Dark Lament's Industrial World

New Venice is the greatest of Dark Lament's industrial worlds, rivalling Artery in it's importance to the World of Progress, for while Artery produces SLA Industries' warriors, New Venice produces the Foldships that enable travel between the myriad worlds that SLA Industries owns, the ships that bind the World of Progress together.
Like many Industrial Worlds, New Venice's own ecosystem breathed it's last, poisoned breath long ago. However, the manner of it's death, drained of the very essence of life by the vampiric Science Friction factory-cities that crawl slowly across it's surface, leave it with a disturbing aura of an altogether different order than that of planets that were simply poisoned by industrial waste and strip-mining.

Dark Lament didn't simply kill New Venice.

They stole it's soul.

Now the winds that scour the dry black dust of the endless, treeless plains carry a soulless edge that makes the inside of visitors' skulls itch and their skin crawl, and haunt their dreams long after they flee New Venice for the bright lights closer to the heart of the World of Progress.

The shipyards of New Venice are actually huge, monolithic vehicles, mobile cities, slowly crawling along the surface, moving a few yards a day to avoid the flux-storms created by the unnatural twisting of the fabric of the universe necessary for such large-scale manipulation of the Ebb. Resembling nothing more than a city of a thousand nightmare cathedrals on treads 20 stories high, the Shipyards tower thousands of feet above the ground, and their upper levels are shrouded in the swirling mists and strange, dancing lights that are the harbinger of the flux storms. If that wasn't enough, an entire city groans and shrieks on the giant tracks that carry it, wailing as the weight of the huge construction yards shift, warp and strain as the City re-shapes itself to the land.
Someone once said of the shipyards "It's as if the dead cities of New Venice had dragged their corpses from beneath the dust and were wandering the planet looking like steel and stone zombies looking for revenge on their long-dead killers. If planets could have ghosts, New Venice's ghost would be an angry one. Maybe it is."
At full operational capacity, a Shipyard will produce a full-sized Foldship every two weeks, and several are under construction at any one time.
Each shipyard has it's own internal mass transport for the 30,000 workers or so it contains, as well as living quarters, huge workshops, the contruction bays where the Foldships are assembled, recreation facilities, processing plants, landing bays for supply ships, and all the paraphenalia of an industrial city. There are gangs, brothels, shivers, nightclubs and Captain Contract on the TV. The bar serves beer. The only difference is that these cities move.

...to be continued.