40K System - Chiron

Probably my longest one as it was the second one I came up with and originally didn't have a cohesive theme.

Chiron

Hiveworld suddenly having to shoulder all the burdens

A small dim red star maintains only two rocky planets. Breathable Chirona and airless Chirob. Chirona is the main hiveworld of the subsector, some 30,000,000,000 estimated inhabitants places it in the lower middle range of the 30,000+ listed hiveworlds.

With the almost complete destruction of Kastor’s Folly, Chirona has suddenly found itself in the awkward potion of being the major supplier of both taxes and manpower tithes for the subsector, with Vito unrelenting in maintaining the dues to demonstrate the continual strength of the region in the face of Orkish aggression.

A hundred hives line the planet in long looping lines, linked by great via-rails, each which is a narrow city in their own right. One cannot count the numbers of gangs, noble houses, guilds and sump-tribes which form the concrete bees.

Tribes of roving nomads and tailing-oasis purifiers eke out a living in between, avoiding the dust storms and transporting cargo between the via-rail lines. As the technology to build them has supposedly been lost. Rumors say their trade routes follow pre-Hive highways and so the unnamed cultures might be descendants of the ancient motor gangs of the 37^th millennia. Such rumors are near-heresy to the lorry-guilds as it implies that they were unable to successfully pursue their ancient but local crusades. They insist with all the wealth and threats they can muster that the nomads are descendants of lower-hive exiles, who couldn’t achieve their anointed fates of dying in the wastes.

The spaceport of Cenorbi is an anomaly. Once a vast landing zone, it has the capacity to house 40,000,000 people, or the estimated complement of daily spaceship traffic if need be. What it does house is 200,000,000 refugees from Kastor’s Folly, crammed into fleeing chartist ships during the WAAGH!! Working their way to only other hiveworld in the sub-sector. They were dumped here, forming a vast camp on the plain that chokes and disassembles the hangers, terminals, maintenance bays and storage pits with their lean-tos and tents. Who knows how many of the recorded have perished or fled to join some hive in upheval?

The 2,000,000 workers of the skeleton crew-settlement feel overwhelmed and have turned to their traditional foes, the nomads to maintain order. Among the new generation of increasingly feral Kastorians, who know nothing but the invisible boundaries of old gangs and the cruelty of the winds, the nomads cultivate the most vicious for their warbands. To move them back is a lesser priority that will cost yet more and could see them spill away into the wastes.

The interlocking combination of power players is proving to be a real headache for the planetary government. The increased extractive burden seems to slip from each group, deferred to another by cunning law-speakers, bribes and informing. No one wants to give up more wealth and personnel in case rivals pounce upon them. In such a closed system of power, there is only one form of advancement, the eventual disposal of the governor and assumption of the throne. Even the most benevolent of leaders see it as the final achievement.

Desperate to make up the numbers, the government has turned to a more extreme form of trog regiments. Normally trogs are “recruited” from the lower hive scum, barely a more than several gangs and prisoners, grouped into a paper regiment through press gangs and religious zeal. But now the governor seeks to press-gang mutant slave levies and worse send them to Ajax. Total outrage has been the result, mutant levies are only for the most desperate defenses. Had not the mutants of Kastor’s Folly achieved purgatory by their sacrifice holding back the Orks?

Such naysayers are headed by the Arcbishop, who as per the agreement with the Cardinal of Vito, is also the Archbureaucrat of the planetary Adeptus Administratum. A position wrangled by the higher Sector Cardinal in exchange for the deployment of the Sisters of Battle in far-flung wars, centuries ago. Such a potent combination denies the governor the official approval to deploy such forces, but the governor refuses to back down, imprisoning untold number of mutants in lightless cavern domes to train them into an army fit to die.

More complications can be found on the Sagi Gun Moon, the first moon that guards the system with cannons capable of hitting the halo belt. In order to sure up the defenses, the government has commanded more shifts and more crews from the proud Bastioners. The first decade was met satisfactorily, but as Vito remains increasingly fortified and Warworld Ajax absorbs more warriors, the paranoia has grown. With not enough Gunfalones, the governor has commanded the transportation of loyal people to establish new bastions.

This is a cultural clash that is seen as threatening the very fabric of the moon. The Bastioners have lived in watchful patience for 3000 years and cultural traits have diverged slowly but inevitably from the medley of hive-defenders. Who in turn, amid their own cultures, cling to their loyalty to the governor, commonly seen as the appointed hand of the Emperor. No Hive would let its defenders go without great payment, straining the vaults even more and upending the social contract.

Subjects serve as a responsibility, the quotas from above set by custom and justified by faith. But if money is now exchangeable for loyalty, then any assumed hierarchy is now at risk. Noble titles might be meaningless, gang leaders cannot rely on strength alone and fears of heretics paying those told to believe without question. Throne-Fever has gripped some hives, with loyalties changing daily as tiny fractions of money are offered. This “Nova-Rich” lifestyle has fueled the ascendancy of lower-hive gangs and traders, who have fewer social strictures and in turn encouraged gang warfare and new economic dynamism. New brutal slave-factories grow, old domes are purged for refurbishment and gladiator voxcasts echo. Pretensions to nobility and so mastery of society entice gang-lords.

War has gripped these places, hardening fears against the governor’s extractions. The governor has moved to the position that the divine order is unchangeable but the Social Wars are simply another means in which the Imperium clears away the impure and reveals the innate nobility of the pure human genome amid the dross. Taking a percentage of wealth and war-captives.

The Governor is reaching deep into his own family’s treasury to fund the press-gangers, the new gunners and the bribes to the Administratum. For deep in the holy records are the promises and exceptions made by millions of organizations that the governor can ply for the needed tithes. Rumbles of family tensions grow as in-laws press their own dissatisfactions.

The financial woes do not stop there. On the Mining World of the Ile Moon and in the Belt Mines of the Halo, the Guilds are unable to properly respond to the buck-shifting of Chirona. Increasingly, providing more of the new quotas for the last two decades, the guilds have decided enough is enough and declared the Ile Moon and belt to be an independent mining world. Such a world might still be subject to the authority of the System capital and may have to provide its own tithes of unaffordable manpower, so negotiations continue.

Chirob remains an outlier. While Chirona professes, as much is possible among a hiveworld to be a proponent of the Holy Body Sect, Chirob is a Mining world of many faiths. The claustrophobic galleries repurposed into pit-cites are home to the biggest monasteries of the Tech-priests in the system. Millions of Holy Body Sect worshippers descend from prior transportation and yet this world and this world alone is the cradle of the Emperor’s Divine Specter sect, the official sect of Kastor’s Folly and Agsuit. Spread by the unrecognized saint Arzarimus, the lavishly decorated shrines and ecstatic visions to him were considered an annoyance to the regular purity rites until the arrival of Kastorian refugees. Some 300,000,000 have swelled the population by a quarter and found common cause with the few guilds and cities governed by sect members. Uniquely the void-merchants, waste-reprocessors and elevator-guilds are descendants from the mining world Four, and so are Three Holy Ministry sect.

Rights are being asserted, and boundary areas are being pushed to establish new areas for the sect to grow. The followers of the Omnissiah and increasingly finding themselves as ill-equipped mediators, air-plant guards and gate wardens. The governor sees this as a self-fixing problem, the more hands there are the faster the galleries will be depleted and so the more can be opened for settlement. And more digging is needed as shipments from Eytry decline. It will just take time Chirob doesn’t have.