Nexum VIII - Nexene Prisons: Nexum is dominated by the vast prison-fortresses which define its value to the Imperium. Each prison is a world in and of itself, cloistered away from the eyes of outsiders, its masters left to run their affairs as they see fit.Although formally an Imperial domain, and as such subject to the oversight of the Adeptus Administratum, Nexum is nominally ruled on that organisation's behalf by the high warden, an official selected from among the prison warders based upon the profitability of their facility.Most prisons on Nexum are effectively work camps, where prisoners live in cells or dormitories during their brief rest periods. They don crude, repeatedly-patched, and unreliable breather suits and are herded (usually at a run) towards the surface of the world where they hack raw minerals from the bare rock.There are about thirty prisons of various sizes on Nexum. Each is like a city, with its own internal culture, society, and purpose. The largest are the six main confinement and processing work camps adjacent to the planet's meagre central starport. Operated directly by the Nexum Combine, tens of thousands of prisoners are brought to these largely subterranean facilities for assessment as candidates for more specialist gaols every solar month, each operated by various sinister Imperial agencies.Such facilities include Processing Centre Theta-Kappa 686, an Adeptus Mechanicus structure which actively seeks out physically healthy but mentally infirm prisoners, with the purpose of converting them into more useful servitors through a series of operations designed to remove higher brain functions and integrate the prisoner into specialist mining equipment.Theta-Kappa's "product" is then returned to work, newly efficient; this is Humanity reduced to its bare functionality, a Mechanicus ideal, and the facility is widely respected and emulated throughout the Askellian Adeptus Mechanicus. Prisoners fear relocation to the facility above all else, and commit the vilest and basest acts to ensure that others transfer in their place.Other notorious prisons include "the Pit," a gigantic open cast mine seven kilometres across and two kilometres deep, bordered by a broad, spiraling ramp which lazily circles into the steaming heart of the mine. Along this ramp creeps "the Beast," a mobile ore-processing facility crudely repurposed into a nightmarish prison by the use of dozens of cell-trailers dragged behind it on vast carriages.With a dozen tracks the size of battle tanks, the Beast is an ancient wonder -- a filthy, stained, priceless treasure from Humanity's technological past. Every work cycle, thousands of prisoners are routed from within their cages by use of shockchain flails, handed picks, and propelled past the Beast into the heart of the pit, there to hack away at the face of the excavation until their hearts give out.Over the centuries, small numbers of prisoners have escaped into the wilds, scratching out desperate and short lives, subsisting upon the scraps discarded by the great prisons. Existing as a despised class of tinkers and traders in crudely dug burrows and trenches, these outcasts and their offspring represent the true natives of Nexum.That a growing number appear to display the psyker curse is something none of the planet's rulers know of yet, but the high warden's astropath has begun to suffer hideous nightmares in recent times and has begun to cast his unnatural sight outwards in search of the cause.