Chapter 2(TE)
Regina sighed unhappily as she paid the legal price for legally obtained metal from the rust mines of house Orlock. It cost more than twice as much as the illegally obtained metal had cost!
The merchant happily accepted the payment and Regina's workers unloaded all the rust ore from the merchant's trucks.
Regina was really annoyed.
The price of good labor was going up by the day as more and more able bodied women joined the imperial navy as a first choice or the imperial guard as a second choice. The factories and other major employers on Necromunda simply couldn't match the high wages the imperial military paid.
Regina was now on an almost equal cost footing with the multitudes of other house Escher tycoons who operated legally all the time, her only advantage was in getting most of her electricity for free. To remain competitive she was forced to live a somewhat less extravagant lifestyle.
Sally Ruth'sgal the 10 thousand credit per day concubine had unfortunately had to go, but without this drain on her finances Regina was holding a small but steady profit each day.
Regina was terribly horny without Sally and could not get away with taking sexual advantage of the few workers in the factory who were actually attractive enough for her high standards. Regina's vibrator was getting a lot of use lately to get her through this pussy drought.
The factory now had a lot more workers, and the workers were paid a lot more to keep the good ones from changing jobs. Almost all of them were too old to enlist, and those who were young had some sort of medical problems that kept them from enlisting. Almost an entire generation of young women were gone.
Necromunda was of course too big and too heavily populated for the military to enlist all of the young people, not even close in fact. Most of the hives on Necromunda hadn't even had recruitment centres and even hive Primus itself was far too big for all the healthy young ones to even reach the enlistment centres. But Regina's factory was right next door to the damn recruitment centre in this part of Escher territory and enough Escher young women had left to massively effect unemployment levels.
Rent was going down too as landlords competed for the fewer remaining tenants and Regina had had to almost halve the rent on her properties just to keep tenants in the apartments paying for her free power!
It was so horrible! The living conditions of the poor were going up, and it was making them much harder to exploit! Regina missed the good old days when she lorded it over the poor like a queen.
Regina sighed and returned to her office. She sat down and got some paperwork done on the cogitator, sighing as she handled her much less profitable business empire.
A few hours later, to Regina's considerable surprise a space marine in yellow armour was shown into her office.
Regina gaped at the yellow armoured giant in astonishment. She couldn't see his face because of his helmet but he wore the armour of an imperial fists space marine.
The space marine removed his helmet to reveal a dark skinned face, clearly of mixed heritage Necromundan under hive origin by the looks of him.
"I am sergeant John Jericho of the Imperial Fist chapter, 7th company, 9th squad." The space marine introduced himself in a Necromundan under hive accent.
"Um, well um, I, I'm, I'm Miss Regina Dior," Regina stammered in shock.
"Yes I know who you are. The Imperial Fists chapter is very impressed with how you so cheaply sell weapons and ammunition to the Emperor's servants. The Imperium needs more business people like you who do their duty to keep costs low as possible for the Emperor's armies." Sergeant John Jericho said approvingly.
"Th, thank you," Regina stammered fearfully.
"Do not fear friend, I will not hurt you. I come here to offer you a business contract to provide ammunition for the Imperial Fists chapter. With the recent drains put on the forge worlds, the Imperial Fists chapter wishes to do our part to reduce some of the strain by purchasing some of our ammunition privately from deserving individuals such as yourself in the private sector." The space marine said and continued.
"Your factory already produces fine heavy bolter ammunition for the Imperial Guard at a very generous price. The Imperial Fists alas also uses a substantial amount of heavy bolter ammunition on a daily basis. I have been sent to place an order for 10 million heavy bolter rounds at your usual prices, we humbly request the order to be delivered to our recruiting stronghold in the under hive by no later than a week from today."
Regina smiled a huge smile and agreed. This was exactly the break she had been needing.
Regina counted her profits happily a week later after the shipment of 10 million heavy bolter rounds had been delivered to the Imperial Fists stronghold.
Heavy bolter ammunition took a lot of energy to manufacture but not much metal compared with other ammunition types of similar size. For most people it was prohibitively expensive to manufacture because of the enormous energy costs to make each round, but Regina could make it for half the price and still make a large profit because she wasn't paying for the majority of the power.
Tens of thousands of tenants were unwittingly footing the bill for most of this electricity, thinking that old faulty wiring was to blame for their elevated weekly power bills.
Regina smiled greedily as the Imperial Fists placed another order for the same this time next week. Regina was frankly astonished that a chapter of space marines could burn through 10 million heavy bolter rounds per week, but apparently this wasn't even the full amount they used each week!
Regina now stood to make 10 million credits profit every single week just from the space marines alone and she had celebrated by rehiring Sally Ruth'sgal as her personal concubine once more.
Sally's kisses felt so wonderful on her pussy as she counted her money on the cogitator screen, Regina really felt like she deserved this immense good fortune.
Regina was just cumming hard from Sally giving her oral when Space Marine Sergeant John Jericho entered the room unannounced!
Regina screamed and covered herself frantically.
"My apologies, I did not realise that you had romantic company. I understand that you women of House Escher are this way inclined due to your unique gender imbalance, and I know that the Ecclesiarchy has granted the women of House Escher with a special lifting of the usual prohibition against homosexuality. Do not be afraid," Sergeant John Jericho said awkwardly.
"It, it is ok. Just wasn't expecting you," Regina stammered in embarrassment.
"I came to express the chapter's appreciation in person and to inform you that you 3 plasma generators are being delivered to your factory as a gift of thanks. The chapter of course realises that you must have lost a lot of money in power bills to make our ammunition so cheaply, in fact you are certainly losing money on every round you sell at your prices, so to ease your burdens we are giving you 3 plasma generators to help mitigate the enormous energy costs you have shouldered so dutifully." The Space Marine explained admiringly.
Regina smiled, this day just keeps getting better!
The new plasma generators were absolutely beautiful. Bright yellow paint jobs gleaming, blue plasma shining, they together produced almost a megawatt of power. Each had come with enough fuel to last a few months and now gave Regina the reasonable excuse she needed to stop paying for any power bills whatsoever.
In effect Regina's profits per heavy bolter round were now doubled and she now stood to make 20 million credits profit per week from the heavy bolter rounds alone, on top of added profits from all other goods.
The staff costs were still going up slightly but only by a few thousand extra total credits lost per day collectively, which was mere pocket change for Regina at the moment.
The price of metal was remaining stable from the house Orlock mines which was something at least, even though it was slightly expensive.
Regina smiled, the rich keep getting richer.
Regina sighed in relief when the imperial military recruiting centre packed up a few weeks later and moved to another hive city far away to continue the search for more fit young adults to enlist. A bunch of yummy teenage girls were just about to reach enlisting age and would now miss out and be forced to work in Regina's factory.
That recruiting office had done a lot of terrible damage to the local poverty levels, far too many people had had far too many opportunities. It would take a while for the unemployment rate to get nicely high again.
Regina looked at her ugly workers hard at work on the production line. Regina relished the thought of being able to fire them and replace them with sexy teenage girls for half the price. This time Regina would opt for a mixed workforce, half old and half young to prevent a repeat of the sudden loss of workers during the enlistment.
Regina's factory had now refocused most of it's production on ammunition instead of weapons as the price of metal reduced the profit margins for weaponry. She still made weapons, just was not taking as many contracts in favour of the much more favourable ammunition contracts.
The chemical pollution of Necromunda was abundant and absolutely free, it took only a bit of transport to get the effluent of other industries to the factory. With a lot of energy this chemical waste could be turned into more useful chemicals, such as the explosive and propellant components of ammunition.
Regina had now refitted the factory with a few extra floors and had filled these new floors with both chemical plants and extra ammunition production lines. Regina was currently favouring types of ammunition with very little metal, especially carbon fibre polymer varieties of krak missiles that used a design with hardly any metal at all. The imperial guard was dubious about these krak missiles but Regina sold them so cheaply that the departmento munitorum had reluctantly agreed to purchase them.
Heavy bolter ammunition however was now the chief product Regina produced. It consisted of a synthetic diamond tip, a depleted uranium core, a bit of casing, a delayed chemical fuse and a shitload of explosives and chemical propellants.
Regina's factory dome contained hundreds of thousands of compact synthetic diamond presses that worked around the clock making diamond tips in batches of ten at a time. It took less than 50 hours and a huge amount of electricity to get a single diamond in each press, but these diamonds were specifically designed to split into ten perfectly shaped pieces when hit the right way. The presses were expensive to buy, but were an excellent long term investment and Regina was paying them off in instalments.
The explosives, fuses and propellants were all mass produced in her chemical plants from local pollution, requiring a lot of electricity which was free for Regina and not too much manpower to produce. It cost Regina almost nothing to make and was the most profitable part of the ammunition for her.
The casing was a relatively tiny amount of metal and not that expensive without the power costs involved, so also cost very little.
The only thing that really cost Regina actual money, not counting the instalments on the diamond pressed, was the depleted uranium cores. The imperial forces simply would not accept Regina cutting these cores with cheaper metals so Regina was forced to buy the pure stuff.
Necromunda had long ago run out of economically viable uranium, but still had a lot of economically expensive trace uranium in the industrial ash and other pollution that covered the planet. Alternatively the depleted uranium could come from off world. Either way it was expensive.
Regina liked to use whichever one was cheapest at a given moment. For the amounts of uranium she needed, only importing from off world gave the sheer quantities needed for practical purposes. Regina had dealings with some black market smugglers who snuck a bit in without paying tariffs, but mostly she got her depleted uranium from an interstellar company called Slaasloth.
Slaasloth was a vulture like corporate entity that followed in the wake of Imperial wars to buy battle field salvage from the starving local children and widows for a pittance. These desperate civilians collected the used depleted uranium cores from heavy bolter bullet holes and bodies, dug up unexploded land mines, that sort of thing and sold it to Slaasloth in exchange for a tiny amount of basic food and water supplies to keep them alive.
The unethical practices of Slaasloth made their prices very reasonable and let Regina reuse old bullet cores often without even having to recast them.
Regina had purchased a lot of new slum buildings and rewired the power boxes to get even more free power (on top of rent). Regina had also bought more fuel for the plasma generators to keep them running at full power and on paper she was also buying power from a nonexistent startup power company to try to explain how she was powering her factory without buying any power from the utility company.
In reality, many tens of thousands of poor house Escher women (many of them elderly) were unwittingly footing the bill for 90 percent of Regina's power consumption, with the remaining 10 percent coming from the plasma generators she had been given for free.
Labor costs would start going down over the coming months as the next generation entered the job market and crime would increase once more as the newly unemployed got desperate. The thefts would begin again and Regina's metal supply would get a lot cheaper.
