Part 6 (2/2)
*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 superst.i.tious 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 a 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 works.p.a.ce Adept Zeth had furnished them, a gleaming silver device that resembled a highly modified grav-couch was taking shape. Caxton lay underneath, a.s.sembling 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 ign.o.ble 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 a.s.semble 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 a 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 a.s.sembly 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.
With a cry of elation, she had rushed over to Severine and swept the current crop of drawings onto the floor. Over Severine's cries of protest, Dalia had called everyone over and begun to outline the scope of what the rough scrawls described.
The team's initial scepticism had turned to cautious optimism and then excitement as they began to grasp the significance of what she was showing them. Each one shouted out what now seemed so obvious to them, as though the solution had been staring them in the face all along.
As the new design began to take shape in the centre of the works.p.a.ce, Dalia realised that it had been staring them in the face, they just hadn't realised it. Each of them, herself included, had been working within the hidebound traditions laid down in the Principia Mechanic.u.m, the tenets by which all workings of the Machine were governed.
Aside from Dalia, the members of the team were grafted with s.h.i.+mmering electoos on the backs of their hands to indicate that they had pa.s.sed the basic competencies of the Principia and were thus members of the Cult Mechanic.u.m. Perhaps with this success she too might be fitted with such a marking, though it was through thinking beyond the Principia's prescriptive doctrines that Dalia had seen the solution to their problem.
*It's incredible,' breathed Severine, as though unable to believe what they had done. *We did it,' said Zouche.
*Dalia did it,' corrected Caxton, putting an arm around Dalia and kissing the top of her head. *She figured it out when no one else could.'
*We all did it,' said Dalia, embarra.s.sed by the praise. *All of us. I just saw how it could work. I couldn't have done it without you. All of you.'
As always, it was Mellicin who brought them back down to reality with a jolt. *Let's not be awarding ourselves the t.i.tle of adept yet, everyone. We don't know if it works.'
*It'll work,' said Dalia. *I know it will, I have faith in it.'
*Oh, and faith now replaces empirical testing, does it? Does it provide hard data to prove we succeeded? No.'
Dalia smiled and bowed to Mellicin. *You're right, of course. We need to test the device and run a hundred diagnostics to make sure of it, but I know they're going to be fine.'
*I'm sure you are right,' allowed Mellicin with a slight smile that surprised everyone, *but since we have to do them anyway, I suggest we take an hour's break before getting back to work and beginning the tests.'
*That won't be necessary,' said an authoritative voice from behind them.
Dalia jumped at the sound of the voice, turning to see Adept Koriel Zeth standing at the entrance to their workshop, her bronze armour reflecting the subdued lighting in gold highlights on the curves of her limbs.
Dalia followed the lead of her companions in bowing to Adept Zeth as she swept into the works.p.a.ce, accompanied by two red-robed Protectors who carried tall staves of iron and whose limbs were sheathed in augmetics. Dalia recognised the Protectors as Rho-mu 31 and smiled at the sight of... him... or was it them? She couldn't quite decide.
<script>