А Велисарий наш Коул оказывается тот ещё маньяк-двачер - держит в подвале некронскую тян-криптека, хочет от неё писечку технологии, обыгрывает в шахматы и стебётся.

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Cawl and his guest had begun with one regicide board. Finding it all too easy for both players, they graduated to two, then three, then seven, then twenty-one. Not quite an entirely arbitrary advancement of number; Belisarius Cawl had a fondness for primes and semiprimes. As they played, the game developed, with Cawl introducing fresh variations from across the game’s long history, until they had mastered them all, and Cawl had begun to improvise and they abandoned the boards.
The final iteration was singular, and potentially deadly.
A swarm of suborned necron scarabs hovered in the air between Cawl and his guest, each representing one of the pieces of a regicide layout. The circular board was defined by a fine mesh of lasers; hair-thin and bright. The game seemed standard. No hooded pieces, no Tellessian variant with its sudden switches in strategy and supplementary deck of cards, no wild divinitarchs or player-selected primarch pieces, each with its differing moves. But it wasn’t standard, and Cawl’s twist beat all those dreamed up over the millennia.
‘These variant rules are simple,’ Cawl explained. ‘We take it in turns to select a piece as is usual. The difference comes in control. We are not simply given licence to move them as we will. You will see that these regicide pieces are all artefacts from your godless empire. I will prove my superiority to you by fighting you for control of them. Win control, and you may move your piece, lose control, and you may not, forfeiting your turn, yes? Or perhaps worse…’ He gave a little chuckle.
The personality traits Cawl had selected for the game were: affable, conciliatory, upbeat. None of these sentiments meant anything to his opponent. His opponent’s characteristics were unalterable as adamant and budded off a tree of hate. Being affable made no difference to the way Cawl’s opponent behaved. Hatred hates affability, as hatred hates everything. But Cawl hadn’t chosen his mood for his opponent’s sake. His emotional palette made him feel fine in himself. That was what really mattered.
‘Pointless,’ his opponent growled. Cawl had woken it, opening up the front of its sarcophagus, putting on display this huge and intimidating skeletal being – a necron cryptek of the chronomancer’s order. Millions of years old, made by damned technologies, scion of a master race, the one-time lord of the galaxy, and yet, oddly relatable in its way, for Cawl had been amazed to discover that this being fashioned from metal and animosity regarded itself as female.
‘Primitive,’ she added.
Pettish, despite all that.

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‘I wish to be done with your irksome presence.’
‘That’s impolite for such an honoured guest.’
‘Guest!’ snarled the cryptek.
Cawl’s eyes flicked up to the necron’s face. Perhaps snarl is not the correct word, thought Cawl. Unmoving features cannot snarl, but she put enough venom into her ancient, xenos voxmitter to warrant the term.
‘I am your prisoner,’ she explained. ‘A guest would be free to leave.’
‘I suppose,’ said Cawl. ‘Then again, the circumstances I liberated you from were less ideal than those you find yourself in here. Here you get to live. There, in that Inquisitorial fortress? Limbo…’ He shrugged – always a complicated proposition for the archmagos, no matter which limb set he wore. ‘Death would have been such a waste. Think of all that we shall achieve together, you and I. We have a glorious future ahead of us, that would never have come to pass were it not for me. You are not my prisoner. We are fellow scientists, engaged on a voyage of discovery!’
‘I cannot die, insect. I am immortal!’ Her voice rose. ‘I am AsanethAyu! I am cryptek, chronomancer of the first court of Valdrekh! You are a primitive. Inferior. You ape lost glories you cannot comprehend. You inhabit a shell of rotting flesh and worthless technology.’
The necron’s vox-unit buzzed when she got angry, some deep-level fault in the ancient mechanism. Necron physiologies were fascinating, and as she shouted at him, he idly considered breaking her apart to find out how she worked, not for the first time.
‘We are not fellows. I am your better. You are nothing but a tomb robber. I am a breaker of gods!’ She clenched her fist. ‘One day you shall kneel before me, and beg for your life. When that day comes, I promise you I shall show you no mercy.’
She stopped speaking. The buzz shut off.
‘Yet there you are, in there, in that box, and I’m out here, as free as you like,’ said Cawl. ‘It seems in here, on my ship, that we are more equal than you think.’ Cawl took his turn, pushing aside her attempts to stop the citizen piece protecting his fortress from floating forward.
‘You let that one go,’ Cawl said.
‘If we are equals, set me free.’
‘I’m not going to set you free,’ Cawl tutted. ‘Not yet. Not until you acknowledge that I am right and agree to help me.’ He glanced at a large, vaguely ovoid machine of necron make half covered in a tarpaulin. ‘Teach me how that temporal ark functions, and I shall set you free. You can even stay and work with me, if you like. You have my word you will not be harmed.’
She moved a piece, overwhelming his control so easily he could have sworn she grinned.
‘Liar. You dissemble. You distract. If you must torment me with your simplistic pursuits then let us concentrate upon them so they might sooner be over and I may sleep.’
‘I would have thought you’d have had enough sleep by now.’
‘A million years in stasis is preferable to five minutes with you, you insufferable mammal! Move!’

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‘You have severed my connection to the drones,’ she said. ‘I require them to play.’ She yanked her clawed hands hard against their energy restraints. Green glowed bright. ‘Why? What is about to happen? Are you so craven you remove my ability at the moment of victory?’
‘You will not need them again today,’ said Cawl. ‘I’m about to win.’
‘You are not! Your arrogance is beyond belief.’
‘Coming from such a mistress of that emotion as yourself, I’m flattered. You’ll see in but a moment.’
He waited a second. Bak was reaching a crescendo. When the music quickened, he began.
‘Do you like my music?’
‘You play to its rhythm. That makes you predictable.’
‘I didn’t ask that. I asked if you liked it.’
‘The mathematical progression of the tones is pleasing, yes,’ she said grudgingly.
‘Necrons have music then?’
‘What kind of sentient species does not?’ She hunched down. ‘Necron music is better than this.’
‘I’m sure it is, but please recognise that if this is pleasing, you must admit we are not so primitive. Yes?’
His fortress slid out, next to his ecclesiarch, both pieces commanding all of the board.
‘Fool’s mate.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘There,’ he said, pointing at the board with several pincered appendages. ‘You can make only one move, and if you do, then it will be full mate. So it is fool’s mate.’ The scarab representing AsanethAyu’s empress flipped over and dropped to the deck. He admitted to himself toppling it was an unnecessarily dramatic flourish, rude even, but if you couldn’t have a little fun, what could you do?
‘You did this on purpose. To humiliate me.’
Cawl laughed. ‘I did it because I’m an enormous show-off,’ he said. ‘And I did it because I could. It’s not easy to set up a victory as subtle as this, and in time to the music, no less.’
‘Indeed not,’ said AsanethAyu. The music finished, and Cawl could hear the faint hum of the multiple atomic motors working to move her body. ‘You will not succeed in doing so again. I have seen the pattern.’
‘Life isn’t about reacting in retrospect,’ said Cawl. ‘It isn’t about established patterns either, but the anticipation of patterns to come. One must look ahead. One must be inspired. Like me.’
‘Humiliating your prisoner is inspiring for you. You are a despicable race.’
‘A despicable race is one that periodically wipes out all other lifeforms in the galaxy to million-year cycles to sate its unnatural hungers,’ said Cawl. ‘Being a little mischievous is a far lesser crime, in my well-informed opinion. In any case, I am not trying to humiliate you, I am trying to instruct you that your prejudice against me is poorly founded. I want you to understand, I am your equal. Together, we can help save this galaxy. There need not be hatred between us.’
‘You are nothing, and will be enslaved, used, and the dust of your bones cast onto the stellar winds.’
‘You’re rather melodramatic for a supposed eternal genius, you know that, don’t you?’ Cawl’s long, heavily augmented body uncoiled, and his more or less human torso lifted up, centaur-like, atop the bonded carriage. ‘We shall play again soon. I must go now. I have other matters to attend to.’
‘Tell me how you did this,’ said AsanethAyu, with enough urgency that Cawl suspected he was right and that she did not really relish more stasis time. She gestured at the laser-defined board as well as she could with her restrained hand. Her energy bonds buzzed with the movement.
‘How I won? Practice.’
‘No. Your control. We are both logical creatures. Tell me, how can you lock me out of my own technology so easily?’
‘That’s the wrong question. It’s not so much how I can do it, but why I am able to,’ said Cawl. ‘As you have said to me before, there are similarities between the Cult Mechanicus and you necrons. My fellows do not see it, or if they do, they deny it. But I do. We are kindred beings, to a degree.’
‘Such insight is impressive, for a primitive.’
‘Is that sarcasm again? Really? Fa–’
‘Do not dare to share your fascination with me again!’ AsanethAyu said. Her vox-cast distorted with anger.
Cawl shook his head. ‘I was only going to say that it is you who lacks understanding.’
‘Oh please do enlighten me, most percipient archmagos.’ Something sparkled deep in her single glass eye. ‘That was sarcasm,’ she added.
‘I won because I have a soul. I can improvise. I can take risks you would not. There is more to me than this matter.’ He poked himself in his chest with one of his many limbs. ‘Our creed says the flesh is weak, and so it is. That is why we strive to improve upon it and replace it, as the Machine God desires. But we abandon His numinous gifts at our peril. To give up one’s soul is the great sin of my religion. The soul must be understood, not despised. This is why we are not on the same path. Your kind gave up your souls, and that makes you monsters. Mine never will.’
With a thought, Cawl activated the sarcophagus. The clamshell front began to close.
‘This is outrageous, giving yourself the last word by shutting me up in this–’
The sarcophagus closed with sonorous finality.
‘I suppose it is,’ Cawl said into the silence. ‘But I can do anything, because I am Belisarius Cawl, and you’re my prisoner. That’s rather my point, which I am hopeful you will soon understand. You,’ he said, reactivating the scarabs. Those inactive on the floor powered on and rose silently up, and together, as a swarm, they swivelled to look at him. ‘Clear yourselves away.’ He looked around the crammed archive, the softly shining monoliths, the half-dismantled machines, the overflowing boxes, the crates full of corroded necron skulls and priceless artefacts heaped carelessly on top of each other. ‘I know it doesn’t look like it, but I really can’t abide a mess.’

- Genefather