Pre-Imperial records relating to Pellenne are scant, but all extant documentation—spanning thousands of years—consistently describes it as a mining world. Pre-Imperial commercial contracts retained by the ruling dynasties indicate that the planet’s initial human population was small, a long-vanished caste of peripatetic interstellar mining clans using a high degree of mechanisation. Over millennia, as the skills necessary to maintain their equipment were lost and their leets of ragtag starships eroded, Pellenne’s rulers became more and more reliant upon vast numbers of unskilled labourers shipped to the planet from adjacent inhabited worlds.
Pellenne corrupted these labourers; mutation ran rife among those toiling in the deep tunnels, even among those who took all precautions to ward themselves against the virulent radiation found within. For as long as there have been humans on Pellenne, there have been mutants and outcasts clinging to existence in ramshackle towns outside the shielded tunnel-cities, eking a miserable life from the effluent seeping downward from above them. The arrival of the Imperium made little diference to the planet’s utilisation; indeed, it only hastened the planet’s reliance upon offworlders. Locking this imported labour into hereditary contracts of indentured servitude—to do the jobs the resource-rich Pellennian ruling dynasties were not prepared to do themselves—was the next logical step.
Life Underground
Given the number of indentured workers (who vastly outnumber the natives), the planet’s culture retains a rather rough edge, despite its antiquity, and Pellenne still feels like a frontier world. As on most Imperial worlds, the majority of its inhabitants do not experience art, leisure, and the advantages of civilisation. Pellennian society remains highly stratified, with little interaction between social classes. The planet’s rulers, a class of interrelated (and often inbred) noble families known as the “Dynants” live in heavily shielded towers on the surface, protected by dozens of regiments of ferocious Enforcer-soldiers—the Deep Guard. The Dynants are aggressive exploiters of the poor of the Stygies Cluster, enticing them to the planet with promises of honest paid work, only to then tie them in to contracts containing unachievable mining targets. Every year, hundreds of thousands of naive workers arrive in Fornix, Pellenne’s great subterranean capital city, to discover that they must carry out decades of backbreaking work in highly radioactive mines. There are tales of some managing to eventually leave, but they are more hopeful myth than fact.
The planet exacts a toll on those who work there; mutation rates, especially among those who work closer to the planet’s core, are frighteningly high, despite extensive rad-shielding. Any worker exhibiting signs of mutation is dismissed immediately, exiled from the protection of the great tunnel cities, and driven into the vast and ancient Mutant Pellennian underclass.
The Twisted
No one knows exactly how many mutants there are on Pellenne. Since time immemorial, they have lurked at the edges of human society, "feeding upon its refuse and watching its inhabitants with envious eyes". In recent years, as many of the great excavation machines have begun to malfunction, these outcasts have assumed a greater economic importance; each mine’s overseer now musters them together every work-cycle in their thousands and herds them into the deepest mines, where they hack away at the bare iron with hand tools in exchange for meagre scraps of food. Those wretches closest to the currently-worked mines and tunnel cities, a group consisting largely of recently-mutated indentured workers desperate for survival, are still utterly dependent upon human society. These desperate exiles occupy hastily-assembled shanties, and jostle for
the scraps thrown to them by Pellenne’s untainted population.
At a remove from these unfortunates are the descendants of earlier Outcasts. These more experienced mutants are less servile and more resentful of their lot. Prone to forming ruthless, exploitative, and secreted bands with their own gang-cant, they are opportunists, entrepreneurs, and innovators, establishing their own constantly-evolving culture. The movers and shakers of mutant society, they operate tattered drinking dens and seedy outposts, many of which are the grandest buildings in the under-towns. These crime lords and ladies, agitators, and thugs are responsible for many ill-fated uprisings against the cruelty of the Dynants over the centuries.
At yet a further remove is a third mutant community. This is by far the most poorly-understood population, consisting of those mutants who, in ancient times, led deep into the lowest and oldest tunnels. "A primeval and preternatural attraction to the depths has always drawn the most mutated. Every year, as if at some secret signal, thousands of mutants wander into the darkness in ones and twos. Many die, their desiccated corpses littering the dark, spiralling tunnels. Yet many seem to find others of their kind, there living a peculiar, almost tribal, existence, feeding upon each other and the strange mould that glimmers wetly in the darkness".
Here, strange societies bloom and fall, far from the eyes of the Imperium, worshipping and sacriicing to hidden gods. Here the spiral mutants breed and plot, waiting patiently for the day when their numbers are so great that they can rise up from the deepest tunnels and "drown the light of the human cities in eternal darkness". One day, soon it appears, their time will come despite the futile efforts of those above to eliminate mutants from Pellenne.