Chapter 26C
Tech priestess Labia Johnson grunted in triumph as the hull of the Nightmare Asylum FINALLY passed it's pressurisation test!
It had taken many days of coating basically the entire outside hull in fast setting airtight plastic foam but the ship could now hold it's pressure in the vacuum of space.
Labia wept in relief as the pumps engaged and the atmosphere in the outside bubble of the void shields started pumping into the ship, raising the air pressure gloriously. As the air pressure increased it started to superheat (exactly the way that an air conditioner works) and the tech priests had to disengage the pumps before they all roasted alive!
Crap, foiled yet again by the laws of physics!
Labia sighed, this would need to be done extremely gradually in stages, a tiny bit of pumping at a time to let the temperature dissipate. The warp outside the Gellar field was cool enough to use as a heat sink by the super hot fusion reactors to perform work, but it was still far warmer than the vacuum of space was in real space.
Labia estimated that it would take at least 78 hours at maximum tolerable air heat to get the Nightmare Asylum to completely empty out the void shields bubble. It would then take even more time to actually get some repairs done.
Basically they were up chastity belt creek without a key!
***…
Mum (Octavia) was weeping in a corner half mad as Egg looked at her in concern. Drool was creeping out of the corners of Mum's mouth as she babbled like some lunatic.
In the other side of the room Augusta and Mandy were squabbling over Liling.
The whole penthouse was becoming a madhouse!
It had been many many days now and they were all starting to get a little crazy from the claustrophobic confinement.
"Children... Children..." Mum kept babbling over and over again, driven to near madness by guilt.
Mum had been having sex with Liling every 4 hours (except sleep mercifully) like clockwork for the last few days to satisfy her sex addiction and every time she did it seemed to have a corrosive effect on her sanity!
Egg cuddled her mother reassuringly but pulled away in horror as Mum tried to insert a finger inside her! Egg backed away as Mum crawled after her, mad eyes filled with unholy lust! Mum's lust aura flared and everyone in the room trembled as they felt it!
Augusta walked up to Mum, physically picked her up, and forced her into the bathtub full of ice cold water again. Mum screamed and the lust aura vanished as the icy water snapped her out of it yet again.
This time Mum did cuddle Egg properly and sobbed wretchedly.
"Poor Mum, I'm so sorry that I caused us all to be locked in here." Egg said sadly.
"Oh my baby girl, it's not your fault, this is all ME, I'm so filthy and pathetic!" Mum sobbed.
After a lot of cuddles from Egg (and some "special cuddles" from Liling) Mum regained her composure and they were all awarded another 3-4 hours of peace before Mum went mental again.
Egg returned to her studies, the only thing she ever studied now was psychic discipline to better control her powers. Egg was amazed that she even missed MATHS, the psychic classes were just so repetitive!
Apparently it seemed that learning to harness her powers safely now took priority over any sort of well rounded education! Egg was now merely a weapon to use to fight against the Inquisition now!
Egg sighed and focused on the mental exercise that reshaped her mind to give herself far greater control. It was all sorts of meditations and directed thinking exercises, mindfulness training and getting to really understand every aspect of her own mind.
Egg endured endless hours of recorded hypnotherapy tracks everyday now, it was gruelling. She had her own little soundproof meditation booth where she wasn't distracted by the crazy family members around her as she sat for hours and contemplated her own farts!
When they were actually sane, the rest of the family in the penthouse desperately insisted that Egg do at least TWELVE HOURS each day doing these exercises. As they said, "we can't get out of here until you learn to harness your powers."
Egg's powers were by nature like an atomic bomb that destroys absolutely everything around it. What it needed to be was like a highly focused laser beam that directed all that power to destroy only certain things she carefully aimed at (and nothing else!).
Egg hadn't removed her helmet at all in these so-called psychic classes, all she ever did was mind shaping stuff that made her head hurt afterwards. The plan was to have her totally master all of the mind training stuff before attempting to take off the helmet.
The penthouse she was in was itself warded against psychic powers damaging it as an added safety measure, with what seemed like thousands of psychic resistant daemonic flesh hounds of Khorne bound into the fabric of the walls. Her insane powers could still damage these walls with a lot of effort, but it was a safeguard that would buy her some time to regain her control before the ship was destroyed. Unfortunately the family members in the penthouse would still be annihilated if this happened!
The chemical/synthetic food machine was multifunctioned to produce any carbon based organic material from food to paper to even synthetic fabrics and plastics, needing only atmospheric gasses and their own sewerage as raw materials! It readily printed out typed sheets of paper for Egg to read and Liling was helpfully organising these into plastic ring folders as Egg studied.
Mum was currently putting thick black slices of sterile common comet tar into the synthesiser to print more books, the penthouse had already been well stocked with this inexpensive hydrocarbon, most likely mined from the same floating space flotsam that was used to construct whatever ship they were on.
The room stank from this pungent stuff, had an entire store room filled with carefully stacked slices of this element rich space gunk. It was filthy with space dust stuck in it and probably contained at least a little bit of every known naturally occurring element in the entire universe! Perfect for industrial production but stinky to high hell!
Egg ignored the smell that made her snot turn black each night and focused on the page in front of her. It presented her with a gruelling mental exercise designed to make her think in a way that felt completely unnatural! Egg groaned in mental discomfort as her mind stretched painfully.
Over the past Slaanesh-only-knows-how-long period of time, Egg's poor brain had been bent and stretched like so contortionist gymnast! Different lessons forced her to think in different ways until her poor brain felt like it had a cramp!
Every day her brain was pushed to stretch ever more extremely, always pushed to just before breaking point. It was terribly painful and she was never allowed to get comfortable with the new levels of mental stretchiness, always pushed to the very level of agony!
Egg was drugged up to the eyeballs with a huge cocktail of psychoactive drugs that let her push her mind even further and the results were absolutely astonishing! Her mind was now the equivalent of an anus that was fucked by ever bigger cocks until it was so loose that you could comfortably have a fist put up it!
Egg moaned in mental strain as the current exercise agonisingly stretched her brain almost to breaking point. She was just so TIRED!
If ONLY she could take a few days off to rest her violated brain! But she knew full well that she couldn't! People she loved's lives depended on her mastering her powers, every minute of delay could cost them their lives!
Weeping with fatigue and resolve Egg finished the current exercise to perfect completion, not cutting any corners, going until she could tick all the boxes honestly 3 times in a row without any mistakes (restarting the whole exercise every time she made a mistake).
With a sigh of relief she enjoyed a few moments of mental rest as she turned the page. The next exercise built on the first one, stretching her almost twice as bad! Egg sobbed softly in dismay as she forced her agonising abused brain to stretch even more into bizarre and unnatural ways of thinking!
***…
That night Egg was puking into one of the several toilet bowls, 12 hours of painful mental exercises had left her feeling absolutely wretched.
Her brain was responding well to the drugs and was actually reshaping with every exercise as the drugs let her physically mould her neural pathways like clay. By being pushed to the absolute limit like this the drugs were able to give Egg's brain the maximum benefit, locking the changes in place so that she was permanently more mentally flexible.
This was only the beginning of a gruelling regime that should really have been started months ago, a regime of mental reshaping that would stretch, strengthen and focus Egg's mind until it was actually able to wield her immense powers safely.
It would be absolute hell for her but in the end she would be one of the most dangerous human psykers the forces of chaos had ever had!
***…
Agent Darkness was extremely pissed off, violated even, but she had to endure every indignity for the sake of completing her mission successfully.
She currently had a snoring traitor rating from the Imperial Navy fast asleep on top of her with his limp cock still partially inside her! She was pinned down under him and couldn't go anywhere without waking him up!
Agent Darkness might not feel fear or pity, but she certainly felt anger, hate and disgust, and right now she felt these 3 emotions very intensely!
Running over the top of her own thoughts, the recorded mind of Pamela in her false mind camouflage was sleepily thinking about how adorable Patrick was and how much she wanted to cuddle him instead of being pinned under Sigmund. Violet's maternal instincts meant that love and protectiveness of Patrick was the quickest way to earn her trust, and Agent Darkness played this weakness ruthlessly.
Agent Darkness would very much like to be laying down next to Violet right now and spooning her as she slept to further strengthen the bond of trust she was forming with her. The more that "Pamela" became like a mother to Violet, the more likely it was that Violet would let Pamela one day meet Egg!
Agent Darkness marshalled all her iron discipline to prevent herself from shuddering in disgust as Sigmund drooled on her face! She hated this man passionately!
Sigmund seemed to do little else besides fuck his slaves and sleep, and he fucked Agent Darkness more than anyone else! She had been fucked continually in every hole she had, been tongue kissed, licked, sucked all over, drooled on, cummed on and more ever since she impersonated Pamela!
Agent Darkness had of course had to sleep with people in the past to achieve previous missions, but never as much as this! It severely limited how much time she could spend befriending the vile unholy mutant Violet and was absolutely revolting!
The odious little traitor didn't seem capable of sleeping unless he was laying on top of a woman, and Pamela had been his favourite human mattress. He insisted on having his cock inside her as he slept and it was terribly uncomfortable! Periodically throughout the night he entered REM sleep and his penis became erect (the infamous "morning wood" phenomenon) inside her!
At the moment he was thankfully limp once more but 30 minutes ago he had been fully erect inside her and it was terribly uncomfortable!
Agent Darkness had slept fitfully at best, always woken up by erections inside her or snoring in her ears or loud farts or the innumerable other things that Sigmund did to annoy her. Sigmund groaned in his sleep and snuggled even closer.
Sigmund stirred and kissed Agent Darkness with his appalling morning breath, putting his traitor tongue inside her mouth! She flawlessly followed the script of Pamela and reciprocated sleepily. Sigmund became erect from the kisses and Agent Darkness used her complete control of her own body to force her vagina to instantly become completely wet. Moments later Sigmund was fucking her yet again.
Agent Darkness dearly wanted to kill this man, in fact she wanted to kill Violet and her unholy offspring too! She felt no pity or regard for them, only hatred and disgust. They were chaos scum, to be deceived, manipulated and then murdered as convenient. She would relish killing these blasphemous traitors!
But for the moment she needed all of them alive and unsuspecting, and that meant that Pamela the bed slave must do what she normally did, enduring endless undignified sex for the good of the immortal god emperor!
***…
Caligula huddled with a group of other homeless natives of Cocowango in a dark corner of a crowded deck. He was hungry and cold and couldn't find his owner.
He hadn't yet been issued with a microchip and was apparently recorded as having died in the battle against the Inquisition. He had no way of confirming his identity and had been turned away by the ship's authorities for wasting their time.
Legally declared dead, Caligula was now a nobody, but at least he was in good company. The entire "Midnight Scream" was full of people who didn't technically exist according to records, and these wandered the ship aimlessly, fed synthetic nutrient paste occasionally by charity workers and drinking from public water fountains.
All over the ship these nonpersons lived, including huge numbers from Cocowango who had not been properly processed in the rushed evacuation. They used the communal bathrooms, stole stuff, and generally kept themselves alive as best they could to the indifference of the chaos people around them.
Caligula was cut off from his owner and in his culture this was considered more grievous than being cut off from contacting your WIFE! He was frantic but had given up trying now and simply kept himself alive and healthy like good property should, hoping to be eventually reunited with his owner.
His fellow natives of Cocowango comforted Caligula as he grieved in traditional mourning for the loss of his owner. They were deeply sympathetic, sharing his culture. It was regarded as even more serious than if Octavia had been Caligula's wife and he were now bereaved!
The others had all been taken prisoner by the forces of chaos, but they had not earned what their culture considered to be the privilege of slavery. They considered themselves prisoners of war rather than true slaves, no matter what the brands on their shoulders declared to the contrary. To be a slave required years of study and many somber rituals, and Caligula alone had been found worthy of this title out of his group.
Mrs Caesar was sobbing with another nearby group in the filth, a "slave" brand on her front right shoulder same as the rest. The entire farm had been "enslaved" when the soldiers evacuated, as had every other surviving chaos controlled farm and settlement around the Brighton Sea!
In the end the chaos worshippers had stolen back every one of the gold coins they had used to buy things with, it was disgraceful! But as his owner had not been the one who did this personally, it did not invalidate his sale to her. The money had been stolen by chaos soldiers into their own pockets rather than going back to Octavia.
Cocowango would take years to recover from this disaster, and the Inquisition would be all over the planet now and brutally purging the planet with torture for information and mass executions of everyone who was even suspected of having any dealings with the forces of chaos!
Frankly speaking everyone from the Caesar family farm was better off here on this chaos ship, they would live far longer here and be (probably) tortured far less than if they had been left behind to face the wrath of the Inquisition!
This particular giant "room" of deck space seemed to (population wise) be little else but a community of homeless people from Cocowango. It was something to do with sewerage systems, so the smell drove away everyone else except the occasional dark Mechanicum personnel who checked on the sewerage system. This deck area had therefore been completely commandeered by the Cocowango community and they had dubbed it "little Brighton Sea", joking that the reeking treatment ponds in the middle of the room were a small sea.
Some of the more adventurous farmers were even growing mushrooms from solids they dredged out of the ponds and the crops were helping ward off some of their terrible hunger.
A group of people heavily wrapped in blankets entered the room and looked around cautiously, taking in everyone as if looking for the threatening presence of anyone who wasn't from Cocowango. They were not disappointed, no chaos worshippers came in here unless they absolutely had to. The people threw aside their blankets to reveal themselves as inquisitorial storm troopers.
They spoke to the crowd in a flawless high gothic, identifying themselves as servants of the Emperor and demanding their aid in helping to gain control of this ship and force it out of the warp so that the Inquisition battle ship could capture it and bring justice to the heretics!
The crowd was roused as the demagogues gave an impassioned speech and they stirred up more and more as the men and women spoke. Within hours the entire mob was fanatically foaming at the mouth to bring death and vengeance to the forces of Chaos, and Caligula was cheering along with them! His owner was not on this ship, so he had no problems with killing every faceless chaos scum on the entire ship!
***…
Rat Abernathy and the other Nurgle worshippers were hard at work attempting to summon Fecaluria as the chaos lord had ordered when suddenly an angry mob surged into the temple of Nurgle and attacked the congregation with machine guns!
Rat grunted as she was hit in the chest by an automatic stub rifle (an auto gun). The high caliber bullets tore through her lungs and heart, which annoyed Rat but didn't really have much affect on the woman who couldn't be killed.
Rat and the other Nurgle worshippers shrugged off the lethal fusillade of gunfire and shouted at the attackers to go away! The angry mob gawked at them in astonishment.
Rat and the other unarmed Nurgle worshippers picked up dead rats and other things on the floor and threw them at the mob as those parishioners with firearms fired warning shots. The mob hadn't succeeded in actually killing anyone so the congregation was prepared to let them off with a warning this time!
Some demagogues among them encouraged them to press on with the attack and the angry mob pressed forward with huge blades, planning to hack the resilient congregation into pieces if they refused to simply die!
Rat was an innocent civilian woman who had never been violent towards anyone (throwing things and infecting people around her didn't count as violence in her book) and she was not about to start now by getting stuck into a deadly knife fight! She was a lady, not some ruffian, a lover not a fighter, a civilian pilot by trade and a very gentle soul. So that being the case Rat fled rather than fight.
Rat was not alone, quite a large number of the women fled. No matter what their diseased bodies looked like, these were women same as any other in the galaxy and had no desire to get involved in a knife fight with an angry mob. The Nurgle worshipping men knew that this wasn't a fight that they could win, but they were honourable men in a way that few chaos worshippers were and stayed behind to fight so that their women could flee to safety.
The sounds of horrible hacking of blades on meat sounded behind Rat and the other women as they fled into the maintenance crawl spaces in the walls and under the floors of the temple!
Rat and the others scrambled frantically through the vermin infested maze of electrical access ducts, plumbing crawl spaces and engineering access tubes. Behind them they heard the terrible sound of a flamethrower being sprayed into the crawl spaces to flush them out and it got terribly hot!
The Nurgle women went mad as they caught fire but still didn't die, merely taking on an extra crispy appearance as their fat melted and their flesh sizzled and blackened! Rat's bionic eyes were fire resistant and merely blackened over the glass lenses whilst the other women's eyeballs cooked and melted. Rat wiped away enough of the lens fire blackening to partially see and she helped direct the now blind women through the crawl space inferno.
Quite a while later the extremely upset band of still partially on fire Nurgle worshipping women tumbled out of a wall hatch into a section of the Midnight Scream that was under firm chaos control. They were weeping, not from pain but because their husbands and brothers and fathers had stayed behind to fight and were most likely hacked to bits!
Rat led the blind band to the first chaos militia patrol she found and together the weeping women explained what had happened and wailed lament for their menfolk!
***…
Violet huddled fearfully with her dad's household as riots and gun battles raged outside, terrified for Patrick's safety!
Her father Sigmund had been conscripted with all the other reserve militia fighters really early this morning and 15 hours later had still not returned! They had locked and barricaded the door but it sounded like a firefight was raging right outside the door!
Outside she heard men shouting "FOR THE EMPEROR" and the screams of the dying!
The minds outside the door were filled with xenophobic fanaticism and hatred of all things chaos.
"KILL THE MUTANT, BURN THE HERETIC, PURGE THE UNCLEAN!" Bellowed a psychotic demagogue right outside the door!
The women screamed and Patrick started a high pitched cheeping of fear, his instinctive cry he made when he sensed danger! Men outside the door heard them and started banging on the door!
"Shut up you fools!" Pamela hissed at the women in an uncharacteristic display of leadership.
The women responded to the surprising authority in Pamela's voice and quieted down. Patrick refused to be quiet so Pamela snatched him from Violet's arms lightning fast, Violet feeling a slight scratch to her skin in the process! Violet squawked in horror but suddenly she swooned unconscious and passed out.
***…
When Violet regained consciousness she observed a scene of terrible slaughter, dead bodies were all around her!
All of the bed slaves were dead, as were dozens of armed men bedecked in crude highly visible imperial symbols! Violet screamed in horror to find Patrick and got up frantically!
She looked around and saw Patrick cheeping agitatedly in Pamela's arms, he was absolutely terrified! Pamela herself was weeping in terror, hiding behind a pile of metal boxes and clinging to Patrick for dear life, her mind was unhinged with terror for Patrick's safety and Violet wept in relief that Patrick was ok!
Violet scrambled over to Pamela and snatched Patrick from her numb hands, hugging him desperately! His mind was absolutely frantic with fear, images of terrible violence, but he was too young to remember what he had seen and heard clearly, only had emotions and a blur of colour and movement.
For some reason he was giving his "predator nearby" cheep (Violet's maternal instincts somehow recognised this particular cheep from instinct alone) and it was directed at Pamela for some reason. Violet read Pamela's mind suspiciously but their was no danger at all hinted in her mind, merely terrible fear and shock from the fighting.
Violet had calmed down slightly but Patrick was going absolutely mental, getting more frantic whenever Violet moved him closer to Pamela!
Violet couldn't figure out what had him so freaked out. His infant mind had clearly seen Pamela do something that had made him think that Pamela was REALLY dangerous, but he had already forgotten what he had seen, he only remembered that he now associated Pamela with being dangerous.
Violet eyed Pamela suspiciously but there really was nothing at all threatening about the woman. She was rocking weakly back and forth in shock and trembling all over. Her mind contained a blur of incomplete memory, most of it blocked out as was normal for victims of extremely traumatic events.
From what little coherent memory Violet could read, Violet had swooned and fainted, and Pamela had frantically grabbed Patrick out of Violet's arms as she fell. Violet actually remembered this part, though she had thought the exact details were different... Well it was certainly true that both accounts were identical in that Pamela had grabbed Patrick and that Violet had fainted, so Violet shrugged and accepted Pamela's version of it.
After grabbing Patrick, Pamela had fled behind the metal boxes as men burst into the room and the men had gunned down every other woman in the room. At least it seemed that way from the chaotic snippets that hadn't been blocked out, her memory was a wild blur of violence and screaming.
From the shot up bodies of the men on the floor, it seemed that the men had entered the apartment and then been themselves gunned down by chaos forces! Violet frantically looked through the door and saw shot up and stabbed bodies from both sides choking the corridor outside!
It was eerily quiet outside, it looked like all the combatants from both sides had taken so many casualties that they had both either simultaneously retreated or completely killed each other to a man!
Violet fled into a maintenance crawl space in the wall of the corridor before the men with guns came back and Pamela numbly followed her, still deeply in shock but terrified of being alone right now.
Patrick let out warning cheeps so frantically that Violet had to insist (futilely) that Pamela keep her distance lest the noise attract the armed men!
"Patrick, what is wrong with you! You need to shut up! Stop cheeping or the bad men will find you!" Violet frantically pleaded Patrick telepathically, but the infant refused to be silent unless Pamela kept out of his psychic senses range (a few meters)!
Violet despaired and went ever deeper into the guts of the crawl spaces and didn't stop until she was confident that no one would hear the frenzied cheeping!
She didn't notice the complete lack of any sounds of fighting...
***…
Inquisitor Horatio Hoffman was extremely irritated by the latest reports from his telepathic agents hidden on the chaos apocalypse class battleship "Midnight Scream", the imperial forces were now clearly attacking each other!
This was EXACTLY why the Officio Assassinorum should be answerable to the Imperial Inquisition!
The shadowy clandestine Officio Assassinorum was answerable to the high lords of Terra on the Imperial Senate alone, and regarded themselves as above the Inquisition!
They had always had an extremely narrow scope of their duties to the Emperor, obeying their orders to the letter even if it meant blatantly fighting against wider imperial strategy! It was always about killing their target, even if it required absolutely insanely counterproductive means of doing it!
Indeed it was said that the Officio Assassinorum would kill the Emperor himself if doing so would help them kill their target! This might be said in jest but it carried more than a grain of truth in it!
The imperial assassins on the Midnight Scream had been sent by the Imperial Senate themselves to assassinate Egg Sevenson, and as far as they were concerned this was the ONLY worthwhile thing that they believed they could do to serve the Emperor.
The problem was that servants of the Inquisition had been organising the enslaved imperial citizens onboard to capture the Midnight Scream in a bloody mutiny in order to drop it out of the warp so that the Inquisition could capture millions of chaos worshippers for interrogation to help them find out everything they possibly could about the foe they were fighting, ultimately letting Egg Sevenson be found more quickly!
The single minded short sighted assassins had apparently had other ideas and instead decided that the Midnight Scream being captured by the imperium would hinder their own mission, so they had slaughtered all the ring leaders of the mutiny attempt as well as thousands of imperial citizens who were doing their duty to the Emperor!
Needless to say, the Imperial Senate would be getting a VERY stormy astropathically delivered letter from Inquisitor Hoffman, a very very strongly worded letter indeed!
***…