At the outermost edge of the military zone stood a rudimentary building. Not far away, a speeding Vulture bike came to a slow stop on the open ground ahead. Alexei stepped off the vehicle, examining the plain-looking exterior of the structure with a curious gaze.
He had learned from Colton that Cawl had built a personal laboratory here on the fringes of the military zone. Alexei had no idea why the archmagos had bypassed the ready-made facilities just to build a new one from scratch.
As the iron door creaked open, Alexei stepped inside the simple building. The dim room contained nothing more than an elevator platform—the laboratory itself was evidently built underground. At first glance, he spotted a torso-only automaton that looked modified and distinctly different from standard adjutants.
"Scanning visitor," the eerie, odd-looking adjutant suddenly announced. The entire room flashed a blinding red for a split second before returning to normal. "Welcome, honored Governor of Aiur."
Alexei narrowed his eyes. The elevator platform beneath his feet hummed to life, rapidly descending with the rumbling clatter of mechanical gears until a shadowy corridor opened before him.
Looking around, Alexei stepped into the passage. With every step he took, dim electronic lights flickered on one after another, illuminating his surroundings. Deep within the shrouded darkness sat transparent vats filled with a specialized liquid, housing preserved Zerg units.
They appeared to still be alive, their bodies twitching occasionally under the web of slender nerve-link needles plunged into them. Alexei took in the scene with surprise; it seemed Cawl had already begun researching the Zerg, likely having requisitioned the specimens directly from Abathur.
Pressing deeper into the complex, Alexei emerged into a vast open chamber. Servitor skulls hummed back and forth in a constant stream. His gaze drifted to a nearby workbench, where a figure was busy dissecting a component from a Zerg creature.
"Kran!" Alexei called out. "Where's Cawl?"
The Tech-Priest Archmagos replied in an agitated tone without stopping, "Just ahead. He's been a bit obsessed lately—well, actually, he's like that every day." Kran complained with a touch of discontent before returning to his work.
Seeing this, Alexei refrained from disturbing him further. Shrugging, he walked deeper into the facility. The space was extraordinarily massive, far larger than he had anticipated. Its aesthetic stood in stark contrast to the bright, sleek design of Aiur's Terran architecture: countless exposed cables emerged from the dim recesses, snaking under the harsh lighting to the far wall, while massive machinery hummed and thundered continuously.
Oppressive—that was Alexei's initial impression. Looking up at the ferrocrete ceiling, he noticed the chamber's sole decorative feature: fourteen lines of verse carved overhead. They were sacred hymns of the Martian Mechanicus; even Cawl, the most radical mind in the Cult Mechanicus, would not omit such mandatory rituals.
Faint sounds of Cawl's voice echoed from ahead. As Alexei drew closer, he finally saw what the Mechanicus's most brilliant Archmagos was doing.
A massive Warp-Fold Engine was suspended in midair, bristling with cables and data lines of varying thickness that wired into a cogitator array. The sheer size of the array dominated Alexei's line of sight.
Most surprising of all was a crude, haphazard mechanical structure hanging nearby, similarly tethered to the cogitator array.
Draped in his Martian red robes, Cawl's towering form stood before the cogitator array, emitting a continuous stream of nonsensical binary code. A swarm of servitor skulls buzzed around him, seemingly logging data. He didn't notice Alexei's arrival right away.
Alexei already understood what he was looking at. That chaotic mechanical construct was Cawl's attempt to reverse-engineer the Warp-Fold Engine, though it had clearly hit another bottleneck.
As he watched, Cawl's mechanical appendages suddenly flicked across the cogitator array. The makeshift replica engine began to emit a deafening roar and violent vibrations as massive surges of power were fed into it.
As the shaking grew increasingly violent, the sharp stench of singed components filled Alexei's nostrils, followed by thick plumes of smoke erupting from the replica engine. "Damned machine!" Cawl roared, terminating the test.
As the replica engine fell silent, the cursing Cawl finally noticed the Governor of Aiur standing behind him. "You come at an opportunistic moment. Tell me, what on Terra is the underlying mechanism of this blasted engine?"
Alexei gave a helpless shrug. "Regrettably, I'm no engineer. I know nothing about its inner workings. It was fabricated directly from an STC template—none of us know how it functions."
At this, Cawl barked out another string of furious binary. To him, only two primary objectives mattered right now, and cracking the secret of the Warp-Fold Engine was one of them. Now, he had inevitably run into a wall; he couldn't comprehend where the spatial-tearing energy originated. That power seemed to belong neither to the materium nor to the Warp.
And what about that strange sub-dimensional corridor? A realm that existed outside the material universe, outside the Webway, and outside the Warp entirely.
"Curse it all," Cawl grumbled again, stepping forward on his multi-legged mobility servo-system to face Alexei. "I have no fresh leads on this thing right now. I need to travel abroad; perhaps I'll find inspiration elsewhere."
"Are you leaving?" Alexei asked. He knew it had been nearly seven months since their return to Aiur. The region around Macragge was likely still suffering under the Godblight, and Guilliman would soon embark on his desperate Terran Crusade in a matter of days.
"Leaving? No, only I am going," Cawl said, lowering his head. "Kran will remain here. With our newly developed comms gear, we can stay in contact at any time. I have other duties to attend to."
The Archmagos's massive frame brushed past Alexei. "I will return. Keep this place reserved for me. I 'will' figure out this engine; I'll find a way..."
Alexei watched Cawl's retreating back. Originally, the Archmagos had only a single obsessive goal: to study Necron Blackstone structures, replicate them to seal the Great Rift in the material universe, and permanently calm the tides of the Warp.
Now, Alexei's arrival had given Cawl a second obsession—cracking the Warp-Fold Engine so the Imperium of Man could break free from Warp travel and jump across the physical universe with complete freedom.
"There will definitely be progress the next time you return," Alexei said softly. He knew exactly where the replica engine's design fell short.
It was a problem he couldn't solve personally either, but as his own abilities unlocked and leveled up, Alexei was confident every hurdle would be overcome. When that day came, they would be able to manufacture their own Warp-Fold Engines, even without relying on the system.
"Inevitably," Cawl's voice echoed from the distance.