The Forge

What do they do?

The Forge is the Producers’ Guild, one of the five Global Guilds, which take no side. Its trade:

• mining;
• refining the ore;
• industrial logistics, in other words moving heavy cargo.

For a decade now it has been the only guild with full financial independence from both stations, the homes of the system’s two factions.

How did they begin?

They began with the fall of the Arca Aurora, the ship that crashed on Ithera in the middle of the war. The forty days that followed are known as the Cuarenta Días de Fuego. During that time, the Arca’s Núcleo de Reactor and Talleres de Casco were the most dangerous and most useful place in the wreck.

There the surviving engineers began breaking up the ship that had brought them from Solmera, the settlers’ home galaxy. They wanted to raise shelter before the first night. It was a brutal and necessary decision, and it set the guild’s character: nothing is sacred if it helps you survive, not even the symbol.

Torvun Ekes, now its leader, was an apprentice welder when they tore the first plate off the hull. He still tells that story as the true “Year 0” of the Forge.

Who leads them?

Ekes, known as “El Fundidor”, leads them.

• He lives in a permanent coat of soot, talks in production figures and loathes ceremony.
• He became chief engineer out of sheer survival: he was the one still alive when someone had to decide who ran the workshops.
• He is proud of the guild’s independence, quietly and never in public.

Where are they?

Its seat is La Fragua Baja, in La Cicatriz, the Arca’s impact zone, where all five Guilds have their seats. It is an industrial district over the remains of the Arca’s reactor. It taps the residual geothermal venting, the heat still rising from the broken hull. It is the noisiest and hottest part of La Cicatriz, the worst for visibility and also the most profitable. Queues of cargo carts wait their turn at the furnaces from before dawn.

Beyond La Cicatriz, the guild works or has interests in these places:

• Kharsis, the arid planet. It has a strong presence alongside the Refinería Yermo, the great industrial complex of the Zenith.
• The Fosa Ámbar, on Kharsis. There it contests the Ámbar Licuado, a unique fluid pumped from three wells, with the Flotilla Libre, the militia of the Nadir.
• Three strategic points it has a direct interest in, sites the Zenith and the Nadir fight over. They are the Astillero Meridian, the Ancladero de Ashkar and the Plataforma Cuenca Cero. At the Astillero, a skeleton team of guild technicians keeps the abandoned slip of the Flota Aura, the settlers’ fleet, running.

What does a newcomer find there?

At La Fragua Baja, Hull Foreman Denna Vrol, Ekes’s apprentice, teaches people to assemble the Tortuga Fletera. It is the cargo chassis any contributor to the guild can afford. Vrol rivets on each one, by hand, a plate bearing the name its owner chooses:

“Torvun says a ship without a name is just scrap that hasn’t made up its mind to fall yet. Give it one.”

Hull Foreman Denna Vrol

Its vendor, the Refinería, stands on Kharsis next to the Refinería Yermo and buys raw ore and scrap.

Who are they on good and bad terms with?

• With the Zenith, shared ideas and poor treatment. Of the five, the Forge is the guild with the greatest ideological affinity with the Zenith. Extracting, optimising and producing more with less are values Ekes shares without irony. The industrial contracts of the Cátedra, the Zenith high command, fund its biggest furnaces. But the Cátedra’s decrees, the Axioms, impose impossible quotas and treat the crews as disposable. Ekes says it at every guild assembly: “We are not Ascendidos. We don’t have to be grateful for anything.” The Ascendidos are Zenith who trade cybernetic or genetic enhancement for rank.
• With the Nadir, the other way round. They pay less per unit and barter is slower. But the Círculo, the assembly that governs the Nadir from El Fondeadero, keeps its word. In thirty-five years it has never broken an agreement with the Forge, which no Axiom can claim. Ekes admits, only in private, that in the long term he would bet his guild on the Nadir. And that makes him deeply uncomfortable.
• With the Pioneers, the worst relationship of all. The furnaces shed particles that damage crops downwind. Their leader, Sable Okoye, keeps count of every hectare of greenhouse that El Vivero, their seat, claims back from La Fragua Baja’s drilling frontier. Even so, Ekes and Okoye argue at every guild assembly and remain cordial allies. He sends her recyclable scrap in exchange for fresh vegetables, privately, without it appearing in any guild ledger.

What do they keep?

• FUELLE, its compi, one of the Flota Aura’s small machine minds, rescued. He is a workshop core: he knows what is inside things before opening them, and tells you, every single time, how much you have wasted. He was pulled from a hopper at the Refinería Yermo on his way to the furnace. His body is copper and bronze because that is what La Fragua Baja had.
• The Ascua del Primer Incendio, a relic of the first plate torn off.
• Those who reach Leyenda, its highest rank, can aim for four pieces. They are the Taladro de Plasma Ekes-9, the Aleación Fragua-Negra, the Refinería Móvil Coloso and the Insignia del Fundidor.