HIVE WORLDS

Hive Worlds are planets which, in all but a few cases, were settled thousands of years ago, often before the time of the Imperium, during the Dark Age of Technology when mankind first spread throughout the galaxy.

A Hive World has a population which far outweighs its own ability to feed or support it, often exceeding a thousand billion people on a planet the size of Earth. Such vast numbers of people exert such pressure upon the environment that few hive worlds can sustain life naturally. Many have no free ground surface left because they are entirely built over, to the extent that the planet is no more than a huge urban conglomeration.

Hive Worlds are tough places: little value is attached to human life and air, light and food are often precious and rare commodities. Because the populations of Hive Worlds are so large they are almost impossible to control. As a consequence it is generally the case that hive societies are extremely brutal and dangerous. Violence is often institutionalised and accepted, and upholding the law is commonly a matter of exerting personal power and influence. In such a situation a man depends upon his friends and family, those whose livelihoods depend on him and those to whom he can promise support. Every hive world has its unique environment, history, and circumstances.

LANDSCAPE

Hive worlds are planets devoid of any remnant of their original natural beauty, the surfaces reduced to a wasteland of windblown ash and accumulated industrial waste. Throughout this wasteland lie the hive cities which give such planets their distinctive character and their collective name of hive worlds.

The hives are grouped into clusters comprising up to a dozen or so individual hives all linked by a network of overground travel tubes and subterranean passages. These clusters are scattered over the cloud-strewn surface of the planet. From the top of any hive it is possible to see the tips of distant hive clusters projecting from the seas of poison mists like far-flung islands.

Hive clusters are connected together by roads across the wastes and transportation tubes supported on pylons and suspended on cables. With its forest of towering hives interconnected in a network of tubes, the landscape resembles a petrified forest entangled in the web of some enormous spider. On the notorious hive world of Necromunda this is a very powerful symbol.

The hives are the result of thousands of years of constant demolition and rebuilding. Any of the planet's original cities lie underneath the hives, many hundreds of yards below the current surface of the planet's ash wastes.

Each hive takes the form of many huge spires which rise from the base of the city. From a distance, a hive resembles a mass of stalagmites rising from the cloud strewn wastes. Each hive covers an approximately circular area some fifty to a hundred miles in diameter. The tops of the spires can rise to a dozen or more miles above the ground surface, piercing the festering clouds that surround the lower levels of the hive. The spires usually merge into each other at their bases, and smaller spires will sometimes grow out and upwards from just above the base, branching like a cactus and forming multiple spires.

The spires are only the top part of the hive, comprising the upper hab zones with factory layers on or above the current ground surface. The older and partially ruined factory and hab layers still exist, although they are buried beneath the ash wastes. Though they are hidden, factories and habs are rarely abandoned until they are utterly derelict or polluted beyond use even by hive world standards.

THE ASH WASTES

Ash wastes are areas of land covered in an abrasive and highly corrosive ash, the end product of thousands of yeas of industry. This desert covers every inch of most hive worlds that is not protected within a hive. In densely populated parts of a hive world, hives may be separated by only fifty or a hundred miles of waste. Some hives may be separated by a stretch of a thousand miles of waste.

In some places the ash is miles deep, forming shifting ranges of dust dunes which can bury roads and transport tubes, and erode the base of a hive when swept along in the frequent dust storms. The funnel-shape of the hive spires is designed to strengthen the hive against the worst ravages of the dust, but even so they are often buried to half their height or more by ash. This is stabilised and held in place by the fresh wastes which pour from the drains of the hive factories.

The ash wastes are mostly composed of metal oxides, powdered plastics and inorganic chemicals which take millennia to reduce. The wastes are an inhospitable environment. The ash corrodes equipment and poisons organic life, although a surprisingly variety of creatures do survive. No unpolluted air, food or water can be found in these dead lands, although there are fungi, algae and bacteria which live on the waste itself. These are believed to be responsible for the limited free oxygen on the atmosphere of most hive worlds.

The ash wastes are a striking and colourful if somewhat lurid environment. The nomads of the waste and even most hive-dwellers who see them would call them beautiful. The ash occurs in many different, often vivid hues such as sulphur yellow, citric green, cobalt blue, pink, mauve, as well as various shades of grey, and it varies in texture from fine dust to crystalline clinker. The creatures and nomads that live there are equally colourful, the better to blend into their surroundings.

Ash Storms

The most dangerous hazard of the wastes is the ash storms. These terrible storms can blow their payload of toxic ash from the equator to the poles. A moderate ash storm will strip an unprotected man to the bone in seconds, and then reduce his bones to a handful of dust. A serious storm is something that all hive-dwellers fear. These can be so strong that they have been known to destroy entire hives. Ruined spires are occasionally revealed in the wake of one storm only to be covered over again by shifting waste in the next. In some areas, ash has been blown away to reveal the scarred bedrock of the planet. During the calmer seasons, which coincides with an extinct summer, liquid pollutants rise to the surface, forming slick-lakes and short-lived blind-rivers. Streams meander across the land, vanishing into sink-holes in the dust only to rise elsewhere. Imperial scholars who have studied dust ecologies believe that there may be currents and tides within the ash surface.

These transient rivers and lakes can dry out, forming a hard pan on the surface of the dust. These dangerous areas conceal deep seas of fine dust beneath them. The nomads who travel the wastes avoid such places, because to fall through the crust of a pan is certain death. Anyone who does so is suffocated and then corroded to nothing by the ash.

In hotter weather, when the sun breaks through the hive world's cloud cover, noxious vapours rise up and form poisonous mists and fogs. Mists are invariably followed by toxic rain storms, laden with particles of deadly ash dust and other contaminants.

However, despite their perils, the ash wastes conceal treasures. Much remains hidden beneath the surface, ready to be reclaimed and used: derelict spires from lost hives; buried convoys; wrecked stratoplanes, aircraft and spaceships; long-abandoned mine workings; and even, in places, raw materials from the bedrock of the planet. There are a few places where, thanks to some mysterious natural sorting of the wind and ash itself, veins of pure oxides and chemicals have accumulated. Such concentrations, or ash pockets, are worth mining in themselves. They are a rich raw material which can be reprocessed.

Sludge Seas

Most, if not all, hive worlds no longer have large expanses of open water. Any such seas and oceans have been filled with liquid chemical waste, choked with ash and thick with chemicals poisoned by heavy metals. The consistency of the sludge varies from a thin, chemical soup to a viscous polluted mud. Sea surfaces have solidified so much that only flyers or hover vehicles can cross. Some mutants even live in these areas, utterly isolated from the rest of the planet.

The sludge seas, however, also support their quota of hives. Some are built on massive piles, driven deep into the sea floor. Other, relatively small hives have been constructed on massive floating islands which are anchored in position. On more than one occasion a floating hive has broken free during an ash storm and sunk or capsized. Survivors of such a disaster are rare.

ANATOMY OF A HIVE

The Spires

From a distance, when the clouds lift from around a hive, its spires look like a cluster of tall, tapering termite mounds. They rise from a broad base of outlying structures to near-vertical towers. Their gigantic scale is such that it almost defies human involvement in their construction and they look as though they might have sprouted up out of the ground by themselves, like some great organic growth. Few human constructions can rival their awesome size. Although no two spires are exactly the same, they all share common characteristics and are constructed in a similar fashion.

A section cut through a spire is not a whole circle. A spire is divided into a series of segments, like wedges of a cheese, which are joined at the centre. Deep gullies or slits in the spire, crossed by communications tubes, separate the segments. These gullies are supposed to admit light and air to the spire, but their size makes this impractical. Every added communications tube also adds its shadow to the darkness of the interior.

The areas close to the core are far removed from the outside world. Their only illumination is provided by glowglobes and massive cables of fibre or flexible glass, which run down into the core of the hive from the sunlit pinnacles of the spires. These create weak shafts of light that penetrate the dim catacombs of the hive and light in the same way as the nave of a Gothic cathedral.

Fresh air enters the inner recesses of the hive via great ducts from the upper layers. It is drawn in through huge wind intake fans and filtered through dozens of purification plants to remove the fumes accumulated as it passes down the height of the spire. In the deepest parts of the hive and especially in the old factories and undercity layers, the air ducts no longer function. Here fumes and stale air accumulate and personal respirators must be worn at all times.

The many airducts and vents are infested by strange creatures called caryatids. These small, blue, winged humanoids, which exist in great numbers on the hive world of Necromunda particularly, are seen as lucky charms and often attach themselves to successful individuals. Conversely, the departure of a pet caryatid is seen as an omen of doom - its former companion is then regarded as a man waiting for death.

The Shell

The outer shell of a hive is its skin and defence. Though the cliff-like shell of a spire appears to be quite solid, its surface is pierced with deep vertical and angled shafts. These shafts are small compared to the bulk of the spire, but are important because they admit additional light and air into the core of the hive. They are all protected by a series of massive covers which can be moved into place when required.

The shell is where the majority of the inter-spire travel tunnels and tubes begin and end. Tunnel stations and gateway fortresses, convoy parks and garrison blocks are all located in it, where they can contribute to the regulation and defence of traffic between and within the hives.

The shell is also the first line of a hive's active defences against planetary invasion. Giant defence lasers, each capable of hitting an orbiting target, are mounted at many points. These are used to defend the hive against human or alien spacecraft. However, against the fierce ash storms, the shell's surface forms its only defence.

Although some people do live within the hive shells, the storms are an excellent reason to find accommodation deeper within the spire. Being able to experience direct sunlight or feel a fresh draft of air from the duct is a status symbol almost as important as having a good diet, but a single ash storm can make such status symbols meaningless.

A heavy storm is quite capable of stripping off the shell's outer layers, including a spire's laser defences, travel facilities and shell-dwellers. Shells must be constantly refurbished by work-gangs, otherwise the next ash storm could easily penetrate the tunnels, shafts and catacombs of the main spire and rip it apart.

Heat Sinks

At the heart of every spire there is a single vertical shaft known as the heat sink. From the topmost levels of the spire the heat sink reaches far below the lowest levels of the hive, down through the geological crust of the planet itself. A heat sink can be several miles across. It is a vast, hollow, sealed tube made from dense plasteel. Along the length of its thick plasteel walls there are buildings, chambers, shafts and service tunnels.

The sink takes heat from the planet's core and turns it into power for the spire. At intervals throughout the length of the heat sink there are generator stations which convert the raw heat into usable energy. The power is then transmitted to the factories and hab layers around the core. There are no power stations in the lower levels. The heat sink passes through these levels and provides only a constant warmth. This, however, is infinitely preferable to the damp chill of the remainder of the lower hive.

On most hive worlds, the power generation systems are controlled by clans whose territory they fall into. These clans receive a considerable income from all who use their power, so possession of the heat sinks is one of the chief marks of a powerful clan of the inner core. Other clans might control territory between the power stations and the users, and they often extract their own tolls from both factories and power producers to protect transmission lines. In this way the feudal clans operate as producers, suppliers and consumers in a thriving economy. Only in the upper hab layers of the spires is there a regulated service. There, power is drawn from stations controlled by the hive world's government, i.e. troops belonging to the planetary governor.

Access to the heat sink is usually very difficult. Many levels have no access at all, and on others access ports are sealed and guarded. On some of the older levels, however, many seals are ruined or insecure and access is possible although dangerous.

Hab Layers

The upper layers of each spire are called habitation areas or hab layers. Here the bulk of the population live in conditions which range from relative luxury to dismal squalor.

Where a family lives in a spire reflects its social standing and importance. The topmost layers of the spire are populated by the elite households of the hive. This hive nobility live in relative comfort enjoying the luxury of natural light, fresh air and real food imported from nearby agricultural worlds. Below lie the twilight levels, inhabited by the rest of the population. Conditions on the twilight hab layers are considerably less pleasant than in the habs above. Natural daylight is dim, fresh air is unknown, and most of the food has been eaten and recycled many times before.

Below the twilight layers is the darkness of the undercity. Here, the only light comes from the artificial glowglobes. Everything, even the air, on these levels has been used before and reprocessed several times. The proteins and minerals in the universal synthdiet is reclaimed from human bodies that no longer have need of it. On hive worlds, everything that can be recycled is recycled, including the people themselves.

The Factory Levels

The industrial complexes built into the spires produce all kinds of different items which are traded to other planets in return for the food which hive worlds so desperately needs to feed the teeming millions.

In the hives, the factory levels extend from below the lower habs down to the surface of the ash wastes and beyond. Over the millennia, the waste exuded from the factories has solidified around the base of the hives, effecting the ever-rising layer of ash waste which covers the surface of the planet. As the level of the ash wastes rises, so the lower factories find themselves buried below the ground. So long as it remains possible to pump effluent up to the surface, these factories can still continue to function.

The new factory levels are a network of waste pipes, gutter-shafts and gas-drains which bleed poisons and noxious wastes away from working areas. These drains stick out of the lower flanks of the hives, flaring off dangerous gas, belching out fumes into the filth-ridden air, or pouring poisonous liquids and solid waste onto the polluted ash below.

Industrial production is controlled by the many clans. Each producer fits into a pattern of feudal obligation - supplying other clans and taking raw materials, components and power from others. Large, powerful clans act as clearing houses for the goods and services provided by their feudal inferiors. This industrial feudalism of a hive world regulates demand and supply in a thoroughly efficient manner.

Clans will often rise in power and importance, as lesser clans in related industries come together in uneasy alliances. Sometimes conflict of interests, territorial rights and clan rivalry lead to inter-clan feuds.

Workers usually live in or very near the factories where they work, and are as much a resource as the machines they tend. In some cases, workers, especially Techs, are surgically adapted to perform specialist functions. Such physical and mental enhancements are expensive to finance, which makes such workers very valuable.

Old Factories

As the surface of the wastes rises it becomes increasingly difficult to service the factories on the buried levels. Huge vacuum pumps lift countless tons of filth up above surface level for venting outside the hive, but even these have their limits. There is a point in each spire below which disposing of the factories' rubbish is impractical. When the cost of disposing of a factory's waste is no longer outweighed by the value of its output, it is closed down and abandoned.

As the lower levels fall below the level of the ash wastes and are abandoned to low-life scum, lower hab layers are converted into new factories, and the upper hab levels are extended upwards. In this way the spires of a hive world are being continually renewed.

The old factory layers are filled with abandoned machinery and hab levels and often reach as far below ground as the spires stretch above it. The lowest parts of the old factory levels are little more than rubble, having collapsed under the weight of the hive, or been deliberately filled in to make foundations for later building work. The abandoned factories and hab layers are infested by scavvies, gangs who roam the dead layers of the hive scavenging for anything they can use or trade.

THE UNDERCITY

Below the hive's foundations lies a honeycomb of ancient tunnels, ruins, and buildings from a long-dead past. These ruins lie at the very bottom of each spire, far below any factories and the ash wastes: they are the undercities, the oldest and deepest parts of any hives.

Undercity zones predate the hives by many centuries, even millennia. They are the remnants of the first cities, built before the planet's natural ecology was destroyed, when there were no encroaching ash wastes. It is quite possible that the remains of the colony barges that first brought mankind to the planet still lie beneath some hives.

The undercities are infested with fugitives, outcasts and mutants who are regarded by the upper hive-dwellers as little better than the animal vermin which are also found there. Life in the undercity is even more violent and difficult than life in the spires above. Many of the most ruthless hive gangs have origins in the undercity. At the bottom of the hive, upward mobility is more than an abstract concept. The strong, the lucky and ruthless can rise to the top, in terms of actual location in the hive as well as in status. It is not unknown for survivors of the undercity to reach high status as officers in the Imperial Army, schooled and tempered by the terrible necessities of survival.

THE FORBIDDEN CITIES

The military tunnels, which link most hives, run deep beneath the ash wastes, cut into the very bedrock of the planet. This travel network is constructed to allow military units to move quickly around the planet.

Access to the hive is via great ramp-shafts guarded by gatehouses, but unauthorised persons are able to gain entry through the heat sinks and air-vents. Under the hives, and linked to this underground tunnel network, are cavernous storage depots and bunkers, used for stockpiles of synthetic food and raw materials in the anticipation of war or some other disaster.

The tunnel system and its associated bunkers are usually very ancient, dating to a time before the hives had grown to the massive sizes that are common today. As the system is continually being renovated or enlarged, many tunnels and bunkers have been bypassed or disused and sealed up. Over the millennia, these unused tunnels and bunkers have been forgotten and lost.

Most hive worlds have these 'forbidden cities'. Necromunda's forbidden cities, for example, are home to deposits of the psychic drug 'spook'. Necromunda's cavernous vaults of their forbidden cities are extended and embellished with the wealth brought in by this drug. Pillared halls are cut from the rock, polished stones and mosaics adorn the floors, ceilings and walls. These places have become palaces of archaic decadence and splendour.

Most of these forbidden cities are populated from the scum of the undercity, supervised and guarded by savage undercity gangs. If they cannot find enough willing workers they will incite undercity gangs to make slave raids into the lower hab layers or offer to buy captives from nomad slavers. Once introduced to the decadent life within the Forbidden City, most slaves are reluctant to ever be free again.

Spook exploitation brings in incredible wealth. This wealth helps to maintain the privileged lifestyle of those noble families secretly involved in its manufacture and trade. These are the so called Lords of the Forbidden Cities. Some are of noble origin, others are adventurers of obscure origin who have connections with the nobility. Frequently they are members of noble households who have gone into exile because they are suspected psykers or wish to escape from political enemies. They simply disappear from the upper spires, setting up court in the hidden bunkers where the spook is processed.

Spook

While there are many decaying foodstuffs down in the bunkers, only a certain type degenerates into the spook lode; the vestigial remains of the oldest kind of synthdiet. The decayed synthdiet deposits are now nothing more than a lurid green powder, having been acted on by mutant fungi for thousands of years. It contained a high proportion of recycled human protein and it is this human essence which is likely to account for its dramatic effects on the human psyche.

The drug spook is taken in liquid form - the ultimate magic potion. When drunk in small amounts, it awakens the imbiber's psychic abilities. When drunk in quantity it opens the channel between a person's physical body and their soul in the warp. If the individual has strong soul, it will be drawn into his material body; if he has a weak soul, all psychic energy will be instantly sucked out of him and lost in the void. It is for this reason that spook is a very dangerous substance, and its use viciously repressed by the Imperium.

In hive world society, people are constantly seeking ways to exploit anything they discover. The people who stumbled on the unusual green deposits investigated ways of turning them into wealth, as they would have done with any substance, and in the process discovered spook. Being ignorant of matters of the human soul and the danger inherent in mankind's metamorphosis into a psychic race, spook was seen as just another substance to be recycled and exploited for profit.

There has always been a massive demand for drugs in hive society, mainly to supplement the diet and ward off sickness. Spook became popular among the nobility who revelled in its exotic effects and it has slowly filtered down throughout hive society.

The noble households which exploited this resource naturally kept the trade secret and continued to grow rich. The household of the Lord of Necromunda himself was involved in the business and was able to organise off planet trade of spook. This had to be accomplished using smugglers, since the Imperial fleet conduct all legal trade in space.

No-one knows or can predict where the spook deposits are to be found, but whenever one comes to light, the 'right people' are informed, and mining and processing can begin. Trusted noble households with a close connection to the ruling dynasty will get concession to exploit the deposit.

Small quantities of spook are also found and traded by scavvies who stumble on eroded deposits during their delvings. This accounts for a small amount of wild spook that is traded in the undercity and shanties. Imperial agents trying to track the spook to its source usually end up following the scavvy spook and thereby miss the main source. There is nothing that connects the nobility to this scavvy spook.

The most significant outlet for spook is the secret cults that lurk in many hives. These cultists need a regular supply of this psychic-enhancing substance. The Immortals in particular require vast quantities for their rites and the expansion of the this cult is certainly the single greatest factor in the growth of the spook trade. Most of the spook lords who rule the Forbidden Cities are probably already members of this cult.

Spook is easily distributed via the various undercity, scavvy or nomad gangs who ask no questions and only know of the next link in the chain.

THE SHANTIES

Shanty towns are built outside the hives, clustered at the outer edge of the shells of the spires. They are inhabited by all kinds of hive world scum who cannot cope with life within the hives. The spires, at least, offer a limited protection against the poisoned rains and corrosive ash. The best shelter a shanty dweller can hope for is one or two layers of packing material, or an abandoned vehicle. To make matters worse, much of the factories' toxic effluent pours directly down onto the shanties.

If a shanty remains in existence for any length of time and somehow escapes being swept away by a storm, the inhabitants will excavate caves and cellars into the solidified sludge and compacted dust. These dwellings can be reinforced by sludge baked by the sun into crude bricks. By retreating into these refuges, some shanty dwellers survive the ash storms that sweep away the more flimsy parts of their homes. When the storm abates, they force their way through the wind-blown dust to the surface and attempt to rebuild the shanty out of the wreckage of the old one.

Conditions in the shanties are worse than anything in the hives, yet for most shanty-dwellers even their crude home is preferable to wandering the ash wastes, where they would fall victim to the creatures and nomads if the heat, corrosive dust and freak storms did not get them first.

No-one from the hives bothers shanty-dwellers very much - they have little worth taking. Furthermore, the sprawling settlements are home to vicious gangs of shanty-dwellers, scavvies and nomad bandits that have come to the shanty to trade.

HIVE WORLD FACILITIES

Hive worlds have the largest mix of luxury and squalor of any Imperial worlds. The massive populations of hives do not benefit from the best life can offer and only the relatively well-off can afford even education. Palatine hive on Necromunda, for example, has facilities in the 'excellent' category, but not all benefit from this. Because of this, hive worlds have a different facility make up than normal Imperial worlds would otherwise have. Once more, hive worlds are polluted, filthy, planets with billions densely packed into individual hives and spires. The distribution of beneficial living can only be offered to those living higher up a hive. The same goes for weapons and equipment.

The availability of goods is considerably less the lower down a hive an individual goes. The populations that benefit from the best are those living in the 'upper' hab levels. For example, in the Palatine hive they will benefit from 'excellent' facilities. In the 'twilight' levels, where the bulk of the population live, they will benefit from facilities a full two grades down from the overall grade, i.e. in the Palatine hive the twilight levels offer 'average' facilities. Undercity/factory levels always offer 'very poor' facilities on whatever hive world an individual is on.