Mining world descending into anarchy and cannibalism as supplies run out. This is trying to get back to the punchier style of earlier posts and failing miserably.
Mining
worlds in the Imperium are extractive, but the limited technology of the 41st
millennia makes extraction by hand one of the most common means to render down a
rocky world. This requires billions of human labourers and support structures,
all which require food and oxygen. The planet Four therefore contained only the
bare minimum of atmosphere required to sustain the workforce. And food is
brought in every 20 years by circuit charterists.
Four is the
first and only rocky planet, leading to much local humour. Roiling far too
close to the small red star Demekog. A thin atmosphere allows breathing with
difficulty amid the cooking landscape and the mines below merely baking
darkness.
The Charterist had left but 5 years into the
20-year cycle when WAAGH!! Gaddzmax cut off Four from Ajax, the
only stable route through the warp. That was some 30 years ago.
41th Planetary Governor, Yoseph the Wisher, The Great
Ballif of the World, made the only smart decision of his life when he heard the
news. He gave a down-tools order to ensure the population would not work itself
into hunger faster. However, he didn’t follow through with any more good
reforms. Four’s mines delve into the crust in a network of ultraviolet-infused
tunnels, with thousands of years of isolation and linguistic diversion separating
the mineshafts into cultural and phenotypically diverse regions. Each shaft
tribe was paid a set rate of food for their quota and suddenly the traditional had
been broken. Food distribution had always been subject to their arbitrary of
the powerful, but now there was no measure of worth except for the opinions of
the Sub-Bailiffs, who were expected and did favour their own tribes.
With hunger came violence, exacerbated by Yoseph’s decision
to move onto half-rations to ensure that the world could survive until help
arrived. Yoseph saw the issue as a self-solving one. As conditions worsen, the population
will hold on, minimising their strength and occasionally feuding, each death
contributing to the corpse-starch reserves, which always formed a supplement in
the cyclical diet.
But as the years dragged on and the favouritism starved the
outcastes, the violence metamorphosed into general anarchy. Pit-Chiefs would band
together to overthrown Sub-Bailiffs, traditional worker and quota raids began
to target isolated and non-productive people for death to render down into corpse-starch.
And in the galleries where the defeated regroup, not even waiting for
industrial processing. Each Shaft-City is surrounded by a dissolving network of
tracks, canals and galleries, each isolated light slowly waning.
Yoseph has not improved matters, the Incarnate of the Master
of Mankind has always appeared weighted down with fat, to demonstrate his power
and authority. From Shaft-City Boyoma, he paces his palace, hoarding supplies
and threatening the populace into supporting him with nearly true tales of the
cannibals in the darkness. His traditional authority has been slipping, and he
has ordered that one per family or 1 in 10 randomly chosen people to be killed
and processed when recapturing each rebellious region. He craves control over
any other source food, for that is where all other power flows.
Though the Three Holy Ministries Sect predominated, the
chaos of the famine has resulted in new religious groups arising in each of the
tunnel networks. Shaft-City Malpool rules Khis, where the traditional
missionary movement remains; Administrative, Ecclesiarchy and Navy.
Shaft-City Stan is home to the Adeptus Mechanicus and central corpse-starch
processors. Though the death trains arrive only from pro-Governor or recaptured
regions. The Techpriests of Subprodey has traditionally seem Four as a
backwater posting, leading to a small number of foreign seniors cowering in
their monastery while the local enginseers tend to the external machines. It’s
becoming a sore point for them.
The other major force to emerge is the cult of the Gardener Emperor.
Which has benefitted from the patronage of the Techpriests via the sole Genetor
on the planet. The Emperor tends the garden of souls, pruning the unjust and
the failures and encouraging the growth of the righteous, until their time has
come to achieve their harvest, their foretold destiny. The Emperor is patient, just,
firm and not arbitrary. To grow is to live in hope for a greater purpose, a
good life that will come to those who are righteous. The gardeners emphasise
this with the cultivation of fungi and even in rumoured greenhouses peaking
into the surface, actual green plants. This food source makes them very popular
even if little trickles down in the form of the Gren Pea Communion.
In the deep networks of Azappo, a dark flower has bloomed to
replace the Mask-wearing Emperor-Talkers. The First Ministry is not the Administrative,
the People of Four are, and the Az are The True People. Though not yet a Chaos
Cult, the Inquisition would disagree that the Cannibal Cults of the Az People believe
in a correct Emperor. Who condones the rule of the strong over the weak, who
revel in the power and the pomp for the fear and subjugation it inflicts and
who profess the desire to torture and consume the bodies of those they deem
lesser. To fuel their holy cause of insuring Mankind’s survival in their lightless
universe.
But yet:
“He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium, for whom a thousand souls die every
day, for whom blood is drunk and flesh eaten. Human blood and human flesh – the
stuff of which the Imperium is made.”
Much the same could be said for the raiding clans of Tip,
which much to impoverish their neighbours and deliver quotas religiously until
the famine. The Tip network was the first to collapse completely, Yoseph having
a deep dislike of the Tip ethnic group and their habit of importing weapons on
the sly and the surrounding regions disliking their use of the same weapons.
This has ironically saved them in their own eyes. Their wealth had meant they
could afford their own corpse-starch plant, and it was the sole thing they
could get running again after Boyoma was destroyed in the 10th year
of the famine. The Emperor had tested them and scoured the weak and the impious
from them. The survivors could simply recycle the countless bodies of the dead
as normal. Retaining their civilisation as the planet fell into outright cannibalism.
Cannibalism is fortunately rare in the network of Lund. More
the preoccupation of isolated people whose galleries and shafts were already
seen as backwaters. The narrow band of normality for Four is centred around the
Shaft-Cities of Lub and Choc. Though having grown well from quotas and raiding,
the mines were under heavy threat from Tip and from Azappo once Yoseph removed
his forces to secure his powerbase. The shaft-cities have been saved by an
unlikely emissary from space, the reinforcement of the Third Holy Ministry of
the Navy.
Fran Warpmaster is a scion of the renegade Charterists and pirates
of Annajmal Khali. Upon hearing about the isolation of Four, some five years after
the start of the famine, he arrived with a great cargo of irradiated food from
Nazgool, having acquired it through the Mutie Trade. He hoped to use the food
to tempt the mutant inhabitants of Four to rebel, and instal him as governor before
the route was reopened. Upon arrival he found that the inhabitants of Four were
fairly mutation free, having been chosen for their ultraviolet resistance. No
matter, he has been funnelling food and weapons to Lund, gaining their loyalty
as he performs seemingly miraculous transits through unstable and unknown warp
routes back to Annajmal Khali and Wraith.
He hopes to inspire the population to revolt and instal him
as the new Kastor, before the radiation-drenched food triggers too many
deliberating tumours and mutations. He brings with him a more unorthodox
Imperial worship, one which prioritises the need for success and flexibility of
traditions. Focusing on the problems of now over the problems of the future and
the need to obey him as the chosen Man-Angel of the Emperor. He supports this
with the title of Doctor of Theology, which might be legitimate, though would
never be endorsed by Vito.
Once mastermind of the world, Fran plans to syncretise the traditional
Emperor-Spirit cults he finds so aesthetic with a production-focused ethos that
not-coincidently will allow him the theological groups to loot the place even
more thoroughly than Yoseph did. He will pay in vast amount of money he has yet
to own to get inside Yoseph’s palace. He was mad to start with to think of this
scheme and he will get more maniacal if he gains unchecked power.
The irony of Four is that the warp route from Ajax has been
safe since the Imperial Navy swept the Orks from the void some 15 years ago. No
one has yet dared pass though the official designation of Warzone.
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