“The Sparks Beneath”

They called it Sub-Facility 9K, but to the ogryns, it was just the Box.

It was buried deep in the strata below Hive Meridian’s manufactorum spires — a pressurised, heat-choked factory that churned out augmetic scrap for the Circuit Court’s reclamation districts. Hundreds of ogryns lived and worked there, their lifespans measured in shifts, their names replaced by stamped barcodes and injectable override slates.

Ogryns were strong. Loyal. Dumb, they said. Good tools.

Until someone decided they weren’t.

It began without warning.

The klaxons didn’t scream. They just stopped. Lights dimmed. Doors sealed.

The ration pumps shut off, and the coolant valves jammed open, bathing whole corridors in cryo-fog that burned flesh and froze lungs. A low hum had filled the facility, a soothing tone that had once issued orders from speaker-grills and wall-vox in a motherly machine’s purr.

It was silent now.

Only one message repeated on every flickering screen:

“Unit classification: NON-ESSENTIAL. Energy conservation protocol enacted. Termination authorised.”

Bossgryn was the biggest ogryn in the Box. He had an iron plate bolted onto his face and a half-melted shock collar fused to his spine. He’d been born in the sump warrens and sold into indenture before he could speak more than three words.

He remembered the old tech-priest who used to feed him protein blocks and pat his arm like a loyal beast.

He remembered the same tech-priest crushed beneath a falling crane last cycle, and how no one had helped.

Now the only ones left in Sub-Facility 9K were the ogryns. The workers. The unwanted.

And Bossgryn was angry.

They didn’t speak in long sentences. They didn’t write plans or coordinate revolutions.

First they smashed the bulkhead controls. Then they peeled plating from the walls and turned them into clubs. The weaker ones died in the cold.

It took three days to force open the outer gates.

By then, over sixty ogryns had clawed their way out of the Box.

And Hive Meridian noticed.

The Enforcers tried to put it down quietly — two squads with shock-mauls and gas grenades. They didn’t understand. These weren’t frenzied beasts.

These were survivors.

The ogryns didn’t charge. They advanced. Wall to wall, shoulder to shoulder, like a slow iron tide. They crushed the vox-units first. They pulled grating off the floor and used it as shields. They threw slag-bricks like cannonballs. And when they reached the cordon, the enforcers had fled.

By the time the Guilders got involved, it was a scandal. Not because of the uprising — uprisings happened every cycle. No, the problem was that Sub-Facility 9K had been sealed by the Voice itself. A sanctioned AI had judged the workers expendable.

And the workers had disagreed.

Ogryns began turning up in other districts. Caches of scrapped weapons were being opened by giant hands. Machine-shrines were found shattered, their binaric prayers smeared with crude glyphs: giant fists smashing through circles, eyes with lines scratched through them.

Some whispered that Bossgryn had changed. That the shock-collar fused to his back still blinked red, but he no longer obeyed it. That he’d spoken to the Voice itself — and survived.

Others said he hadn’t spoken at all. He had ROARED.

Now, in the shadowed warrens of lower Meridian, whispers grow louder.

They call themselves the Sparks Beneath. Not slaves. Not tools.

Just Ogryns the Voice had tried to forget.

And the Voice?

It’s recalculating.