I kept to the shadows, moving through the dragon's belly as quietly as I knew how. Stealth was not my first choice, but my training proved useful and I was not noticed by the servitors patrolling the manufactorum's innards. I noticed that these ones carried heavier multi-barrelled autoguns and melta weapons and had carapace plating. Combat models.

As I progressed through the bowels of the manufactorum, a terrible sound rose from the bowels of the facility; a deep, unstable roar like an earthquake's early trembling. Beneath it like an undercurrent there were screams. Horrible, terrified wails. Panicked cries. Men dying.

Technicians, supervisors, Adeptus…whatever men still living inside this hellish place that could be called men were dying. Their own machinery was falling apart around them.

I could possibly find the security cogitator and activate the safeguards that Weiss had disengaged, to further slow the factory's inevitable disintegration. But to what purpose? The dragon was dying. Weiss was infinitely more experienced than I in the ways of techno-arcana; if he wished this facility to destroy itself, there was little I could do to truly prevent it.

And if I spent time hunting down the control room, Weiss would have time to escape.

I conveyed this news to Jack, and told him to alert the Skitarri. He informed me a moment later that a strike team and a disaster crew were on their way. I had no less than twenty minutes. It would be enough.

The Adeptus Mechanicus were inhuman. But they were not evil inherent; they should not have to die like this, trapped under suffocating tonnes of machinery and metal. No man should die like that.

Another crime to add to Weiss' list. Fifteen years had made it a long list.

I would find him, and I would stop whatever radical work that Emperor-cursed cyborg was attempting here. And if that failed…I had the second tube charge on my belt. Just in case.

I passed through into the enginarium, where the manufactorum's plasma reactors were housed. They lay in the centre of the chamber, secure behind four-inch-thick transparent plasteel and numerous radiation shields. Eight thick swathes of power cords and transfer channels snaked across the floor and to sockets in the wall like the spindly legs of a huge, malevolent arachnid. It pulsed softly in the shadows. Like a dragon's guts.

The air was oppressive and stifling, thick with lubricant and the sharp, charred smell of plasma. Heat fell off the reactors in tangible, shimmering waves, washing over the bare skin of my face. The chamber was lit by a soft blue afterglow that, I realised, emanated from the inert reactors themselves. As I approached the radiation shields, I felt the faint background humming, rattling my bones and setting my teeth on edge. Even with their power forcibly shut off, they still growled. Like dormant volcanoes.

A quick inspection showed me where several maintenance hatches had been abruptly torn away. The red paint was scored and chipped along each frame where crowbars had been forced in and centuries of sacred salves and lexmechanical seals had been broken.

I peered into one of the open covers and saw rows of copper-bound power cells wet with black lubricant, insulated electrical routing and lagged iron pipes. Transfer clips had been attached to some of these cells, and wires attached to them ran back to an evidently new module box bolted to the reactor casing. A digital rune on the displayed flashed crimson on and off.

This was where Weiss had triggered the machine spirit's activation process. I was not surprised that he was able to do it. I had seen him do worse with wires and batteries.

Footsteps sounded from across the room. I slid away from the hatch and into the darkness, gripping both pistols tightly.

A man in salvaged Imperial Guard-issue flak armour, complete with helmet and a largely modified heavy stubber. I recognised him. One of Weiss' retinue. I'd severed his left hand a year ago on 23-Tarnis, near the galactic fringe. The reactor's sapphire half-light gleamed off the bionic prosthetic. He walked up to where I had stood and examined the core. Then he put the metal hand to the vox-communicator on his ear.

'My lord, this is Lazarus. The reactor is inactive. Where are you?' There was an inaudible reply. Then the ex-soldier drawled out, 'Yes, lord. The control room had been blown out. Tube charge, from the looks of it.'

A long pause as he listened to the speaker on the other end. 'Are you sure?' he said, and I could hear the sudden anxiety in his voice.

'Holtz is here?' he hissed. I smiled. It's pleasant to be reminded of the effect my name can have on people. I began to leave the shadowed cover of the power coils, carefully slipping one pistol back into its holster. The other was a reassuring weight in my hand.

'No, my lord. Yes. I'll return right away. Lazarus out. The Emperor protects.'

I nearly snarled when I heard that last statement. The nerve.

Lazarus switched off the vox and looked down to check the stubber. I didn't let him finish; I slammed the reinforced grip of the bolt pistol into the back of his head. The helmet absorbed much of the force – without it, the blow would have cracked his skull – but he swooned, giving me time to rip the stubber out of his hands and throw it into the shadows.

I slid my left arm around his neck and pressed the wide muzzle of the boltgun against his sweaty cheek.

'Morning. How's the hand?' I growled.

Lazarus whimpered.

I didn't learn much from Lazarus. Weiss kept devoted servants. Initially, he refused to say anything at all, but he became much more talkative after I shot off his remaining hand.

People would call me cruel for that. That wasn't cruel. Cruelty would be leaving him tied to a reinforced pipe in the enginarium to bleed to death, without his prosthetic or his vox.

I did that as well.

Lazarus had held his tongue well – loyalty was an admirable trait, and it was sickening to find it in one such as him – but from him I learnt that Weiss was retreating to the primary assembly line near the top floors of the manufactorum, that he and his retinue were hastily evacuating the planet via orbital shuttle, and that I was a bastard. Of two of these I was already aware.

But this begged the question; why? Why would Weiss attempt something so blatant as an act of mass terrorism against the Adeptus? What could he hope to gain from attacking a servitor assembly line?

I banished the questions from my mind and left Lazarus bleeding behind me. Questions signify doubt, and blessed is the mind too small for doubt.

I pondered the meaning of that mantra as I moved towards the stock elevator at the other end of the enginarium, amidst the distant, echoing wails of the dying, and Lazarus' increasingly weak pleas for mercy.

The handless man's vox-communicator began to spew static just as I entered the elevator. I bent to pick it up. The white noise cleared and a familiar voice came from the other end. Harsh, intangible, muddled by vox interference, but I knew it well.

'Lazarus, come in. Lazarus, come in.' I'd recognise that thinly accented voice anywhere.

I looked at it for a second, momentarily speechless. An idea presented itself. I pressed the receiver rune and held the vox to my mouth.

'Weiss, is that you?'

No response.

'I know it's you.'

There was a long pause. Then, 'Lazarus?'

'Dead. Or soon to be, although if you can get here quickly enough you could probably stop the bleeding.'

'You won't win.'

'We're the Inquisition, Victor. We always win.'

There was a moment of dead silence before the vox was cut off from the other end. I let the machine fall to the floor and crushed it. Then I checked the ammunition in my pistols and made sure the sword was within swift reach.

The elevator hummed softly as I ascended to the highest floors. When I reached them, this would end. Fifteen years, and it was all coming to an end.

The lift ground to a trembling halt some three floors from the top. I exited via the emergency hatch and, after a brief climb up the walls of the shaft, forced the doors open.

A shot rang out. A las-shot. It hissed past my head as I left the shaft, sizzling in the chemical air and missing my face by a hand's breadth to shatter against the elevator controls. There was a warning siren.

I leapt out from between the two iron doors, tumbled and landed just as the stock elevator's emergency protocol cut in, its doors slamming shut vigorously. I would have been inadvertently bisected.

I fired twice down the passage, alarmed at the noise the Lucius made.

Two more las-shots flickered down back at me.

Sheltering behind an iron bulkhead, I switched to auto and emptied a full clip down the length of the hallway. It was like holding a thunderstorm in one hand. The las-shots ceased.

I swung back into cover, exchanging clips. A few more spits of laser drizzled past me and into the floor, leaving ashen grooves in the metal. Then a voice. Harsh, metallic.

'Holtz? Samuel, is that you?'

Weiss. There was barely ten metres between us. Fifteen years and ten metres.

'Samuel, you must listen to reason. This vendetta you pursue is nothing but madness – '

I answered by sending a hail of bolts from the second pistol in the direction of his voice. There was a saddened pause before I was answered in turn by a stream of bullets and las-beams. The heavily concentrated fire tore fat chunks out of my cover.

I grabbed one still-hot lump of metal and hurled it overarm across the hall. It clanked into a patch of shadow and Weiss' two combat servitors, trained to fire based on sensory input and not common sense, concentrated their fire on an empty space.

I stepped out, sighted through the targeter and fired. His servitors were good shots; quick to draw a bead and quicker to fire. But I was faster, and I could think.

I caught the first standing in the open in the middle of the shadowed hallway, its shoulder-implanted stubber chattering away at the wall. It turned to face me as I stood. The bolt made a hole in the midst of its forehead. In a vivid fraction of a second, I caught its expression – it may have been smiling – just before the deuterium round exploded and the servitor's head disappeared.

The second whirred around at its companion's death, realised its mistake and began firing.

One of the laser shots scorched the sleeve of my bodyglove. The Lucius kicked and roared. The shot slammed into its teeth and blew out the sides of its skull. It fell slack-jawed to the ground.

I heard heavy, uneven footsteps amidst the clamour of collapsing machinery and crumbling walls. Weiss was running.

I ran too, across the vaults and through the hallway. The foundations of the building screamed. The walls quivered with its death throes. The noise was apocalyptic. I pray that I never hear its like again; it was like being in the epicentre of the end of the world.

The grille roof above me turned the dusty red light into a series of rapidly flickering lines. Sweat poured off me as I ran. Air burned in my lungs.

As we crossed into a third corridor, I sighted Weiss running parallel to me. We were separated by a ten-metre gap inhabited by some fifty-metre long spinning work of the Adeptus. He saw me and stopped and twisted on his bionic leg to raise the spitting plasma torch in his left hand.

I ducked backwards as the blue-white flare ripped across the gap between us and drilled deep into the far wall.

A glimpse was all I had of him; tall, wiry, every inch of skin other than his head wrapped tightly in black leather, the grimy light gleaming from his single augmetic eye and the iron sections of his torso. He ran with a heavy limp, but was fast and untiring. Every hasty step ejected superheated steam from his left kneecap.

I fired back, but he was running again, his black stormcoat flying out behind him.

I ran on, glimpsed him in the next hollow and fired again. At the next, nothing. I paused and reloaded before pulling off the outer sections of my suit. It was becoming hellishly hot inside the stomach of MC-three-fourteen.

Cerise had frequently used combat stimms in situations such as this. I shunned them, knowing too much about their after-effects, but it was at times like this that I wished I'd taken up on the ex-convict's offer. A single 'Slaught injection would have allowed me to catch up to Weiss, tackle him to the ground and beat him to death with his own metal leg. But I did not, and here we are.

Well, Cerise wasn't, but that was life. I comforted myself by focussing on my hatred.

I reached and climbed a set of staircases, covering each turn with the pistol as Cerise had once taught me. I heard a machine noise, heavy and industrial. Flickering chemical globes set in wall-brackets illuminated the way. Through another forced service door, I exited into what a stencilled brass plaque identified as the assembly area. Smoke coughed and noise rolled from behind the hatch.

The assembly chamber was vast, three stories, with vaulted roofs and layer upon layer of iron railing supporting countless machines and monitoring cogitators. The rumbling equipment it contained was ancient and immense. The chamber was dominated both by a colossal assembly line – a single unbroken tread upon which the dismembered parts of servitor bodies lay in disarray – and also by a huge, broad glass skylight that spanned the length of the west wall and rose two levels high.

The entire factory floor was illuminated almost solely by the light from this enormous window, casting the chamber into a dusty ruby half-light that birthed myriad shadows and murky crevices. The dragon's heart. The heat was abominable.

This assembly was sixty metres long and constructed from cast-iron and copper painted in matt-red lead paint. All along its length, it birthed dozens of veins in the form of waist-thick conduits and heat-exchangers that intertwined with the other machinery, creating a labyrinth of snake-like cords wreathed in smoke and steam. Unfinished servitors hung limply from a production chain like hunks of meat hanging from abattoir hooks. They swayed gently in the wind, like hanged men.

I moved on cautiously and clambered up a ladder frame onto a raised platform of metal grille. The vox-bead chimed in my ear. It was Jack. I could barely hear him over the noise.

'Black Soldier, reporting. Praetorian reinforcements in eight. Hexenhammer engaged. Circling facility on western side. Enemy shuttle located. Pattern?'

I considered. I was in no mood to take chances. 'Initiate pattern thunderbolt.'

'Pattern thunderbolt confirmed,' said Jack happily. 'Firelight's retribution comes.'

There was a distant, shuddering roar from outside. A monumental shadow passed over the room's great window, and for an instant it blacked out the sun.

'Black Soldier out. The Emperor pro–'With a sudden hash of static, Jack's vox line was brutally cut off. I recognised that as a sign of a communications breach.

A familiar voice sounded in my ears.

'Hello, Samuel.'

I paused. He had made upgrades since we last met.

'Morning, Victor.'

'I thought you may wish an opportunity for us to speak privately. There are matters we must discuss.'

'We have nothing to discuss.' I could not stay the bitterness from entering my voice.

'On the contrary,' he rasped through the vox. 'I must at least try and reach a diplomatic solution with you, Samuel. You, with what you have seen, should realise why my work is so vital – '

'Your work is suicidal,' I spat. 'It is sown in death and death is all you will reap.'

'What I will reap is life, Samuel. Life in its purest form, in its deadliest form. I will create life.'

'You will create a heresy.'

'Your rhetoric is, as always, narrow-minded. Too narrow for your own good. You are an intelligent man, but your stubborn ignorance cripples you.'

'Ignorance is bliss.'

'Has your life been blissful lately?' he said plainly.

I said nothing. I was beginning to suspect he was merely delaying me. It was succeeding. This was the longest conversation we'd had for ten years.

'I present you with a choice. Walk away. Place your guns on the ground and leave the manufactorum before its destruction. Forget about me, and you can live to fight the Emperor's enemies another day. But stay here, struggle, and you will die. I will not let you interfere with my work a second time.'

'Weiss, I don't care about your work. I don't care about your science or your plans. I want you dead. What you did was… inexcusable. And I can never forgive you. I will hunt you until one of us lies dead before the other.'

Silence. White noise. Then, slowly, carefully, Weiss answered

'I am truly sorry. Once, years ago, I had hopes that we might be friends. A pity.'

'An Inquisitor does not know pity.'

'Truly. Please, Samuel. You have resisted my every attempted at reconciliation, but you are a worthy and cunning opponent, and for that I will give you a moment. Then I will kill you.'

The vox snapped off.

There was a flicker of movement in the corner of my eye a half-second after Jack cut the vox. A las-shot rang out and snapped the railing of the platform I stood on. The second and third flew past my head as I dropped to a crouch and returned fire. Both pistols shuddered. The bolts left trails of smoke as they sliced the thick air.

I saw, high up amidst the second tier of the assembler's myriad levels of machinery, a bulky shape waver and fall. More materialised behind it, distant, but within range. A trap. I'd walked straight into it.

The smoke was lit by a half-dozen flares as they found their target and let loose.

Gunfire of various types hailed down towards where I stood. I wasted no time. I leapt up and over the railing and landed on top of the assembler itself. An inaccurate volley of bolt fire sent me seeking cover behind an iron partition. Beneath me, the great machine lay dormant.

Over the surge of noise, I heard an enthusiastically vox-amplified voice shouting. I strained to hear.

'He cowers there. Pin him down!'

I risked a glimpse at my attacker's position. Four or five servitors standing in formation on the rail, weapons blazing, and behind them a tall figure in thick maroon robes directing their fire. I saw the four sinuous, snake-like limbs protruding from its back. They told me all I needed to know. It was Lambert, Weiss' pet Magos.

And behind Lambert and his machines, I saw a limping man limp shamble through the smoke and clamber up a ladder on the western end.

A concentrated salvo forced my head back down. I tried to vox Jack for help. The bead was silent. Weiss had jammed the channels.

'Strike him! Firing pattern 46-B-delta!'

Gunfire thudded into the partition. I felt the metal behind my back heat up from the las-blasts.

It was a stark choice. If I stayed, Weiss escaped and everything, Cerise's death, would be for nothing. If I left cover, I would be torn to shreds.

The building trembled.

I could not let Weiss escape. There was another path. I touched the silver tube hanging from my belt.

I rose from my crouch and broke into a low, fast dash across the assembler. Bless the Throne, but it took a heartbeat for the servitor's sluggish targeting systems to track my mad sprint. Instead of tearing into my flesh as I had expected, their bullets undershot me and echoed off bare metal. The air filled with the seething smell of cordite and laser discharge. Two more shots sliced into the edge of the platform deck before me and gouged through the grille.

I took a leap from the top of the assembly machine, and fell ten feet back to the bottom floor. I struck the concrete surface with bone-crunching force. Gunfire slashed past me, bullets grazing my torso. It was thankfully inaccurate.

I crawled a few feet and fell prone behind a thick cable. The barrage stopped. I began to edge across the factory floor.

'Activate heat senses. Find him. Find him now!'

The Imperial-standard tube charge is a Guard issue demolition weapon intended primarily to unlock blast doors and flatten certain mission objectives. Stormtroopers and assault units make common use of it, and it was through Jack that I found a steady supply. I believe he builds them from spare parts found during our campaigns. Cerise had always liked using them. She liked explosions.

In terms of sheer destructive power, a tube charge was outclassed by the melta bomb. But a tube charge has a single, surprisingly useful advantage; it can be thrown.

I could see Lambert, standing twenty feet above me; a tall, gaunt figure swathed in a rust-red robe. His mechadendrites swayed and danced snakelike above his head, sharp talons snapping open and shut. The voxponder in his chest was blaring out mathematical orders to the watching servitors in his thick, artificial drone. It was beginning to grate on my nerves. The heat and the constant tremors and Lambert's vexing tones was making my blood boil.

Shut up, Lambert, I thought. Just please, please, shut up.

I keyed in the timer on the tube charge and put it to ten seconds. Then I hurled it overarm from behind a console, and then I ran.

I heard what I hoped was the tube charge landing on Lambert's platform. The Magos abruptly fell silent, which was pleasant, really. I could picture him noticing the tube charge in my mind's eye.

There was a sound of heavy feet dashing across the platform above me. I put my fingers in my ears, ducked inside an alcove and counted.

Then there was a very loud explosion. The manufactorum's tremors swelled somewhat.

Smoke and fire billowed from the eastern side of the factory. Lighted chemicals flickered and danced across the floor. Severed electrical conduits sparked and spat scattered tongues of lightning. I stood, my ears ringing from the force, and surveyed my handiwork. I waved my hand in front of my face to dispel the smouldering fumes.

There was a jagged hole in the far wall that stretched ten feet across. The entire second tier had…well, it had disappeared. Much of the assembler was a gaping wreck, spewing its charred electromechanical intestines out onto the flooring. Weiss had gone, Lambert was no-where to be seen, and his servitors were ashes.

The chamber's single great skylight cracked, and then fell outwards with a deafening shatter. Chemicals and mist flowed in from the jagged breach.

The charred head of a servitor lay next to my right foot. I kicked it into the shadows.

Then I pressed on.

Weiss had ascended through the roof of the assembly chamber with what remained of his retinue and out to a broad landing platform set into the slanting crown of MC-314. We were at the highest point of the forge's reach and the furnace winds were violent and hot.

An orbital shuttle was parked near the far edge of the platform. I saw Weiss and several dark shapes hurrying towards it, some wounded and limping, being supported by the others. Servitors followed them. One noticed me exiting from a service vent and chattered a waring in nonsensical machine-code.

Weiss turned to face me and I could feel his stare. The air shimmered as waves of heat crashed onto the landing pad. He said something to his followers, who hurried onto the shuttle. He stayed.

I approached him, pistols held in both hands. Five combat servitors trained their heavy weapons on me, but Weiss raised a hand and they did not fire. They merely observed us silently, dead eyes seeing and remembering nothing.

'I see you retain your passion for meaningless destruction,' he called out to me over the sound of the wind. 'A shame.'

The vox beeped in my ear and the link was revived. Jack hissed a message.

'Black Soldier, ascending furnace tower. Pattern thunderbolt in progress. Shuttle and Iron Man sighted. Location confirmed.'

I didn't respond. I couldn't yet afford to let Weiss know that his jamming had failed.

Instead, I shouted back out to the renegade.

'The Adeptus Mechanicus are sending reinforcements. You will not escape this forge alive.'

'The Mechanicus will not aid a technophobic Monodominant,' he called back, his voice calm and steady. Yet his adamantium prosthetic hand was clenching and unclenching, a sign of anxiety. I worried him. This was good.

'Then I shall kill you myself,' I replied, raising one bolt pistol. 'You will not escape me, Weiss. You will never escape me.'

'I try and try to reach peace with you, Samuel, but it is futile. You are like a pit hound trained only to bite and never to let go. You would rather that your jaw broke than to let your prey escape. Is this not true?'

'I will take that as a compliment.'

Weiss laughed at my response; a deep, hollow chuckle, almost derisive. He was mere feet away, the closest we had been in years. My right pistol was trained on his skull.

Weiss grinned. Most of his face, like the rest of his body, had been rebuilt from scratch over the years. His was an iron smile, robotic and mechanical. But it still conveyed perfectly the intellectual egotism I had known and hated for a decade and a half.

'Samuel, I have a ship, and you do not. Shall we debate who possesses the better hand?'

I pressed a finger to the bead in my ear. No time to be subtle. I whispered a vox message to Jack.

Then I shouted out to Weiss, 'But I have a trump, old friend.'

What rose then from below the landing platform amidst the infernal twilight, suspension thrusters wailing mournfully, was the Malleus Maleficarum. Five hundred tonnes and forty metres of thrice-layered adamantium and unbreakable armoured hull, twin plasma turbines glowering malevolently and landing struts extended like the limbs of some ancient, elephantine behemoth. The mere force of its presence was enough to make the unstable platform shudder.

It had once been a Thunderhawk gunship in service to the blessed Adeptus Astartes, but time and circumstance had pushed it into my hands, and over the decades it had changed as I had changed. The burgundy daylight gleamed from the barrels of autocannon and hellfire missiles. Spotlights mounted below its blunted nose bathed Weiss and his servitors in stark white light.

I saw Weiss' jaw fall open momentarily at the sight, before he turned and took a step towards the shuttle. That brief movement was enough for Jack. His temper was fuelled, his mind empty but for the thought of Cerise, dead and gone forever. He let loose.

I didn't quite see what happened after that, because I was preoccupied with finding some sort of cover with all haste. It's thankful that Jack did not use the Malleus' missiles or the monstrous dorsal battle lance; that would have obliterated me, Weiss, the servitors, the orbital shuttle and virtually the entire landing pad.

But even without the major weapons, its rage was a terror to behold.

Heavy bolters and autocannon mounted on the ends of the short wings opened fire and showered the platform with a storm of tracer fire. Concrete cracked and cratered. I glimpsed a servitor being methodically shredded into a liquid soup of bone and flesh before an autocannon round obliterated the spongy remnants of its torso. A stray autocannon shell splintered the casing of a fuel reservoir and fire fountained aloft in a radiant inferno, settling down across the deck in a gentle rain.

Weiss, more intelligent than his drones, had limped towards the shuttle before the Malleus fired. I shouted after him wordlessly and leapt out of cover. Jack saw this and quickly silenced the cannons. I gave chase, stumbling over debris and corpses. My pistols flared and shuddered, but the distance was too great and all I did was chip the shuttle's paintwork.

Weiss disappeared into the entry hatch. I saw the struts rise and the lift thrusters engage as Jack's second solid-shot barrage detonated ineffectually against the shuttle's hull. He could not use the missiles for fear of killing me in the blast, and without the missiles the shuttle was impenetrable.

He chose to let Weiss escape to save me. I cannot say I appreciated his choice.

The shuttle ascended into the smog-deepened atmosphere. I fired pointlessly at its departing shadow and felt crippled, impotent, as the burning fuel seared my skin and the Malleus Maleficarum bellowed its wrath to an empty red sky.

A/N: Second chapter. Read and review. Complain. Criticise. Mock. Etc. Blagh. Tired.