Warhammer: Striving to Be a Grinding Man

Chapter 103 Trade 939.M41

When Governor Cohen Severus went to Lucis, the star of Garros still burned above the dome, and more than 60 million people lived in the city beneath it. The migration surge peaked before the Armageddon route deteriorated, and thereafter the Indomitable and Valiant continued to transport the last few groups of immigrants, but eleven small transport ships had ceased interstellar travel. These final waves of immigrants brought Garros' population past that once insurmountable threshold.

Gallo's routine affairs were handled by Administrator Ellis and his large team of civil servants.

Ellis was fifty-four years old, a graduate of the Upper Nest Administrative Academy in Amigeddon, and had worked for twenty-eight years in the Supply Allocation Department of the Governor's Office in Helsard. He wasn't a big shot—no anointing from the Cult of Mechanics, no noble blood, just a mid-level civil servant who had spent most of his life in the Upper Nest bureaucracy. When Garros' recruitment notice reached him, he was already fifty-one. Governor Cohen Severus personally interviewed him, asking him three questions about supply allocation. His answers weren't particularly impressive, but every number was accurate. Cohen nodded and said, "Welcome to Garros."

In Garros, he found his 28 years of accumulated experience truly put to use. Not in compiling outdated lists, but in building a world's resource allocation system from scratch. Every dormitory room under the dome, every ration, every batch of raw materials allocated—all flowed through his data dashboard. Garros's central computing power was astonishing, but overt decision-making still required human intervention. Ellis's office on the second floor of the governor's mansion was always lit, with administrative servants lined up at the door, waiting for his signature.

The rationing system maintained basic order in its first year, but everyone knew that the stockpiles of synthetic starch and canned meat in the warehouses couldn't sustain them for a lifetime. People needed to work, to exchange their labor for food, and to feel, after a long day, that they weren't just refugees being given handouts, but part of the community under this dome.

What truly changed everything was agriculture.

Agriculture at Garros is not a crude, extensive farming method. In the glass structure area at the edge of the dome, multi-tiered cultivation racks, several meters high, extend from the ground to below the lighting panels, each layer covered with drip irrigation pipes and a nutrient solution circulation system. This is not soil cultivation—although there are a few experimental fields under the dome—but a combination of hydroponics and aeroponics. Plant roots are immersed in precisely formulated nutrient solutions, LED light strips simulate the stellar spectrum, and the light cycle is automatically adjusted by a central computing power unit according to the crop type.

The first crops were root vegetables and legumes. The immigrants who climbed up from the bottom of Amighiddon had an innate instinct for cultivation—not science, but the instinct for survival. They had grown mushrooms in the cracks of pipes in the hive city and raised slugs in abandoned ventilation shafts. Under the dome, given multi-tiered growing racks, nutrient solutions, and controlled lighting, they could make greenery grow from metal and plastic.

Potatoes. Soybeans. Green beans. Peas. Then grains and algae.

The glass farming area was expanding at a rate of tens of thousands of square meters per week. Machine-operated clerks handled the heavy lifting—moving cultivation racks, laying pipes, and preparing nutrient solutions. But the tasks requiring judgment—sowing, raising seedlings, transplanting, and harvesting—were all done by human hands. The register of the Galloes Agricultural Company flipped through pages on Ellis's data board, and the first farmers emerged from among the immigrants.

Algae cultivation takes place in another area. In giant cultivation tanks, dark green algae slurry churns under the power of circulating pumps, yielding thousands of tons daily. After dehydration, it becomes a raw material for synthetic proteins. The recipe for algae bread was found in the archives of the Lucis Temple. A baker from Amighiddon improved it by adding a small amount of cereal flour to the dough. The resulting bread was no longer the soft, wet, muddy substance of the algae-growing algae, but a real bread with a rough crust and a soft interior.

Livestock farming employs a similar intensive model: multi-layered cages, automated feeding lines, and environmental control systems. Grox—the Empire's most common meat-producing livestock—is mass-produced in temperature- and humidity-controlled farming modules.

A butcher who came down from Amighiddon and spent his entire life working in the gang's butcher shop in the bottom hive, stood in the slaughterhouse of Garros for the first time, his hands trembling so much he could barely hold the knife. Not out of fear, but because he had never seen work in the sunlight before.

Food processing enterprises quietly emerged amidst this prosperity. They weren't branches of the Empire's giant monopolies, but rather businesses started by the immigrants themselves. A few people who had previously made moonshine in the Underhive pooled their money to rent a small factory, sourcing potatoes and grains from the agricultural region to begin producing starch cakes and protein blocks. The first batch of products was sold to the spaceport's canteen, and the response was positive; orders increased from a few hundred kilograms per week to tens of tons. Another quartermaster, retired from Armageddon, had worked for over a decade in the Ordnance Department of the Helsard Governor's Palace and understood the basic principles of canning production lines.

He submitted an equipment application to the industrial department under the Garros administration. Garros' industrial capacity was enormous, and a canning line was insignificant to the industrial department. It was rolled off the production line and put into use within a few days, with negligible costs.

The cannery's production line runs day and night. Vegetables grown in the glass agricultural area beneath the dome are washed, cut, canned, and sterilized at high temperatures within hours of harvesting. Grox's slaughter line operates in sync, with meat chunks rapidly cooled in freezing tunnels before entering the canning production line. Every day, tens of thousands of cans slide off the end of the production line, are stacked on pallets by machine operators, and transported to the storage area at the edge of the dome.

The warehouse shelves stretched from the floor to the ceiling. Canned vegetables, canned beans, slab meat chunks, gross minced meat, seaweed bread cubes, corn porridge, and canned fruit were all on display. The labels bore the Garros gear skull and the words "Made in Garros" in Low Gothic script.

Every day, massive quantities of food supplies are transported from the storage area to the spaceport. Large transport ships line up in front of the airtight doors at the edge of the dome. As the cargo doors open, service aircraft push pallet-laden loading platforms in single file. The pallets are stacked neatly into squares in the cargo hold, secured with straps, and covered with crash netting. As the transport ships depart, the blue exhaust plumes of their thrusters burn silently in the vacuum outside the dome, heading towards the spaceport.

The five Odysseus-class ships—the Indomitable and the Valiant—are still transporting the last batches of immigrants on the Armageddon route. Their firepower and armor are sufficient to deal with the sporadic green-skinned raiders along the route, and they don't need to be withdrawn. But the eleven small ships are not an option. Continuing to transport immigrants with these small ships, risking a deterioration of the route, is far too inefficient. The number of people transported in one round trip could be equaled by an Odysseus-class ship making one more trip. Rather than having eleven small ships perform inefficient transport on a dangerous route, it's better to withdraw them and redirect them to safer trade routes.

The decision was simple: eleven transport ships would be diverted to trade. The route would be established between Garros and Lucis—safe, stable, and patrolled by the Imperial Navy. The cargo would be food produced under the dome. Lucis had a population of over two hundred billion, and most of its food needed to be transported from outside; an additional food route was welcome.

Trade settlements were conducted using the Gallosmark. The Gallos Dominion officially issued its own currency, pegged to the Imperial Throne Coin at a 100:1 exchange rate. One Gallosmark was worth exactly the basic hourly wage of a standard worker. It was not legal tender recognized by the Empire, but within the Gallos Dominion, no one refused to accept it. Lucius food importers paid in Throne Coins, and the Gallos offices also used Throne Coins for their rented premises in Lucius. After payments were settled in Lucius, they were converted into Gallosmarks through financial channels and then distributed to producers under the dome.

Cortez was the head of the Galloes office in Lucis. Fifty-two years old, he had retired from the Amighiddon merchant fleet and spent over twenty years working at a freight forwarding agency in the Helsard Spaceport, his sense of accounts and contracts sharper than a servitude scanner. He was registered with the Lucis Chamber of Commerce and had signed supply agreements with several food importers from Middle Nest. Galloes dispatched ships weekly, and Lucis settled accounts in Throne Coins quarterly.

Victor, the new commander of the transport fleet, was in his early fifties and had served on the Armageddon merchant fleet for thirty years. His previous ship had been damaged in a warp storm, the repair costs exorbitant, the shipowner bankrupted, and he lost his job. When Garros' recruitment notice reached him, he had already been living in a cheap motel in Lower Nest for three months, his savings nearly depleted. He signed the contract without his family—his wife had long since passed away, and his son served in the Imperial Navy, on some patrol ship in some sector, his whereabouts unknown.

After signing the last word on the departure confirmation form, Victor looked up at the starry sky outside the bridge window.

The exhaust plumes of the thrusters formed a bright arc in the darkness as the eleven ships departed the port in succession.

"Let's go," he said.

The fleet leaped into subspace.

A young woman from the Helsard nest sat by the canteen window, forking a piece of slab meat. "Back in Amigidoton," she whispered, "you had to wait three hours for even starch blocks, and the ones you got were mixed with sawdust." A coworker next to her grinned. "And now? Slab meat, peas, and canned fruit. You've been to the Helsard nest, have you ever seen any of this?" She shook her head. "Never. Never even heard of it." The coworker slammed his empty plate on the table. "So, we came to the right place."

"

Ellis stood at the second-floor window of the governor's mansion, gazing at the lights beneath the dome. He recalled the endless, overdue lists he'd kept in the basement of the governor's mansion in Helsard three years ago. Now, every document he signed corresponded to a new incubation rack, a new packaging line, a new dormitory room.

Cortez was organizing shipping manifests in his office in Lucius. The sign for the Galloes office was already up: a deep red background with a golden gear and skull, and below it in smaller print: "Trade Representative Office of the Galloes Dominion in Lucius."

Gallo's fleet never returns empty. After each batch of canned goods is unloaded, the holds are loaded with ordinary skilled workers and civilian industrial equipment from Lucis: machine tools, textile machines, food packaging lines, and building material production equipment. Gallo's industrial capacity is concentrated in important areas such as shipbuilding and weaponry manufacturing, while importing civilian equipment from Lucis is more economical. Private participation is permitted in Gallo's export trade, with taxes levied uniformly by the Ministry of Administration.