the cowl,' replied Severine, rubbing the heels of her palms against her temples and deliberately laying down the electro-stylus upon the graphics tablet. 'It won't work, Dalia, you can't make it fit and if there's no pin, the cowl won't remain precisely locked in place over the cardinal points of the skull. Face it, this design won't work.'

Dalia shook her head. 'No. Ulterimus knew what he was doing. This is how it has to be.'

'Then why is there no design for the cowl restraint?' demanded Severine. 'There's no design because he knew it wouldn't work. This whole project isn't something he ever intended to build - it was a theoretical exercise.'

'I don't believe that,' persisted Dalia, turning to the wax paper drawings of the device that the long-dead Ulterimus had produced. As she had for the last five rotations, she pored over the plans and diagrams she had painstakingly copied and updated to fill in the blank spots where the design was incomplete. They were so close.

In the centre of the workspace Adept Zeth had furnished them, a gleaming silver device that resembled a highly modified grav-couch was taking shape. Caxton lay underneath, assembling the circuit boards in the back support, while Zouche was machining the drum cylinders that would insulate the electrical conduits once the internal workings of the device were complete.

Mellicin circled the device, which was large enough to bear a fully grown human in a reclined position, her arms folded before her and one finger beating an irregular tattoo against her teeth.

It had taken them a full five rotations to get this far, and with only two to go, they were either on the brink of their greatest triumph or doomed to ignoble failure. Despite the awkward frigidity of their initial meeting, they had worked well as a team, and relations had thawed in the face of each other's skills.

Zouche was an engineer of rare talent, able to machine working parts with great skill and precision in amazingly short times. Caxton had proven to have an intuitive grasp of how machine parts fitted together, which, together with his uncanny knack of appreciating the knock-on effects of even the smallest change in the structure of a circuit, made him the ideal candidate to assemble the device.

Severine was a draughtsman extraordinaire, able to render Dalia's haphazard sketches into working drawings from which parts could be manufactured. Mellicin was skilled in all aspects of engineering and had a wide breadth of knowledge that covered the gaps that existed between the group's specialisations. Not only that, but her organisational abilities were second to none, directing their labours with domineering efficiency once she understood the breathtaking scale of Dalia's vision.

Contrary to her expectations, Dalia found herself warming to Mellicin, recognising the woman's initial frostiness as no more than a need for Dalia to prove herself.

Since Dalia had divined the purpose of the machine Ulterimus had designed, their work had progressed at an exponential rate, but they had run into a problem that threatened to prevent them from completing their project: a means of linking and supporting the cowl that would cover the head of whoever sat in the machine.

It seemed laughably trivial, yet it held the key to the entire device. Too thin and it would melt, breaking the connection to the skull; too thick and it would not fit between the precisely machined, necessarily compact, components and would provide a surface area from which current would undoubtedly flare - thus disrupting the delicate balance of electrical harmonics generated within the subject's brain.

To be thwarted by such a basic, yet fundamental, problem was uniquely frustrating, and Dalia began to understand why the device had never been successfully constructed.

As Severine held her head in her hands, Dalia's eyes wandered over the drawings, letting the lines and curves of the design wash over her, the notations and measurements swimming around like leaves in a storm. Each portion of the design spun around in her head, each part interlinked and each motion subtly affecting the next with its variation.

Dalia felt her hands moving across the wax paper (hearing the scratch of the stylus she wasn't aware she'd picked up) as she doodled without thinking. The portions of the design that didn't exist were grey patches in her mind, as though the solution to the entire problem lay shrouded in a thick fog.

No sooner had that image come to mind than it was as if a stiff breeze sprang up within her, the clouds of fog thinning and golden lines of fire appearing in their depths. Each line linked the spinning parts of the design, drawing them in tighter and tighter, as though a spun web was drawing all the disparate parts together.

Dalia felt her excitement grow, knowing that she was on the verge of something important. She kept her focus loose with conscious effort, knowing that to concentrate too fully on this intuitive assembly would be to lose it. The leaps of logic her subconscious was making were fragile and could tear like fine silk were they to be tugged too insistently.

Her hands continued to scrawl on the wax paper as the golden lines in her imagination drew closer and closer, finally pulling the thousands of elements of the design together, and Dalia held her breath as they slotted home, one by one, into a harmonious, complete whole.

There.

She could picture it now, complete and flawless in its wondrous complexity.

They would need new parts, entirely redesigned schematics and fresh circuit diagrams.

Dalia could see it all, how it would fit together and how it would work.

Twenty-three hours later, Dalia slotted the final piece of the machine home. The mechanism slid into place with a tiny hiss of pneumatics. Almost a full rotation ago, as she shook herself out of her intuitive reverie, she had looked down to see a fully worked out plan of the images that she had seen in her flight of imagination. The drawings were crude, to be sure, but with even a cursory check, she had known they were right.