I had to admit I was a little stunned. We had intended to make a survey of the manufactoria and narrow down our list of candidates. It seemed vanishingly improbable that we would have had success so soon. I suppose there was something to be said for sheer dumb luck. We followed Ortega down a cracked ferocrette alley. My feeling of unease increased as I realized that some of the newer gang tags included what might have been the sigil of the Son's of the Fen. As we approached a loading bay door it began to wind open with the flatulent stench of high pressure steam.

I stepped under the door and found myself facing a surprised looking man in a scribes robe and a team of worker shifting crates. I whammied him hard. I am normally a soft touch with my psychic powers but I didn't have time for dinner and a holo. The scribe stiffened and then smiled.

"Master Deckard, we weren't expecting you so early," he said, his words garnering arched eyebrows from his crew. It is an interesting experience editing someone's mind in real time. In the foreman's mind he was telling his men to hurry up, the words I was putting into his mouth unheard. Editing the two experiences together was the art, a combination of long practiced skill and the new Ordo techniques Hadrian had instructed me in. Even so the foreman would be paying for this with a splitting headache later today as he fought the cognitive dissonance. I was just pleased the ambient tempreature was too hot for me to start coating everything with hoarfrost right away.

"Please head right on through," He/I said, waving with his clipboard. We walked past and I gave him/me a nod, trying desperately to avoid swaying while I walked. Ortega didn't exactly relax, I think he might have been genetically incapable of doing so, but he seemed to radiate a bit less suspicion. We moved through the loading dock and into the manufactoria proper. It was an immense edifice. Massive vaulted arches stretched skyward, crisscrossed by gangways at various levels. Heat blasted out from great glowing furnaces that reduced steel ingots to glowing metallic lava and spurted it into massive troughs that carried it down towards great vats that smoked and sent up curtains of sparks. Workers in ancient leather heat suits moved among the arcane machinery, prodding at the streams of metal with long poles or scanning it with crude looking auspex units. No one was paying attention to us, their eyes fixed on their tasks. The whole placed smelled acrid of ash and chemicals. Great clouds of sparks rained down from above and gusted up from below.

"Horus' balls," I breathed at the vast inferno in front of us. I wondered what this must have been like for a Son of the Fen, coming to this place of fire after spending their whole life in a dank swamp. I felt a curious sense of of pity for the man we were hunting. I glanced back at Hadrian, a little overwhelmed at the space before us.