"Two shifts, one of fifteen hours, one of six. The longer one’s for working, the shorter one’s for sleeping. Avoid the gangers, they’ll kill you soon as look at you. Rise and run to the robing bays quick, dawdlers get the leaky suits and die soonest of lung-rot. Eat everything they give you, as you won’t get much. There’s only one escape: death. Don’t allow yourself any hope. We don’t do hope here."
-A veteran inmate explains Nexum VIII to a new arrival
A brittle, rocky penal colony, Nexum VIII lies on a neglected Warp route less than eight months’ travel from a cluster of civilised Tributary systems Coreward of Snope’s World. The sole surviving planet of its system, it orbits a vast dying star known as Medea. For recorded history, this deadly star has flickered like a guttering candle, a harbinger of dark times. For millennia, the sector’s inhabitants have known that the star is doomed to collapse and explode into a supernova, obliterating Nexum and every star system within a dozen light years. During the long-faded Dark Age of Technology, humanity may have had means of predicting when this dire event would occur with precision; in the 41st Millennium, even the most sagacious Magos Astronomica is unable to offer anything but vague estimates.
Lashed by occasional streams of plasma from the dying monster at its heart, Nexum VIII would be ignored were it not for surface minerals essential for the production of ceramite. The presence of these minerals renders it useful; however, given the planet’s hazardous location, it has long been neglected.
Navigators abhor the system. They are aware that the relative ease with which Nexum can be reached arises from the permeable local barrier between reality and the Warp. No Navigator can travel to Nexum without feeling the cold caress of insanity pressing against his psyche. The entire stellar region is a psychic sponge echoing and amplifying the emotions of its inhabitants. On Nexum, this feedback generates a vortex of negative emotion where the Warp bleeds into the lives of the inhabitants with horrific consequences.
Nexum is a grim silicate world whose surface consists of jagged black shards of rock and shattered mountains. It is a harsh planet, unsuited to human life. The air is rich in microscopic, flinty slivers of local rock which scour away the lining of lungs after only a few minutes of exposure. Protective filtering devices are essential for sustained operations on the surface.
Medea hangs in the sky, a terrible red light reminding all that life faces imminent destruction. There is no water save that carried by visitors. Habitations are usually hermetically sealed, often buried as far below ground as possible. Prior to the arrival of the Imperium in recent centuries, the only structures at all were a series of peculiar dolmens carved from the local rock, arranged in concentric circles or henges. Now, the only occupied structures are the prisons. There are several dozen, each a titanic fortress clustering around orbital landing domes. Each prison is dependent on shuttles delivering supplies from Snope’s World. Cast from local rock rendered into crude black cement, these prisons are deadly locations whose psychic emanations reverberate powerfully.
Nexum was apparently discovered during the sector’s early history, though records mark it purely as a navigational hazard. Certain references in the fragmentary data pertaining to the dark years following the Great Heresy mention Nexum explicitly in the context of a list of local worlds "purified" during the series of brutal wars known as the "Great Scouring," but what they were purified of is tantalisingly unclear.
For thousands of years the world lay ignored. However, the looming threat of the Pandaemonium engaged the desperate predatory instincts of the sector’s merchant class, instituting a culture of greater commercial risk-taking. Three centuries ago, a group of merchants formed the Nexum Combine to exploit Nexum’s mineral resources. Only desperation could have led to mining a world orbiting a potential supernova.
Naturally, one does not obtain volunteers for such hazardous work; slave labour was the answer. Workers were sourced from local worlds: bonded serfs, contract-bound timesmen, and the dregs of prisons purchased and dragged to the planet in chains. The Combine’s agents comb surrounding systems, bargaining in human lives with callous governors seeking to rid themselves of dangerous elements. Thus, a world known to be doomed has become one of greater utility than many which are not. Dozens of vast prisons now dot the surface, each a model of efficiency by cruel standards, generating vast profits for concerns untroubled by the deaths of hundreds of prisoners every day.
Nexum is dominated by vast prison-fortresses. Each is a world in itself, cloistered away from outsiders. Although formally an Imperial domain, Nexum is nominally ruled by the High Warden, an official selected from among the warders based upon profitability. Most prisons are work camps where prisoners live in cells during brief rest periods, donning unreliable breather suits to hack raw minerals from the bare rock.
There are about thirty prisons of various sizes. The largest are the six main confinement camps adjacent to the central starport. Operated by the Nexum Combine, tens of thousands of prisoners are brought here for assessment. Facilities include Processing Centre Theta-Kappa 686, an Adeptus Mechanicus structure which seeks out healthy but mentally infirm prisoners to convert into servitors. Theta-Kappa's "product" is returned to work, newly efficient; this is humanity reduced to bare functionality.
Other notorious prisons include "the Pit," a gigantic open cast mine bordered by a ramp circling into its steaming heart. Along this ramp creeps "the Beast," a mobile ore-processing facility repurposed into a nightmarish prison by the use of dozens of cell-trailers dragged behind it. With tracks the size of battle tanks, the Beast is an ancient wonder. Every work cycle, thousands of prisoners are routed from cages, handed picks, and propelled past the Beast to hack away at the excavation until their hearts give out.
Over the centuries, small numbers of prisoners have escaped into the wilds, scratching out short lives. Existing as a despised class of tinkers in crudely dug burrows, these outcasts represent the true natives of Nexum. A growing number appear to display the psyker curse, causing the High Warden’s Astropath to suffer hideous nightmares.
Gang culture dominates Nexum’s prisons. Those brutal enough to exploit the weakness of others rise quickly, sacrificing their humanity to survive. On Nexum, where the walls between the Warp and realspace are thin, this can be a literal experience. To those who perceive the Warp, the anger and despair of the incarcerated bleed into the fabric of the facility. In recent years, warders have reported explosions of violent gang activity; few months pass without spontaneous murders.
In Camp Takkrid, a facility processing penal legionaries, murders have risen far above average. Many victims have been decapitated or show signs of ritualised combat. In the medical wing of General Population Processing I, a respected physician was caught injecting patients with chemicals of his own devising, linking him to seventy deaths.
Many peculiar happenings are attributed to "snake," a sinister narcotic. First encountered three years ago, this drug appears created from the harvested adrenal glands of prisoners subjected to torture. It is highly addictive and spreading across the planet. Other guards cite the appearance of a new mystery cult, the Servants of the Iridescent Aquila. Ostensibly fanatical in their worship of the God-Emperor, they scheme incessantly against other congregations.
Finally, the Turnkeys, Nexum’s interrelated fraternity of hereditary guards and Enforcers, have not been immune to the growing violence. This traditionally tight-knit and insular society has for centuries policed the planet, herding prisoners with a flick of the chain-whip. However, their social cohesion is now breaking down in the face of escalating gang violence, and more and more deaths can be attributed to heavy-handed and brutal policing of the worst kind.