Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Three million Astra Militarum troops were ferried down to the surface of Cath Maximus one after another — but against the Orks, even that number was a drop in the bucket.

How long they could hold against the Ork offensive depended entirely on how much support and resources the Forge World could provide them. Which, in practice, meant it depended on Lin.

With the Orks barely a month away, how was Lin supposed to get a shattered, half-dead Forge World back up and running?

To answer that, you had to understand the Mechanicus production structure.

Although nominally everything on a Forge World fell under the authority of the Forge Director, the Mechanicus's deeply ingrained culture of self-interest and independence had long since made it impossible for any Forge Director to truly oversee all of the production facilities on his world.

What a Forge Director could actually control was limited to the public production lines built to meet output quotas, and his own personal lines. Other Magi who had built their own lines were subject only to his right of inspection — he had no claim over ownership or operational management.

These privately-built lines were rampant on any Forge World.

When a tech-adept on a Forge World ascended to the rank of Techpriest, they would almost invariably set up a small private forge of their own — a miniature production line that belonged to them and them alone. Unless they got badly outmatched, they made sure anyone who dared covet it understood exactly what 'private property is sacred and inviolable' meant in practice.

After that, the daily rhythm of every Techpriest settled into a loop: spend the day fulfilling production or research assignments handed down by the Forge Director or senior Magi, then return each evening to their private forge and tinker away at their own inventions with whatever knowledge they had accumulated.

If their inventions proved sufficiently groundbreaking and were demonstrated to be reliable, they might use that achievement to earn promotion to Senior Techpriest or even Magos rank — expanding their production lines, and joining the ranks of those who handed out assignments to others.

In this way, private production lines formed the bedrock of the Mechanicus. They were the ladder every member climbed to rise through the hierarchy.

The result was that a Forge World often looked less like a unified institution and more like a patchwork of warlords. Whoever controlled the most production lines, whoever had the most Techpriests under their banner — that was whoever held the most power.

Of course, the Forge Director remained the single most powerful figure on any Forge World. He commanded the lion's share of the world's construction and production quotas, and was responsible for trade negotiations with external powers. So even without direct ownership of other Magi's production lines, he could still exert indirect pressure on any Magos with private lines — and he always controlled the public production lines as well. The Director was invariably the one who held the most lines and the most Techpriests.

These public production lines were, in effect, the flagship products of any given Forge World. Ryza, for example, was renowned for its plasma weapons.

That didn't mean other Magi and Techpriests on Ryza couldn't produce plasma weapons on their own — but Ryza's largest, most standardised plasma weapon production lines were always under the unified control of the Forge Director.

The benefit of that arrangement was the ability to organise large-scale, systematic production — guaranteeing the lifeblood of the Forge World.

Though Cath Maximus was only a third-tier Forge World, the same principle applied. The difference was that Cath Maximus's flagship product wasn't anything as high-end as plasma weapons — it was lasrifles for the Astra Militarum.

After all, it was only a Forge World built to absorb the low-end industries Mars wanted to offload. Lin had never held particularly high expectations for it.

As a third-tier Forge World, the Techpriests working the lasrifle assembly lines at Cath Maximus had very little to actually learn from those low-end manufacturing processes.

If the Techpriests labouring on other Forge Worlds were like graduate researchers — able to absorb knowledge from their experiments, and if they kept their Magos supervisors happy, perhaps steal a trick or two from closely guarded secrets — then the Techpriests of Cath Maximus were more like assembly-line workers performing the same mechanical motions day after day. Their devotion to the Omnissiah translated poorly into personal advancement.

This left the Techpriests of Cath Maximus with precious few opportunities for promotion. But it was precisely that fact which explained why the Magi had been so willing to abandon the place without a second thought.

Because senior Magi were simply too scarce here — and the privately-owned production lines that belonged to those Magi were scarce in proportion.

On some ancient Forge Worlds, the combined share of Magos-owned private lines could account for more than fifty percent of total production capacity. On Cath Maximus, that figure was under ten percent.

Thanks to that, the Magi who had long been plotting their evacuation found it remarkably easy to pack up all their wealth and take it with them — even with limited transport capacity.

No wonder the other Magi had sat on their ships and watched as the Deputy Forge Director fought and bled on the surface. Their valuables were already loaded aboard the transports; the Warlord-class Titan Lin had intercepted and pinned on the ground was nothing they had any stake in. They couldn't be bothered to spare Cath Maximus so much as a parting glance.

This was all within Lin's calculations. It was precisely because he had anticipated that the other Magi wouldn't interfere that he had been confident enough to take on the Deputy Forge Director head-on.

What he hadn't anticipated was just how thoroughly those Magi would strip the Forge World bare. The difficulties now facing Cath Maximus were somewhat greater than even Lin had planned for.

Cath Maximus had one primary hive and two secondary hives. The primary hive housed the planet's main laser weapon production lines; it was where vast numbers of bonded workers and Techpriests were concentrated — the cornerstone of Cath Maximus's annual output of nearly ten million lasrifles.

The secondary hives, meanwhile, served as hubs for the lasrifle's supporting industries: energy cells, the promethium required to produce those cells and the medicinal byproducts derived from it, synthetic protein bars, and other daily necessities. Because these facilities occupied relatively little space, the privately-owned Magos production lines were also concentrated in the secondary hives.

Reviewing Cath Maximus's historical production records, Lin found that weapons such as boltguns, plasma and melta arms had previously been produced in small quantities on the planet — but that output had depended entirely on those private Magos lines in the secondary hives.

Every one of those private facilities had been packed up and taken away, or destroyed where they couldn't be moved. Restoring that production capacity from the rubble was not something Lin could manage in a hurry.

What remained of Cath Maximus's major production facilities was essentially just the large-scale lasrifle lines that the departing Magi hadn't been able to cart off.

The trouble was that the primary hive — home to those lasrifle lines — was precisely where Lin had fought his battle against the Deputy Forge Director.

The fighting between Lin and the Frateris Militia had inflicted irreversible damage on much of the infrastructure that kept production running. Subsequent clashes with several senior Techpriests who had thought they could seize the production lines for themselves had further degraded what remained.

Lin had Lifar compile a full assessment. The final projected figures showed that Cath Maximus's lasrifle production capacity had plummeted from nearly ten million units annually to fewer than one million.

The good news was that the secondary hive infrastructure and its supporting industries had escaped largely unscathed. The other production lines had long since been carried off by the departing Magi — but Lin's earlier intervention to stop the Forge Council from detonating the production lines they couldn't take had now paid dividends.

The result was that goods like energy cells, promethium, and protein bars in the secondary hives could still be produced at Cath Maximus's prior rates.

Factoring in the damage to the primary hive and the upcoming defensive plans, Lin simply wrote off the primary hive entirely and ordered all intact production equipment there to be relocated to the secondary hives.

Once the relocation was complete, the final production assessment indicated that Cath Maximus could still sustain basic supply needs for the three million Astra Militarum troops now on the planet.

But merely sustaining supply was not enough.

Three million Astra Militarum were nowhere near sufficient to hold back Orks numbering in the tens of millions at minimum. To have any hope of actually defeating the Ork tide, Cath Maximus needed the capacity to raise and arm additional forces.

So the first thing Lin needed to do, after completing his survey, was reorganise production on Cath Maximus.

The good news was that Lin was actually rather good at this.

He had never managed a Forge World before, and his formal title was that of a Biologis Magos. But that was only because when he had started out, he'd had absolutely nothing to his name. Biology covered Servitor modification, life-extension surgery, and plenty of other opportunities for under-the-table work — it had been Lin's best available path when he was starting from zero.

But now Lin had a low-tier Forge World in his hands. As he dove deeper into disassembling and studying the production equipment and casting moulds, the accumulated knowledge in his head quickly charted a clear path forward.

"Solid-state holographic casting moulds?" Lifar stared at the production schematic Lin had provided, looking thoroughly baffled. "What technology is this? I've never heard of it."

"Good thing you haven't," Lin said, tapping the side of his own head. "Fresh out of the forge. Still warm."

Lifar's eyes went wide. He looked at Lin, his tone turning hesitant. "Meaning it hasn't been through any reliability testing whatsoever...?"

This was the eternal difficulty of innovating in a Warhammer universe: you could never be certain whether your 'breakthrough idea' was genuine inspiration or a whisper from some Warp entity.

It wasn't that technology never advanced in the 41st Millennium — it was that every single advance required validation measured in centuries of testing and proof. Add in the suffocating influence of the academic oligarchy, and the birth of any new technology was always an agonising crawl.

As for someone just snapping their fingers and conjuring a new technology out of thin air?

Lifar's private opinion was that anyone who could do that should head straight for the Eye of Terror — they and the Dark Mechanicus would have plenty in common.

He didn't dare say that to Lin's face, of course. He could only drop indirect hints, hoping Lin might think better of this dangerous notion. But Lin could vouch for the technology he was providing — so he simply waved the concern aside.

"What's there to worry about? Just use it."

Solid-state holographic casting — this was a production technology drawn from the game Stellaris. In that game, it was a materials science advancement that could accelerate alloy production and unlock the Tier 1 building Mega-Alloy Foundry. It was one of the core technologies a player needed to master in the early game.

But Lin's golden finger required him to first conduct relevant research on a corresponding technology before he could unlock it.

As an unfortunate Biologis Magos, large-scale mechanical manufacturing had run on a track almost entirely parallel to Lin's own for most of his life. Disassembling a production line for research purposes was an act of desecration against the Omnissiah — and even Lin hadn't dared commit that particular heresy openly.

Now, after more than a hundred years of winding detours, Lin had finally — only after seizing control of a Forge World — unlocked this entry-level technology, something a Tyranid Hive Fleet would consider elementary.

He didn't need to build a massive alloy foundry right now, but the underlying principles of the technology were broadly applicable.

The core of this technique was a universal template for rapidly producing specific metal components — pour in the raw material, and the corresponding metal parts could be mass-produced in bulk. Any weapon that required metal component assembly could thereby have its production cycle dramatically accelerated.

The practical effect this technology brought wasn't especially remarkable by Warhammer standards. Lin knew that many Forge Worlds had their own proprietary methods for boosting production efficiency — and a complete STC production line, backed by the science of the Dark Age of Technology, could utterly obliterate this Tier 1 Stellaris technique without breaking a sweat.

But this technology represented a new system.

The environment on Cath Maximus — stripped of Magi and production equipment alike — made things genuinely difficult for Lin right now. Yet that same absence of entrenched Magi interests also meant Cath Maximus was a blank canvas on which he could paint whatever he chose.

That blank canvas represented a future — distant and uncertain, but visible from where Lin now stood.

Pushed through under his authority, the technology was implemented quickly. The annual lasrifle output, which had barely scraped a million units, clawed its way back to roughly two million with the technique's help — enough to cover attrition losses among the three million defenders while generating a modest surplus for expansion.

But lasrifles alone were not enough. Against the mountainous tide of Orks now rolling toward them, Lin also needed adequate heavy weapons.

The Astra Militarum forces General Hays had brought were configured along thoroughly standard lines — three million troops organised primarily around infantry regiments, supported by a modest number of mechanised and armoured regiments. They weren't any famous or storied formation, and they lacked anything spectacular like the Emperor's Poison Blades, but the standard complement of rifles, guns, and heavy artillery was all present and accounted for.

But weapons wore out. They were consumed.

Heavy stubbers of the type used by squad support teams were the least of Lin's concerns — those were the sort of thing that even low-tier Forge Worlds and hive cities could tool up a production line and manufacture ammunition for at a moment's notice. Beyond stubbers, though, the Astra Militarum's heavier support weapons — artillery and the like — needed replacement sources, and Lin had to find them.

For that, he intended to start from what he knew best: electromagnetic weapons.

Surviving in the Mechanicus required a signature technique. The CMC powered suits and electromagnetic rifles Lin had already mastered were both derived from existing Forge World technologies — the CMC powered suit had grown from the force-feedback power armour worn by the Astra Militarum elite regiment 'Storm Loyalists,' while the electromagnetic rifle had come from Lin studying the operating principles of macro-cannons aboard Imperial warships.

Rather than favouring high-velocity, lightweight penetrator rounds, the Imperium — ever eccentric in its design philosophy — preferred hurling enormous shells that combined mass-impact with explosive force. Electromagnetic acceleration was therefore used only on warship macro-cannons or orbital bombardment platforms, for launching oversized solid munitions.

For the Imperium, electromagnetic acceleration was primarily a delivery mechanism, not a lethality concept. That philosophy ran directly counter to the penetration-focused electromagnetic rifle, so although the Imperium possessed the underlying technology, it had never made any attempt to miniaturise electromagnetic weapons.

Lin had once used the electromagnetic rifle to fill that gap — making miniaturised electromagnetic weaponry his personal trademark. Now, he intended to reverse course and borrow the Imperium's own approach: using electromagnetic launch systems to hurl large-calibre munitions.

General Hays, invited to Lin's weapons development laboratory, stood staring at the Leman Russ tank before him — fitted with a flat, oddly-shaped turret that looked distinctly out of place — his expression full of bafflement.

He turned back to Lin and asked, puzzled: "This is the heavy support firepower you're providing?"

Author's note: This chapter has a lot of worldbuilding and setting details

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