The Gorgonid Mine remains the most important single mine on Sepheris Secundus, accounting for nearly 10% of the world's Gross Planetary Product. Directly beneath Icenholm the Gorgonid is like a gargantuan tiered cone turned on its head - the greatest strip mine in Calixis sector, several kilometers deep and many scores of kilometers in diameter, all wedged in between jagged mountain peaks rising as high as 6000 meters. Floating on top is the glittering crown that is Icenholm, its many mirrors and colored glass faces turning the city into a dazzling sight (too bad the serfs are always looking down, or one would imagine they'd be quite impressed).

Today there is little strip mining in the Gorgonid directly beneath Icenholm - that sort of activity has moved on to the valleys and plateaus in the surrounding mountains. Instead the old faces are puckered by great portals of metal leading down and into the surrounding mountains and the deep earth. Each portal leads to a single independent mine, each run by a Baron, and there are thousands of such mines (many of whom are no longer operated, their mineral bounty stripped out long ago, and the portals closed forever).

Approximately 200.000 million serfs live and work in the shadow of Icenholm, with another 300.000 million spread across the strip mines in the surrounding mountains. In a way they are the fortunate ones. The Gorgonid is not run purely by hand power - semi-advanced gear is in use, ranging from drilling equipment, to explosives and massive ore haulers. In other regions of the planet conditions are more primitive, and the lives of the serfs even more desperate. But that is beyond the score of this brief (but there is an appendix ;-)

The ore that is gathered is sorted on site and hauled by building-sized trucks to the great ore processor stations at the edge of the Tumble (the great slag heaps that surround the mines of the Gorgonid). Elsewhere on the planet ore must sometimes be transported overland for quite a distance to reach the regional orbital landing fields. After sorting and some simple refinement the processed ore go into the great ore barges (the pilots and tech-adepts operating these shuttles also live in Icenholm - but out of sight of the nobility). Thousands of barges make the trip every day, carrying the ore into the waiting maws of the megafreighters waiting in low orbit.