ORTHEX IX
CHAPTER I – THE BREACH
Hive Cinerax
The first tremor came at 03:17.
Nobody stopped working. Deep beneath the iron skin of Cinerax, the furnaces had been burning for longer than anyone could remember.
The floors shook, pipes groaned, steel expanded and contracted beneath the relentless heat.
Somewhere, kilometers above, machinery the size of hab-blocks hammered without pause. Cinerax was never silent.
Old men claimed that if the Hive ever stopped making noise, everyone in it would have three minutes left to live.
Nobody knew where the saying came from, nobody laughed at it either.
Jorek Venn barely looked up when dust drifted from the ceiling.
“Again,” muttered Halvek beside him.
Jorek drove the cutting torch deeper into the corroded coupling. “Again what?”
“The shaking.”
“Everything shakes down here.”
“Not like that.”
Jorek killed the torch. For a moment, the two men stood beneath the flickering lumen strips and listened.
Around them stretched Processing Gallery 19-Kappa, one of hundreds of industrial chambers buried beneath Cinerax.
Steam hissed through overhead pipes. Somewhere beyond the wall, an ore conveyor thundered through the darkness.
Jorek shrugged. “Still alive.”
He reignited the torch. The second tremor came eleven minutes later. This time, everyone stopped working.
The floor moved, it didn’t vibrate, it moved. A wrench slid from a workbench and struck the deck.
Somewhere in the gallery, someone shouted. Then came a sound Jorek would remember for the rest of his life.
A deep metallic crack. It did not come from above them, it came from below. The deck split open. Jorek saw Halvek disappear.
There was no scream. One moment the man was standing three metres away, the next, the floor beneath him folded downward
and swallowed him… Then the lights went out.
Cinerax had been built for thousands of years, not according to any single plan,
not by any single hand, it had simply grown. Generations had raised new manufactoria upon the roofs of old ones.
Habitation blocks had swallowed forgotten refineries. Transit tunnels had been cut through districts whose original names survived only
in corrupted maintenance records.
Upward, Cinerax clawed toward the poisoned skies of Orthex IX. Downward, it descended into history.
The wealthy lived high above the smog, where filtered air and artificial sunlight were privileges inherited with blood,
below them lived millions. Below those millions worked millions more and beneath them all, lay the Underhive,
a labyrinth of forgotten industry, settlements, markets, collapsed tunnels and territories where the laws of Cinerax
became increasingly theoretical. But even the Underhive had a bottom.
Or so people had believed… Until the Breach.
The collapse continued for seventeen minutes. Entire sections of the lower Hive disappeared.
Walkways buckled, pipelines ruptured, power stations failed, ancient support columns snapped beneath loads they had
carried for centuries. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped.
For almost thirty seconds, a part of Cinerax became completely silent and somewhere in the darkness, Jorek Venn opened his eyes.
He tasted blood. His left arm refused to move. Emergency lumens flickered weakly through clouds of dust. “Halvek?”
Nothing. Jorek pushed himself upright. “Halvek!”
His voice travelled farther than it should have. He looked toward the place where his workmate had vanished.
The floor was gone, so was the wall behind it. Jorek crawled toward the edge.
His hand found twisted metal, and he pulled himself forward until he could look down. At first he saw only darkness.
Then the emergency lumens flickered again. Jorek stopped breathing. There was something beneath Processing Gallery 19-Kappa.
Something enormous, not rubble, not rock, structures.
He could see the outline of a bridge disappearing into darkness. Beyond it stood the upper levels of buildings, gantries, pipes, towers…
A city beneath the city.
Jorek stared. “Emperor preserve us…” Something moved far below… The lumen died.
Within six hours, Enforcers had sealed Processing Gallery 19-Kappa. Within twelve, the official explanation was structural failure.
Within eighteen, mentioning what had been discovered beneath the collapse was punishable by detention.
Within twenty-four, everyone in the surrounding Underhive knew.
Rumours travelled through Cinerax faster than authority ever could. A forgotten city had been found, a buried manufactorum,
a treasure vault, an ancient mine.
Some claimed the place predated Cinerax itself. Others said the lowest chambers contained machines untouched for thousands of years.
Then the first scavengers returned, they brought power cells, weapons, machine components bearing manufacturing marks
nobody recognised.
One man returned carrying a fist-sized piece of metal and bought an entire drinking den with what a Guild factor paid him for it.
After that, barricades meant very little. People found other ways in, maintenance shafts, collapsed drainage systems,
disused mine workings, forgotten transit tunnels, every entrance led somewhere different.
Every expedition brought back another story and then people began to disappear.
A woman was found three days after she had entered, barefoot, dehydrated and alone.
She walked out of an abandoned ventilation shaft nearly four kilometers from where her group had descended.
The other five were never seen again. For two days she refused to speak. On the third, she asked for paper.
She drew a door, nothing more…
Just a tall rectangular door surrounded by black lines. When questioned, she finally whispered three words. “They locked themselves in.”
The interrogator asked who. The woman stared at him. “Everyone.”
The authorities tightened the cordon. It changed nothing.
Too many people had smelled opportunity. Guilders wanted salvage, merchants wanted artefacts, prospectors wanted claims
and the great Houses wanted everything.
Orders began moving quietly through Cinerax, credits were transferred.
Weapons disappeared from armouries, maps were purchased from people who had no business possessing them.
Old debts were suddenly forgiven and new ones were created.
Nobody openly admitted what was happening, nobody needed to.
The Houses were sending their gangs below.
Nobody remembered who first gave it the name.
Perhaps it had been a scavenger who had stared too long into the abyss exposed by the Breach.
Maybe one of the workers who had survived the collapse. Perhaps the name had simply appeared, as names often did in the Underhive,
spoken first in some nameless drinking den and repeated until nobody could remember a time before it.
The Underscar...
The authorities never used it. Their reports spoke of Substructural Collapse and Restricted Excavation.
Nobody else cared, the name spread.
It appeared scratched into walls beside hidden entrances, was whispered by merchants selling questionable maps.
It was painted onto the armour of men and women preparing to descend. Nobody knew how large the Underscar was,
nobody knew how old it was. No one knew why entire districts had apparently been abandoned with meals still sitting on tables
and tools lying beside unfinished work. There were doors welded shut from the inside, barricades facing empty corridors
and in some places, there were marks on the walls.
Nobody agreed on what had made them. None of that stopped the gangs. Because in Cinerax, fear could keep a man from entering the darkness… But credits could convince him to bring a gun.
Far below the lowest inhabited levels of Hive Cinerax, something disturbed a layer of dust that had lain untouched for centuries.
A red indicator illuminated… Once, twice… Then remained dark. Above it, unseen beyond kilometers of steel and stone,
the gangs descended into the Underscar.
The struggle for Orthex IX had begun.
The history of Orthex IX continues…