Chapter 9Forge
Pi the Adeptus Mechanicus Menial frowned under her heavy rad scrubbing gas mask, her thickly gloved hands holding an electronic data slate showing her a stream of orders and explanatory information. Were these people serious?
Pi was currently at work, standing in her heavy full body rad suit in a dusty cavern full of machinery and supplies and blank faced work servitors. It was the morning at the start of her shift, she had recently arrived and she was reading over the morning's work orders and information on a workplace data slate, like she did at the beginning of every shift. As a Menial Pi mostly acted as a petty manager in charge of teams of servitors, but she was also given all sorts of petty tasks and responsibilities as the need arose.
Pi didn't exactly hate her job, at least not most of the time, but today's work order promised that today would be one of the days that made Pi really hate her job.
The situation was simple enough to explain. A bunch of regiments of the Imperial Guard had gone and gotten themselves decimated by the orks and now the Imperium was demanding that Ferrous Prime massively increase military production in response. The ruling Tech Priesthood of Ferrous Prime had agreed to this demand in exchange for certain quid pro quo favours, the order had been finalised, and now all the poor workers of Ferrous Prime had mandatory overtime and gruelling work ahead of them!
Pi was dismayed but stoic as she read through the impossible amounts of iron ore these people expected to get dug up today, she would be lucky to be home by midnight with so much work ahead of her!
Pi was a lifelong professional iron ore miner, she had spent her entire working life down in these underground mines organising the servitors into digging out iron ore. Her job was much more complicated than just digging holes, she also had responsibilities for mine safety and supplies, she had to make sure that the mines were not just dug but also safely braced with Ferrocrete and rock bolts, she had to test the air for breathability and other factors, she had to allocate supplies and equipment and she had to document everything that happened.
In short she had a lot of responsibilities.
Pi got the servitors moving with carefully worded precise verbal orders, referring to task management spreadsheets to precisely time every single work task for the entire day as efficiently as possible. The servitors unemotionally obeyed the instructions precisely, moving off to drill and blast enormous quantities of iron ore.
Ferrous Prime was a planet naturally very rich in iron ore deposits, albeit many of the deposits rather low grade iron ore. The surface of the planet in particular had been comprehensively stripped of every scrap of high grade iron ore, leaving only vast quantities of medium and low grade iron ore that was barely worth smelting. The planet still had an almost inexhaustible amount of high grade iron ore in the planet crust, but it was all deep underground and had to be dug deep to mine.
This particular mine was designated mine 888M, serving the iron ore supply needs of factory cluster 888 that lay kilometres above the mine up on the surface. This mine stretched out very wide underground, positioned not only under the cluster of factories but also undermining miles and miles of the slag badlands and ash wastes surrounding the industrial zone. It was not the only iron ore mine on the planet, just one of countless mines that served different regions of the planet.
Ferrous Prime was rich in iron ore and also in aluminium ore (all planets were rich in aluminium ore), but it was lacking in other vital strategic metals such as copper that had to be imported from other parts of the sector ever since the local deposits were depleted long ago. The Pax Sector had a number of mining worlds that supplied critical strategic metals to Ferrous Prime in exchange for manufactured goods (and in often cases more than a little money), with copper in particular being absolutely critical for manufacturing advanced military production. They also imported a range of other critical metals such as Rhodium and Gold and Silver and a selection of other rare and critical minerals.
But thankfully the bulk of the manufacturing by weight could be made with local steel or steel derivatives like plasteel and armaplas that used mostly steel mixed with advanced meta materials, that let Ferrous Prime locally source the majority of its manufacturing materials in a way which was very kind to shipping logistics.
Pi as mentioned was one of many Menials who worked in iron ore mine 888M, she was paid a relative pittance for her work but then again, she didn't really have much stuff to buy anyway. She got free accommodations, free rad suits and gas masks, free food rations and free medical care. The most exciting things she ever purchased with her meagre money was racy and provocative underwear that she got to (briefly) wear once a month when she ovulated and was allowed to breed with her boyfriend Logarithm. There just wasn't much to do when you lived underground in this toxic polluted mine.
Very occasionally Pi had left the mine on adventures of curiosity to the surface, seeing the sights of the factories and of the endless slag and ash wastes. But these places hadn't exactly been pretty or even pleasant places to visit. The entire planet of Ferrous Prime was nothing but machines, heavy industry and the pollution of heavy industry. The planet rained acid, the outside surface was filled with lethal radiation levels, everything stank terribly and the air was only even breathable thanks to prodigious levels of artificial oxygen production. Men might find the planet interesting for all its manly weapons production but for women like Pi the planet was devoid of any real appeal.
Logarithm enjoyed visiting the tank factories and weapons factories, he had even dragged Pi along with him on a tech pilgrimage to visit the sacred weapons factories, nominally as an act of worship to the great machine god but in reality mostly to indulge Logarithm's boyish desire to see all of the various shooty things and gigantic war machines. The most impressive had of course been the titan god engines of Legio Mathematicus, with around 50 of the massive big humongous Titans of various types standing parked in maintenance hangars of monstrous size.
These sorts of excursions away from the mine were rare. The Tech Priest ruling class did not believe in giving Menials holidays as a general rule, they only let them take time off work for religious (or health) reasons. Any vacation time had to be some sort of religious pilgrimage to see the various sacred machines to worship them, making each vacation spectacularly dull for the average woman like Pi who didn't much care for tanks and guns and titans and ammunition and smoke belching factories.
Pi preferred pretty and feminine things, she was a very feminine woman with very girly tastes. Unfortunately such feminine friendly things were very rare on Ferrous Prime, it was a world full of ugly smelly boys stuff like guns and bombs and Titans and industry.
Pi sighed and focused her mind completely on her extremely long and difficult day of work.
The day passed horribly slowly, with every passing minute feeling more like ten minutes. She stopped checking the time whenever she didn't need to as the slow passage of time was just too depressing.
The work site was very busy with servitors endlessly drilling, blasting and digging out fresh iron ore, as other specialist servitors braced and bolted the walls and ceiling for safety. The grind of organisation and paperwork was eternal. Sometimes Pi worked alone and sometimes she worked with other Menials as the situation dictated.
Pi felt like her thumbs would fall off as she typed endlessly on her data slate. She needed to pee but her toilet breaks were strictly regulated for "maximum efficiency", she was also thirsty and hungry and her face was itchy inside her gas mask where she couldn't scratch it.
She looked up from her data slate to see yet another loading servitor going into mindlock whilst holding a large crate of explosives, forcing her to race over to reboot the servitor with a verbal command before it could bump the crate and blow the place up!
The stupid servitor obediently rebooted with a buzz of binary and safely placed the crate where it belonged, emotionless after its close brush with death.
Some Skitarii soldiers patrolled through Pi's worksite on a patrol a few minutes later, simply getting in the way of the work.
Pi sighed with relief during her next toilet break, entering a rad scrubbing air lock into a small chemical toilet unit, removing her rad suit and gas mask gratefully and having a glorious scratch all over as she stood in only her underwear, then rushing over to pee in the toilet.
Pi washed her hands afterwards, looking in the mirror at her pale young white face and long blonde hair reflected back at her. Pi was a pretty woman and slightly curvaceous. She wasn't fat, not even chubby as she was not fed more than her carefully calculated regulation amount of food calories per day, but she had rather generous amounts of mammary gland tissue and fatty backside flesh. Her boyfriend Logarithm certainly believed that Pi was a deliciously erotic physical specimen.
Pi was wearing only plain white bra and panties and white socks on her feet, she got frightfully hot in her rad suit and gas mask if she wore more than this minimal attire underneath. Indeed she didn't even own much more clothing than this sort of undergarments, the only places she was ever out of her rad suit were places of privacy, either in her female only hab unit or here on the toilet or in the female only workplace food unit or else being bred by her boyfriend in the fertilisation unit, in none of these places was modesty a great concern. Pi did own a selection of extremely comfortable nighties and a small selection of other clothing but not much really.
Pi had a large drink of water from the sink before leaving the toilet unit, wishing that she could get away with just hiding in here for a bit longer. With a sigh of resignation she entered the airlock and got back into her heavy and uncomfortable rad suit and gas mask, carefully air sealing the zip seams and other gaps with synthetic rubber flaps. She carefully put her long hair inside her gas mask by holding her head upside down as she put it on, her entire head and neck completely covered by her heavy ugly gas mask.
Pi was completely covered head to toe with rad and chemical protection, not so much as a square nanometer of her entire body exposed to the air outside. Pi then activated the air lock and stepped back out to continue her endless gruelling work.
For hours she continued working without a food break, her stomach growling from the cruel length of time between meal breaks. The human body could survive eating very few meals per day so long as the total calories per 24 hours remained the same, and the tech priest ruling class very logically (and callously) concluded that the Menials could go uncomfortable lengths of time between each meal, unnecessary meal time on the job being considered time wasted.
Pi was hungry and irritated when she felt her bottom being pinched through her rad suit pants!
Pi turned around aghast, seeing a male Menial in a rad suit and gas mask!
"It's me Pi, it's your boyfriend Logarithm!" The man quickly identified himself before she could call the Skitarii to report him for sexual assault.
"Logarithm?! You stupid fool!" Pi roused on him crossly, relaxing from her adrenaline rush.
Pi hugged her boyfriend tightly in greeting for a moment but couldn't kiss him in their gas masks, Pi rested the side of her gas mask covered face against his chest affectionately for a moment before extricating herself from the hug and returning to her endless work.
Logarithm was a fellow Menial like Pi and the two of them had met at work. During less busy days when the iron ore quotas were less extreme the Menial men and women found the time to talk to each other and develop friendships. The tech priests positively encouraged these sorts of relationships as they produced fertilised embryos to breed the next generations of the forge world population, offering incentives to (in particular women) Menials who formed breeding couples. Pi was paid slightly more as a result of having a boyfriend and she enjoyed very minor additional discretionary privileges. Most precious of all it entitled her to one additional toilet break per work shift so long as she kept getting bred once a month. It was a little thing but a powerful incentive to encourage Menial women to seek and accept boyfriends.
Most Menial women had a boyfriend, if just for the additional pay and toilet breaks. The fertilisation process with their partner was (usually) tolerable and sometimes even fun and pleasurable, and the embryo extraction process was completely painless with the wonderful drugs they were given just before the extraction procedure. The bliss of the pain numbing drug was also an incentive to get a boyfriend just to get wasted off the drugs once a month after a night of hard breeding. The result of this all was an endless and renewable supply of fertilised embryos to turn into trillions of servitors and other humans.
Logarithm continued to affectionately pester Pi with touch and words, he had work of his own to be doing but he obviously had only one thing on his mind right now and that one thing was breeding with Pi.
"I'm ovulating very soon, not much longer and you can breed me." Pi coaxed to try to get some peace from his relentless physical attention.
Logarithm wasn't dissuaded so easily and he was a relentless pest until a patrol of Skitarii entered the cavern and eyed Logarithm suspiciously. Logarithm quickly decided that he had other tasks to do in a completely different cavern and Pi could finally work in peace.
Pi's long overdue lunch break was as short as it was unappetising. The workplace food unit was little more than 3 standard model TEU intermodal containers welded together with the internal walls cut out, with just a single rad scrubbing air lock welded onto the outside as the single point of entry and exit.
The food unit was small and cramped, and filled with as many long mess tables and bench chairs as it could feasibly fit, with a tiny nutrient paste distribution machine and a lot of bowls and spoons, as well as water cups and a water dispenser faucet, all cleaned and maintained by a single female housekeeping servitor mono tasked with maintaining food unit hygiene.
The food unit was sex segregated to be female only and was currently crowded to capacity with Menial women who were mostly just in their underwear like Pi was, all of them sitting barely fitting into the bench seats at the table and drinking water and eating bowls of bitter and vile tasting paste made from lowest grade corn and soy and synthetic nutrients. The women all grimaced and complained at the awful quality of their food but they were all too hungry not to eat it.
Pi herself was frowning in disgust as she forced down this foul bitter paste, wearing only her underwear and so close to the women to either side that their shoulders rubbed together, but Pi was not embarrassed as this state of dress was normal in the food unit. What bothered her was not embarrassment but the sweat and the smell, the women were crammed together so tightly that it was hot and the heat made the women sweat. The younger women didn't particularly smell but some of the older ones reeked of strong body odour from the hormones of menopause, it was suffocating being trapped inside a claustrophobic airtight metal box with this malodorous sweat!
Pi at least wasn't hungry or thirsty when she left the horrid food unit air lock in her rad suit and gas mask, and she continued to work endlessly to try to meet the impossible demand for iron ore.
Pi's usual end of shift time came and went, but she still had vast quantities of iron ore remaining unfilled in her work quota!
Stupid Imperial Guard getting their tanks and artillery blown up or captured by orks! Couldn't they be more careful with their machines?! Now poor Pi would be lucky to get any sleep trying to dig up enough ore to replace everything they lost on top of all the new regiments being raised that needed new equipment!
Hours into overtime Pi was almost in tears, the iron ore quota set for her was excruciatingly high, she couldn't possibly dig it up before midnight at the earliest!
That was when the platinum blonde peddlitute arrived with a smug smile on her pollution ravaged bare face.
The peddlitute was an illegal natural born woman, not grown in a vat but grown in a Menial woman's womb in secret. She was now an adult woman who had left her mother to live out in the tunnels. Her kind was illegal and by definition she was a criminal by birth status alone. Pi had seen this particular woman lurking around in the past but didn't know her name. The woman subsisted on crime in a multi purpose illegal occupation known as a peddlitute, a cross between an illegal itinerant merchant peddler and an illegal prostitute, offering either service to anyone who would compensate her with food or money or something else the woman wanted.
The peddlitute woman was dressed in dusty and highly immodest prostitute clothing that left bare a lot of her pollution ravaged skin, with high heeled knee high boots and far too much makeup to be tasteful under the dust that covered her face. In her nostrils were stuffed a pair of "flugs", air filtration nose plugs to let her breathe the filthy air through her nose with less harm than breathing it unfiltered, (though still nowhere near the same protection as a real gas mask).
The peddlitute also carried a stylish handbag over her shoulder of the sort a prostitute might carry, and in one hand she held a communication frequency intercepter device to let her listen into Skitarii radio chatter to let her carefully avoid their patrols.
Pi was too busy to do more than glance at the peddlitute, but the peddlitute showed interest in the busy Pi and sauntered over with amused mischief in her face.
"I hear from the com frequencies that you have an impossibly large quota today." The peddlitute opened to Pi.
"Yes that's true, what do you want?" Pi replied with fatigue induced impatience.
"How much would it be worth to you if I made it a little bit less large?" The peddlitute drawled.
"Unless you have thousands of tons of iron ore then you can't…"
"Ah but I DO have thousands of tons of iron ore, high grade, stashed away in a safe hiding place. It's already blasted out and piled up. It's yours for the right price." The peddlitute cut in smugly.
"I need over a hundred thousand tons extra to make my quota, how much do you have?" Pi asked seriously.
"I have slightly over thirty thousand tons. How much do you want it?"
"Where did you even get it?" Pi asked dubiously.
"Knowledge of crime begets culpability. Take my advice and don't ask for specifics, you won't like what you learn." The peddlitute chuckled.
"So it's stolen. You know what, I am so exhausted I want to cry. I'll take the ore if it's what you say it is in quantity and quality." Pi sighed.
"I want food, a year's supply, also I want all the explosives you would have used and all the fuel you would have used to blast and excavate 30 thousand tons of tunnel rock. I also want… Let me have a look at your inventory and I will see what I like…" The peddlitute haggled.
"I can't give you that much food, not even half that! I can give you a QUARTER of a crate of powdered nutrient corn meal paste, that's more than fair with the current food shortages…"
"No deal, I will find someone else to sell to if you won't buy it at my prices."
Pi continued to haggle in exhaustion, eventually coming to an agreement to exchange 100 litres of dehydrated corn/soy meal and various other supplies in exchange for 30 thousand tons of stolen iron ore.
The peddlitute shook Pi's gloved hand in a deal and she walked off into the dark tunnels to go get her secret stash of stolen ore.
Pi continued working, wisely not having paid anything up front, she desperately waited for quota relief as she relentlessly kept working herself to exhaustion.
Maybe an hour later a large convoy of ramshackle old crude stolen ore trucks arrived, driven by obviously stolen servitors with crude command override bypass circuits crudely stitched directly into their heads to hijack them to the command of the peddlitute. The peddlitute herself sat in the passenger seat of the leading truck.
Pi very gratefully inspected the ore optimistically, but was disappointed to find upper-medium grade iron ore rather than the promised high grade ore!
"What the cog is this rubbish?!" Pi angrily demanded.
"It's close enough to high grade to help make your quota." The peddlitute insisted defensively.
"You are a scoundrel!" Pi accused.
"Do you want it or not?" The peddlitute said simply.
Pi was too desperate to quit the deal now and simply agreed to take it, directing the trucks to a nearby major iron ore auger screw lift. The trucks tipped their ore trays into the auger feed hopper one by one, driving off to get more ore. Thirty thousand tons of iron ore was a lot even with trucks, it took many many trips to deliver all of it.
At the end of the deliveries Pi was 30 thousand tons closer to meeting her quota and she paid the peddlitute with the agreed price of food and fuel and explosives and other supplies. The peddlitute took the payment in her trucks with desperate greed and drove away in her convoy of stolen trucks. Pi was happy to be rid of the dishonest charlatan.
Pi filled out a tissue of lies in her paperwork to explain the strange iron ore and the missing supplies, the tech priests would be annoyed with the lower grade ore and Pi was forced to fabricate a geological report claiming that she had regrettably encountered a vein of lower grade iron ore than originally expected. Iron was still iron and the surface level smelters and steel mills could work with this inferior quality ore, it would just be less efficient and generate more industrial waste slag.
Pi could only guess the origin of this inferior iron ore. The most probable explanation was that the peddlitute was illegally mining the untapped medium grade iron ore somewhere higher up in the tunnels near the surface. Some stolen servitors and explosives were very capable of digging out huge amounts of inferior ore, especially when they bypassed safety procedures and didn't bother to brace the tunnels properly.
The miners like Pi tended to ignore the inferior ore in favour of the highest grade ore deeper down, the surface "slag problem" was getting so extreme that the tech priests had set a policy dissuading ore below a certain grade to minimise slag production. There was plenty of slightly lower grade iron ore still up there in the tunnels above for the criminals to illegally mine.
Pi should have known that the peddlitute was a dishonest charlatan ripping her off, her sort were bottom feeding criminals who thrived off such dishonest illegal dealings. The peddlitute had obviously hacked into the communications and discovered that Pi had an impossibly large quota. The peddlitute had then waited until late when Pi was at her most desperate to deliberately approach Pi in a highly calculated manner. The whole thing had been a huge big scam!
Pi should have called the Skitarii to shoot the deceitful woman, it was obvious that only fear of the Skitarii wrath had stopped the peddlitute from simply robbing Pi at gun point without bothering with the trade ruse.
Well at least Pi's remaining iron ore quota was noticeably reduced now, maybe letting her get to bed before midnight tonight.
…