Life in an imperial armaments factory, a warhammer fanfic

Life in an imperial armaments factory.

Chapter 1(factory)

The steam train chugged ponderously as it hauled its heavy cargo over endless rusty tracks in the vast scrubby arid flatlands, crude wheels screeched along the shoddy worn tracks, and the heavy carriages rattled as they carried their heavy loads of raw materials and fuels.

Engine crewmen worked hard as they shovelled dry wood chips into the steam engine furnace, keeping the crude train moving through their back breaking hard labor.

The arid landscape was seemingly endless, covered in scrub bushes and other arid plants, with only the occasional grox or other herbivores grazing to break the uniform monotony. The train chugged and wheezed its way tirelessly along, passing through the occasional small rural towns that centred around train stations.

This was the planet Bogni Quaternus, an agriculture-heavy civilised world of mixed landscapes on it's four continents, the planet diverse in its regional climates and populations. The planet was home to a few billion people, and more or less completely self sufficient, growing it's own food and manufacturing it's own goods and machinery.

Bogni Quaternus was so big and varied that it would take years to properly visit and explore every town and site it had to offer, but this particular part of the planet was a vast arid flatland of shrubs and scrubland, populated mostly by "groxboys" who herded and grazed the tough grox that thrived here.

The train chugged on without pausing at these occasional country town stations, and the train tracks repeatedly branched off into forks every few tens of miles, the train was scheduled and expected, and the forks were already set for its route, letting it continue without pause.

The steam train meandered over the scrublands on its rusty worn tracks, and eventually came to a vast razor wire fence to either side of the tracks, with a huge billboard sign that read:

THESE LANDS ARE THE PROPERTY OF AMSW INDUSTRIES. TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT.

The tracks went over a cattle grate between the two razor wire fences, guarded by manned pillbox bunkers to either side of the track, and the steam train crossed through without incident, waved through by armed guards at the pillboxes.

The landscape changed now. The scrub and bushes had been almost completely harvested for the small amounts of wood they contained, and even the grass was mostly cut away, the lands harvested mercilessly to feed ravenous industry.

The land beyond the fences was vast and bare, the sprawling sovereign property of the AMSW Industries corporation, one of many corporate entities that ran industries on Bogni Quaternus. These lands were effectively beyond the rule of the local authorities, beholden solely to the bloated corporation that had owned these particular lands for centuries.

The train chugged on, spotting the occasional small seedlings that grew to replenish the relentless harvesting. In places small young scrub plants grew, being deliberately grown to size for eventual harvesting, the corporation was not so foolish as to completely waste the potential of these bare lands.

Crude rusty wind turbines dotted the landscape in particularly windy places, old and worn but still generating power for the merciless demands of industry. Electrical wires with old weather damaged insulation ran over the ground in messy tangles, connecting the turbines together in a grid that stretched across the entire lands.

Old depleted quarries dotted the landscape, now partially filled with toxic industrial waste that they were used as a dumping ground for. Toxic ashes blew sluggishly from these quarries, poisoning the soil all around them with dangerous heavy metals like lead, only slightly hampering the seedlings that tried to grow here.

The train was now passing thousands of long rows of grimy parabolic mirror troughs, angled in a fixed position to catch the sun the maximum amount each day. Dusty black painted metal pipes ran above the troughs at the apex of the collected light, the system was a concentrated solar power station, using the mirrors to concentrate sunlight to heat up oil in the pipes, the hot oil then being stored in vast underground insulated tanks, to be used as needed to boil steam to generate power even at night.

The train belched smoke all over the mirrors as it passed by, and workers with long mops tried their best to keep these filthy mirrors clean enough to keep generating power. It was an extremely labour intensive process.

The train wheezed its way past these solar troughs, and the vast industrial complex beyond finally came into view, a huge warren of factories and warehouses and other buildings, with smoke stacks belching out smog and ash into the polluted hazy air that surrounded it.

The engine crew stopped shovelling now, and the train chugged slower and slower, rattling into a vast industrial train station building to offload its bloated cargoes.

The train hissed as it came to a halt, and the engine crew got to work loading fresh water into the boiler, and refilling the fuel car with dry wood chips sourced mostly from the locally harvested scrub plants.

This was the AMSW Industries facility in the vast Gibson Province, a vast industrial factory that produced 100 percent of all the military equipment for the three entire Imperial Guard regiments raised from Gibson Province, no small task.

The planet Bogni Quaternus was divided into a few hundred provinces, each under the command of a hereditary Earl, and each of these provinces was required to produce and equip no fewer than three regiments for the annual tithe to the Imperial Guard, at least one armoured tank regiment, at least one artillery regiment, and at least one infantry regiment.

These tithe requirements were excessively high and draining on local resources, leaving important infrastructure repaired as infrequently as possible to save resources. Fuel and high tech power resources were reserved almost exclusively for the military and the richer provinces, and the impoverished local civilian sectors of the poverty stricken Gibson Province made do as much as possible with steam engines, wind turbines, and other extremely low tech alternatives just to get by.

Gibson Province was one of the largest in terms of area, but also one of the poorest. The provinces were divided geographically to ensure that each had exactly the same population, leading to some tiny but densely populated provinces and others like Gibson that were huge lightly populated landscapes.

Regardless of the resources of each given province, each was tithed exactly the same, and each had to somehow manufacture its own weapons and vehicles for the excessive annual tithe. The rich urbanised provinces had little difficulty paying this tithe, but for the poorer provinces it was a nightmare.

The hereditary Earls of Gibson Province had not originally had any manufacturing capacity at all when the tithe rules started, so had been forced to turn in desperation to the bloated amoral manufacturing corporation known as AMSW Industries to set up a factory complex, this vast clanking monstrosity that belched out vehicles and gear at a prodigious rate.

AMSW Industries, the acronym short for the merger of Abernathy Muhammad Smith and Wang, was a bloated conglomerate that had a centuries old permanent contract with the Earl of Gibson Province. The Earl provided the corporation with the limited raw materials from his provincial domain, and then paid AMSW Industries a set price each year with taxpayer money for the set quantity of military products as outlined in the contract.

For centuries the corporation had been making the cheapest products it could possibly get away with, while always charging the exact same price, and the entire province was in a sorry state from the constant taxpayer money ripoff that couldn't be spent on other things. Vulture capitalism at its worst...

The steam train was unloaded by an army of workers, offloading raw materials and various fuels for the tanks and other military machinery. Thousands of tons of ore was offloaded, as was agricultural products, plant material, fabrics, logs of timber from the more forested edges of Gibson Provence, grox skins, and everything else that the impoverished province could provide.

***...

Guy Asquith the AMSW worker was hard at work unloading cargo from the latest train, sweating slightly in the heat as he heaved on ropes with other men to drag out a heavy large crate full of thick grox hides.

Over a hundred men sweated and struggled as they hastily unloaded the train as quickly as possible to meet the train departure schedule, this train had to be completely unloaded and then reloaded with over a thousand tons of military cargo, all whilst keeping to its rather optimistic departure time.

Guy Asquith redoubled his efforts, dragging out cargo as fast as his body was able to, already badly overworked but pushing on even more. The other men followed suit, and cargo was carelessly dumped all over the platform just to meet the deadline, irritating the supervisors.

The men unloaded logs without count, and opened the floor grates of ore cars, letting the ore crash down through open grates under the tracks, dropping down into an underground ore silo underneath the fully enclosed vast station complex building.

Guy's muscles were burning as he worked himself ragged to meet the impossible timetable, getting the entire train unloaded only just in time for the arrival of the first rumbling Leman Russ battle tank, on the "loading platform" on the opposite side of the train from the "unloading platform" he currently occupied.

Guy and the other workers clambered over the gaps between the train cars to reach the platform on the other side, and immediately got to work with a gigantic pulley and chain, lifting up the ridiculously heavy Leman Russ battle tank, and swinging it on a groaning push-crane into position over an open topped train car.

It took almost the entire hundred men and excessive amounts of extremely geared pulleys just to lift each tank, and they had to load three of the huge things, each one weighing approximately 60 TONS, not to mention then having to fill up all the remaining cars with as big a weight of military supplies as the train could safely pull!

The departure deadline stopped for no man, and the workers just had to work even harder to get everything done in time, this wasn't even the only train that was expected today, and any delay here would delay all the other trains too!

Guy was not sure how he even managed it, but he and the others got the train fully loaded with two whole minutes to spare.

The engine and fuel car had already been disconnected from the front, taken around to a turnstile, turned around, driven up an adjacent track, reversed through a fork in the track, and was now securely connected to the back of the cars, fully fuelled and ready to depart.

Guy and the others got to work clearing away all of the messily offloaded cargo from before, as the train chugged struggling away under the enormous weight of the Leman Russ battle tanks and other cargoes. The train would carry this cargo all the way to a space port thousands of miles away on the far side of this particular continent, where the cargo would join the three regiments of conscripted local men, who were currently undertaking their one year of basic training before they shipped out for the Imperial Guard in next year's tithe.

Guy and the other workers had barely cleared the platform before the next train was chugging into the station, beginning the whole process all over again!

***...

Guy Asquith was sore and exhausted as he washed himself clean with soap and a bucket of cold water in the communal bathing area after his shift, shaving and cleaning his teeth as he did so. His body was burly and muscular from a lifetime of hard labor, and some of the factory worker ladies were looking at him with very subtle interest.

Guy tiredly clenched and bulged his muscles deliberately for the ladies, and his corporate tattoos stretched slightly on his skin.

Guy Asquith was covered all over in tattoos that proclaimed:

This same message was tattooed on all his limbs, the front and back of his hands, his forehead, both sides of his face on the cheeks, on his neck, and all over his chest and belly and back.

Everyone else in the bathing area with him had identical tattoos, as did the vast majority of the population of this industrial property inside the confines of the vast razor wire outer fence.

AMSW Industries was all about making money as profitably as possible for its owners and shareholders, and the corporation had long ago decided that it could make a lot more money if it didn't have to actually pay its workers. The obvious solution had been slavery.

Bogni Quaternus did not have any emancipation laws or anti-slavery legislation, slavery was perfectly legal in the Imperium of Man, and went a long way towards clamping down on pesky things like labor unions and economic equality. Guy had been born into slavery, as had countless generations of his ancestors, and he would die in slavery, that's just how it went in the Imperium of Man.

Guy wasn't particularly bothered by his unfree status, he had never known or imagined any other sort of life. Being a slave had it's perks, his owners always fed him, and slaves were only rarely conscripted into the Imperial Guard due to the loss of profits this would mean for people rich enough to effect such things. The free men were forever being conscripted against their will, leaving behind multitudes of free women who struggled to survive without their menfolk.

That was how slavery started on Bogni Quaternus, some free young married woman somewhere would find herself struggling to survive after her husband and male relatives got conscripted, struggling to feed all the children she had borne her husband before he got conscripted. Eventually the situation would become so desperate that she started selling some of her children into slavery, just so the rest of the family could survive.

When times were truly tough the young women would give themselves away as slaves just to be guaranteed a meal each day. The new owners then eagerly got these young women pregnant with endless babies to maximise the profits, leading to a truly excessive slave population.

Guy winked at the ladies as he washed, these particular ladies were a new batch of destitute young women, and not yet pregnant.

One of the ladies blushed and looked away, her body language extremely subtly indicating her receptivity to Guy. Guy got himself all cleaned up and tiredly walked over to the blushing lady...

***...

Later that night Guy was laying in bed with the now sleeping lady, she was resting her head on his bare chest as she slept.

Guy and the lady were laying on a bunk in the overcrowded slave hab blocks, just one of many triple bunks in this one room, the room itself just one of many. The bed had no proper mattress as such, just a tough cheap mat of material stretched taut in the rectangular frame. The workers simply laid on the tightly suspended bare mat, with a rolled up blanket for a pillow and a second blanket draped over them.

Guy felt extremely sore all over as he lay with an arm around the sleeping lady, he wasn't even entirely sure what her name was, she had told him but he had already forgotten it.

Guy didn't do long term relationships, only the more foolish of the workers did. The workers could be suddenly reassigned without warning, sent off to other facilities and never see their sweethearts again. It saved everyone a lot of heartache to just keep things as casual as possible, less people got hurt that way.

AMSW Industries warmly encouraged the men to do things with the women that were likely to result in new slaves being created, and the workers of course didn't have any kind of contraception. Guy had no idea how many children he had fathered over the years, it was impossible to know which man was the father of a given child as the ladies were extremely social with their affections.

Guy didn't lay with women with the idea of fathering children, he just did it for the pleasure of it like any other man. Most nights Guy was joined in his bed by a lady, as he was old enough to have packed on a lot of muscle but young enough to still be handsome, right in that sweet spot where he got the most ladies.

The ladies themselves worked mostly in the less physically demanding roles, such as sewing and weaving and the like in the textile mills, making stuff like military uniforms and combat boots and the like. Hard labor hampered the ladies from getting pregnant and having babies as often as possible, which was their primary economic value, so the ladies rarely did the heavier hard labor that the men did.

Guy had painful cramps in his aching muscles at the moment, and stretched as well as he could without waking up the lady. It always took him a while to relax his muscles enough to sleep each night, his work was terribly hard on his body.

The lady stirred as he continued to fidget, and with her awake he stopped trying to be subtle and bent his body in a series of glorious stretches, muscles almost sighing with their own relief as they were stretched out and massaged. Golden Throne it felt so GOOD to stretch like that!

Guy felt a lot better as he settled down with the lady after the long stretch, much MUCH better now!

Guy finally drifted off into a deep and very restful sleep.

***...

Guy Asquith blinked sleepily as he ate his morning meal of grox snout stew and thin gruel in the crowded worker's mess. The meal taste was... Well, it was at least food. To save money AMSW Industries fed the workers only the cheapest foods available, parts of the grox carcasses like the snout that were of little value otherwise.

Some of the meal ingredients were grown out in the sprawling grounds by the workers themselves, the heavily pregnant women and small children and the very old were put to work in weather beaten greenhouse gardens, at the edges of the industrial grounds far away from the toxic pollutants, relatively light work watering and tending mixed gardens of edible plants.

The gardening was extremely cushy work by the standards of this industrial property, easy enough for small children to get a taste of work without being too much for them, readying the older children to start working in the factories. The facility had massive amounts of child labor, Guy himself had been a child worker up until adulthood.

The food was what it was, nothing fancy but still food, and Guy ate huge quantities of the stew and gruel, feeding himself for another day of hard labor.

Guy fully woke up as he finished his breakfast and left for work. Today's shift he would be working in the infantry weapons factory, assembling the vast amounts of firearms needed by one infantry regiment plus the secondary crew weapons carried by the crews of the tank and artillery regiments.

Guy's roles shifted around from day to day to prevent repetitive strain injuries from just doing the same thing every day, by swapping around tasks the workers lasted much longer without expensive workplace injuries that hampered profitability.

Guy stretched his muscles in warmup as he walked towards the massive weapons factory building, wearing freshly washed work overalls and work boots and hard hat.

The factory was absolutely enormous, and quite noisy as he entered. Lathes and saws and machining tools were buzzing loudly, presses were squeaking with old moving parts, and unpowered roller conveyors were rattling as goods were pushed by hand along them.

Guy went straight to a freeman supervisor, and was assigned a post at the woodworking section that produced the wooden stocks and handles of various weapons.

Guy put on very old ear muffs and extremely scratched old plastic safety glasses, and sat down in front of a very crude band saw, getting as comfortable as possible on the scratched wooden work stool.

Further down the section from Guy the logs from the trains were being sawn up into smaller pieces, mostly into thick planks that were further cut up into more useful shapes. Guy took hold of a very thick short plank in a pile next to him, and used a rusty old nail and a sheet metal stencil to mark out the shapes of tightly packed lasgun wooden fittings.

The band saw screamed loudly as he used it to trace the scratched stencil lines, cutting the small plank into five single-piece lasgun bodies, complete with shoulder stock and firing handle grip and body of the gun and hand hold just before where the barrel would poke out, all in one piece to save costs.

The off cuts were not wasted either, being sawn into the shapes of grips and handholds for flamers and other weapons, and the few slithers of wood left over would find use as the wooden handles of bayonet combat knives. Absolutely nothing was wasted, reducing costs.

Guy got up and passed the five cut lasgun pieces to another man at a different woodworking tool, who would carve out all the holes and cavities in the wood for the trigger and ammo pack and setting dial and the working parts of the gun itself. When this was done the finished wooden components would be further shaped and sanded, treated and varnished to make them more hard wearing, and finally sent off to a different section inside this giant single room factory building to be assembled with the metal and electrical components, finally taking shape as fully operational and lethal lasguns to be sent off to the waiting guardsmen of the regiments.

Guy then handed the other remaining cut wood pieces to other workers, these ones focused on the woodwork of different weapons, and then returned to his work station to cut more wooden shapes.

Guy should have had an extremely long morning ahead of him, but with the aid of his years of experience he churned out wooden components at a prodigious rate, meeting his quota with comfortable time to spare. This was much less heavy work than loading and unloading trains!

Guy used his sudden unexpected free time to drink water and visit the toilet, and then busied himself with getting started on the afternoon quota to give himself even more free time later. When you had enough experience the woodworking stations could be surprisingly cushy jobs to operate.

Guy managed to finish the entire day's quota before he even got to the end of the morning half of his shift, and found himself with nothing else to do. The factory only got a finite amount of wood each day, and could only make so many lasguns and other weapons before the three entire regiments had their full quota.

Guy and the other woodworkers imagined taking the rest of the day off, but the freemen supervisors had other ideas, and quickly reassigned them to help the sections that were struggling to meet their quotas, namely the intricate and complex work of wiring up the crude electronics in various weapons.

Guy was made to assist a much younger and less experienced male worker, little more than a teenager, who was getting hopelessly behind in his quota making the shoddy electronics of an AMSW Industries pattern lasgun.

Guy picked up worn old pliers and a crude soldering iron, and helped the youth correctly solder together the electronics much faster. The electronics were as simple and cheap as they could possibly be while still functioning, lacking any fancy settings like an automatic fire option or an adjustable beam strength. The weapon fired only as single shot semiautomatic mode, shooting one brief beam every time the trigger was pulled, but did have a mandatory safety switch setting.

It might not be complicated electronics, but it was still fiddly and tedious to assemble by hand with cheap crude solder. The youth was already shockingly behind in his quota, and Guy had to work very very hard to catch up the backlog, barely finishing the morning quota before lunch break.

A whistle sounded and the entire factory staff powered down their machinery and stopped for a thirty minute lunch break, entering the crowded worker's mess for a meal of very cheap food.

After lunch Guy managed to get some serious headway on the youth's afternoon quota, and within two hours of extremely fast work the entire quota was finished early.

Other reassigned woodworkers were having similar success now too, and the supervisors now had twice as many idle workers as before. Rather than just letting them finish early, the supervisors made up jobs for them to do such as DUSTING the factory! The miserable pricks!

When the factory was completely spic and span, and every made up job had been completed, the supervisors led the workers into other buildings, desperately trying to find something for the workers to do rather than allowing them time off.

The workers were getting rather annoyed by this stage, grumbling about how uncharitable the supervisors were being.

"We get paid by the HOUR! If we let you slaves finish early then we lose money," the supervisors finally admitted after a lot of outraged vocal discontent from the workers.

Guy and the other workers jeered at this selfishness, but nevertheless obeyed as they were put to work doing non-jobs around the place until the supervisors ended their own shifts. Miserable miserly bastards!

***...

That night Guy was in bed with a different sleeping lady, feeling hard done by by those supervisors. Guy didn't get paid either way, and did not appreciate having to waste time needlessly when he should by rights have been able to enjoy a few hours off!

Guy grumpily put it all behind him, and just enjoyed the feel of the lady snuggling against his chest. Today had not been very physically hard, and his body felt a lot better after the relatively light work. He still had sore muscles, but far less sore than yesterday.

He didn't have a cramp this time, and didn't wake up his sleeping lady, and he sighed peacefully as he drifted off to sleep.

***...

The next day Guy Asquith was sweating and sweltering as he did hard labor in the metal and smelting mill! By the Emperor this was HOT work!

The lasguns might not use much metal components, but the same could not be said for the tanks and artillery! The amounts of metal the tank and artillery regiments needed was absolutely enormous!

Furnaces roared as they melted and smelted a variety of different metal ores, filling huge crucibles with brightly glowing yellow liquid metal. Guy and a hundred other workers had to work extremely hard as they tugged on heavy chains to move around a hanging crucible on screeching ceiling rails.

Sweat was pouring into their eyes as they pulled hard on another chain to tip the several ton crucible so that the liquid metal poured into the mould of a Leman Russ armour component.

Again and again they moved around and tipped the heavy hot crucible, pouring out more and more to make various metal components. Guy was already utterly exhausted only halfway through his morning shift, and miserable as he worked in this hellish heat!

The work was hot and heavy and hard, grinding on and on as metal was poured in the most labor intensive way imaginable. The day's quota of metal items was unimaginably large, and the workers had a rotten time pouring out hundreds of tons of liquid metal, all to cast the components of only a mere handful of tanks and artillery pieces!

Leman Russ battle tanks and Basilisk mobile artillery vehicles were SERIOUSLY heavy pieces of hardware, requiring hellishly hard labor of over a hundred people to make each one of them. The vehicles weren't even completed yet, this was just the initial casting of the components, and the casted metal still had to be laboriously machined and worked, blessed by the resident tech priests, assembled together, blessed again, and have a huge number of other things done before they were complete!

The industrial complex had excessive manpower at least, enough bodies to heave on chains and shovel ore to keep producing these mighty machines. The furnaces alone consumed the vast majority of the power from the massive concentrated solar power plant, this foundry was the true heart of this entire industrial endeavour, the thing that made everything else possible.

The foundry itself worked day and night, the night shift of workers kept the furnaces roaring and metal pouring every hour of the night. The concentrated solar power used a thermal storage tank deliberately to allow this round the clock power use, feeding endless watts into the electric powered furnaces, so that production never stopped.

Guy and his over one hundred fellow workers were not the only group of workers in this foundry and furnace room, they were simply one of numerous work groups of over a hundred men each, each group doing their own different tasks. Some shovelled ore endlessly into the furnaces, some worked and set and unpacked the casts, some transported away the finished products, others did yet other tasks.

Guy's group was focused solely on moving and pouring this heavy mobile crucible for the heaviest components, pouring an extremely tough and strong metallic alloy known as "plasteel" into the casts to make armour. Plasteel was insanely expensive by the standards of the cheap garbage materials AMSW Industries preferred to use, but the Imperial Guard would have a fit if anything cheaper was used to make their tanks, so it's use was unavoidable.

Guy's work group were extremely careful to use the bare minimum amount of plasteel needed to fill each cast, making what tiny savings they could to avoid punishment for waste. The corporation did not like unnecessary costs and would have the workers flogged if they wasted this expensive plasteel.

The added care made the work even more slow and gruelling, as the workers made sure to tip only just enough into each cast.

By lunch break Guy was utterly soaked in sweat and exhausted, and he ate his meal with desperate hunger to replenish his strength. The work group was slightly behind quota, having produced the cast armour components for only 4 Leman Russ tanks and 3 basilisk artillery vehicles to completion, with part of an additional basilisk cast but not completed. Rather than the mandatory FOUR basilisks of their morning quota!

After lunch they had to work even harder to make up the lost quota, completing the fourth basilisk as well as the four tanks and four artillery of the afternoon quota. By the Emperor it was HARD work!

Guy was so hot that he felt like he might cook alive, sweating buckets and muscles screaming. This was the WORST job in the entire factory complex, hot and heavy and unpleasant and thankless, just awful!

By the end of the day his group had poured over 500 TONS of plasteel BY HAND, even with a hundred men this was an impressive achievement in a single day!

For their efforts the industrial complex now had the unworked armour casts of 8 Leman Russ battle tanks and 8 basilisk artillery vehicles. These 16 vehicles were not even close to being complete yet, this was merely the first step in an extremely long and labor intensive process to complete these vehicles, requiring the combined effort of thousands of workers!

Guy didn't even want to think about how much work still needed to be done on those vehicles, he was just grateful that his horrible shift was over for the day!

***...