Day 1:

I started sculpting when I was still a baby in arms.  My mother left me in the pens with the other children while 

she went down to the mines to work and when she came back I had made shapes in the mud off to the side.  She was 

so proud.  Her little Artemisia wanted to dig!



She never did understand, and really how could she have?  On Cthonia, there are only two jobs, mining Durantium 

and administering the mines.  My family hadn't been born executive material, so it was the mines for us.  



Cthonia joined the Galactic Empire as a client world in Imperial Year 887.  For them as don't know it, that's 887 

years into the Emperor's reign, long may He live.  Almost 1000 years since the exodus from Old Terra.  Longer than 

most living memory.  Some nobles were still around who remembered the emperor's birth, some of them even older 

than that.  So rumor said.  But rumors about the Impies were all we had on Cthonia.  Rumors and rocks.



I was born in Imperial Year 974 and learned my trade in the tunnels and on the slopes of the vast mountains of my 

homeworld.  We were simple, rough, but better than the softworld Impies anyday, just ask us.  I could tell the 

composite structure of a chunk of Grantium on sight at age 6.  By 9, I was helping momma grade Durantium ore 

before we sent it on to the company refineries.  



I had a knack for picking which cargo trains were going to the fairest graders.  People started to notice that we 

got better prices for the same ore on a consistant basis and more folks used my ma's tracks.  It wasn't long 

before the overseers told my ma I couldn't come to the platforms anymore.  Bad for company morale, they said, 

with a couple of CorSec on hand to make the point.  Nobody wanted a repeat of the union incident, so I started 

following my father to the mines instead.



Mining on Cthonia is the food in your mouth, the roof over your head, the clothes on your back.  Everything you 

need comes out of the company store, and everything you make goes into it.  You're born, you grow, you go into the 

mines.  You file for double occupancy, you pump out as many kids as your body will handle, and you go back into 

the mines.  You're born in the dark, you work in the dark, you live in the dark and when you die, they drop you 

down an old shaft in the dark and keep on digging.



It was not a world for art.  Not a world for beauty.  Not a world for me.



It was clear from early on that I was gonna be tall for a Cthonian.  5'9” was a giant, and I towered over my da 

from the time I was 10.  We were a squat, misshapen people, dwarfed and twisted by exposure to uncut Durantium 

until we looked more like the rocks we pulverised for money than the taller, straightlimbed folks of the Company 

Administrative Enclaves.  And no miner nor miner's child ever trusted an Admin once they went off to their schools 

and we went into the mines.  Childhood bonds didn't matter.  They were a different breed from that moment.  They 

became gouging tightfists with no idea what goes on here in the ground, man.  



I seemed to be the only person who remembered that the same fella who came around in a plush airconditioned aircar 

to survey the safety of the equipment was my friend once.  It was them, and us, and we only met to trade our ore 

for too little pay or when something had gone wrong and there was an inspection.



Safety protocols are the lifelines of a mine.  Safety was tops, and more important than your daily ore count since 

one accident could shut down a whole shaft's vein for hours.  Never mind that it wasn't an accident unless 

somebody died.  I still can't remember anyone over the age of 50 who still had all their fingers or limbs.



I was lucky, and I was blessed, and everyone knew it.  I worked the mines for 13 years before my chance came, and 

in all that time, no one I was with EVER got seriously hurt.  Shafts were miraculously free of cave-ins, equipment 

never malfunctioned, explosives never misfired, no one came in too sloppy from deadening the whispers the night 

before and fed themselves head first into a borer.  To the men and women who worked Shaft 4, I was a magic charm, 

and I always had more than my share of them what wanted to rub me for good luck.



I was fast, capable, strong, and tall.  Built like one of the Impie gods, straight and fine and good to fuck.  But 

I was more, and I don't think any of them understood it then.  Hell, I didn't understand it then.  All I knew was 

there was a fire in me, and it burned in my guts like the cheap rotgut engine cleaner we used to swill after hours.  

It was the cause of my continued single status when all the other girls in my work set were filing double and 

getting fat, and pumping out the first of the brood of children whose birth gave them pay bonuses and who would 

also one day work for the Company.



It was that fire that drove me well past exhaustion, out to the makeshift shed I built in back of my parents hovel 

to waste precious fuel shaping grantium into godshapes.  It was the fire that drove me into the embrace of metal 

and stone and bone, from which I could not be removed until the fire had passed, leaving me spent on the dirty 

floor, flecked with molten metal and drained, to stare uncomprehending at whatever new vision I had unfolded.



I made stuff, you see.  That was all.  That was what made me so damn dangerous to the Company.  I made stuff, and 

to see it was to see truth with it's pants down.





Cthonia Mining Limited was the name of my nemesis, but it hadn't started that way.  In the early days I had the 

same affection for the Company that any bred Cthonian carries.  The Company is mother, the Company is father.  The 

Admin is parent, leader, and priest.

  

They provided our food and clothing and homes, gave us basic ed for free, like all children of the Empire.  Never 

mind that we would spend our first five years in the mines paying the Company back for all of it, and our next 

five paying for our equipment.  The Company took care of us and we were supposed to be grateful, and I was.  When 

I was a kid, all I wanted was to be a Durantium miner like my father, and a Company breeder like my mom.



I was the 10th child my parents had managed, and after me there was only little brother Boo, the miracle child.  

The AdminDoc told my parents they shouldn't have anymore and since Momma had given her required 5 and already had 

the bonuses for the 5 extra she'd birthed, she was ready to stop.  Any more might cripple her and then the bonuses 

would seem small compensation.  There was enough money to feed us all, and her bonuses would continue even after 

we were all working in the mines, provided we worked when the time came.



Boo was a surprise, hence the name, and honestly sometimes I think the gods must have snuck him in there expressly 

for my sanity.  All the years the others would stare at  the “messes” I made with Grantium and plane cutters and 

wonder why I was wasting effort and fuel, Boo just seemed to understand.



In retrospect, I guess you could blame the Company's ed programs for my direction, if not for the Celestial Fire, 

itself.  We were given basic ed, as per the stipulations set out by the Imperial Government when Cthonia joined up.  

All sentient beings were to have access to basic ed, according to Imperial Law.  I was voracious, tearing through 

it and demanding more.  I read, I watched vids, I dug through old data tapes, and one day, to my shock, I found a 

discrepancy.



You gotta understand, Cthonians are not outgoing by nature.  Most kids, they find something that doesn't match in 

their edprogramming, they ask a teacher.  On Cthonia the teacher was a box, all it did was deliver data, and even 

that only if you knew the right way to ask for it.  Sometimes I wonder if the Imps didn't build the EduComps that 

way as an oversight precaution expressly to deal with people like the Cthonian Mining Company.



Even if there had been a teacher, no Cthonian child would have asked about a discrepancy.  We're misers by nature, 

and when it comes to information, I'm no different than the rest.  I did want any self respecting Cthonian kid 

would do.  I put the discrepancy in my mental horde and went sniffing around for others.



I stopped turning in my tests early, instead using the allotted time I didn't need to dig deeper into the rusting 

innards of the old educomp's datafiles, systematically mining for knowable gold amidst all the Company line dross.  And what I found astonished me.  

There were huge gaps in what they'd given us, and somehow I was sure there weren't supposed to be.  Why would we 

study the history of the Empire and never once read any of the great documents upon which it was based?  We could 

read the complete works of Spider Robinson, but there was no Heinlein to be had.  We could study the Company 

manifesto until we turned blue, but nowhere were there copies of Magna Carta, Constitution, or the bible.  No more 

mention of Ghandi, or Hoffa.  No Franklin, no Churchill.  I discovered in my pillage of the poor educomp that we'd 

only been given half the Shakespeare, and none of the Wilde.



It took me years to find the pattern, but once I did, it was clear.  Freedom was a dangerous thought on Cthonia, 

and free thought was discouraged from birth.  By then I had discovered painters and sculpters and writers of songs, 

and I knew that my fire was known by others out there in the great beyond, in the Imperium, even if it was alone 

on Cthonia.  And I knew something else valuabe, too.  I knew I was going to leave.



Passage off Cthonia was available, even then.  You had to pay off your debt to the Company first, of course.  And 

then you had to work like a slave for years to pay for it, but passage could be had, if you were careful and there 

were no accidents.  It was dangerous offplanet, and no one had ever heard from anyone who'd left.  Everyone said 

you were a fool to go.  But, I was gonna be one of those fools, so help me.



The basic ed that I had drawn out for 5 years, I finished in a fortnight, and the discipline of study had made me 

quick.  I hit the books again in my own time after putting in my hours in the mines and got my welder's rating in 

less than a month.  By the time I was 12, I was learning to fix anything with gears and do all the most dangerous 

and demanding jobs Shaft 4 had to offer.



I cut back drastically on my fuel use, started doubling shifts in the mines, and put my money in my head in the 

form of more repair and heavy machinery study.  By the time I was 16 I was rated to drive, use, and repair every 

machine in the mine, I had paid off the Company store for my education and I had a reputation for being the hardest 

working, if craziest, bitch of a miner Shaft 4 had ever seen.  I was known for taking insane risks, but they 

always panned out, and people started making a point of getting behind me in the shift bid to see where I was 

going to go.



I reached the breeding stage of paying back the company faster than any other girl in my work set, but to 

everyone's astonishment, while I did more than my share of fucking, I didn't breed, not even from the banks.  I 

was fanatic about my birth control, and there are no secrets on Cthonia.  Everyone had me figured for one of the 

odd cases who loves the mines too much to lay out for birthing, and gods know we had a few of those poor souls, but 

I was driven by a different demon.  I wasn't giving birth to any more slaves for the Company Store.  I wasn't 

sending my babies into the mines to get ground into meat for the Admin's quotas, and hell sure not for the 

Cthonian Mining Company, and they could kiss my overly large though well-muscled ass!



I had paid off my education by 17 and had 5 years left to go to pay off my equipment.  I figured with double 

shifts and extra ratings I could manage my equipment and my passage off planet by the time I was 27, barring 

accidents.  It was killing me to take so much time away from my real work, but if I was gonna make it out of the 

tomb that was my birthplanet, I couldn't afford to waste money on fuel to carve Grantium, sculpt bronze, or smelt 

glass.  I started working in clay and rock mixtures just to keep the burning inside from eating me alive.  It was 

a poor substitute, and every once in a while, I'd have to.  Just have to.  One cel of fuel for my cutter was a 

small price to pay for my sanity.



Sometimes I couldn't help myself, and I'd wake up at the end of a rest period with an empty fuel cel and a new 

sculpture that could never leave my world.  My poor bastard children would never be free because while I could 

ship myself and maybe some of my tools, shipping solid chunks of Grantium would cost enough to make payload 

masters cry.



But still, the fire burned unstoppable, sometimes banked, sometimes blazing out of all control, and sometimes it 

had to be expressed or immolate my soul from the inside.  Sometimes, I had to burn.  I always picked myself up and 

swore it wouldn't happen again.  But when fire rages, empty words don't carry much water.  In my case, the road to 

good intentions was paved with the hell of stifled creative output.