Part 7

Overburdened

Chapter 44(orphan)

The fully repaired and upgraded 20 kilometre long chaos battleship "the Nightmare Asylum" shot out of the warp without warning near the permanently shaded Lagrange point, and opened fire with everything it had.

Torpedoes, lasers, macro cannons, daemon possessed boarding craft full of rabid daemonettes, daemonette controlled bombers and interceptor fighters, all were unleashed towards the Word Bearer fleets before they even knew they were under attack.

The planet down below had still not fully repaired their void shields, and the Slaanesh psykers had already divined that Franklin was recovered and that the Night Lords were safely many miles under the ground. The Nightmare Asylum didn't even hesitate to launch a full fusillade of exterminatus cyclonic bombs at the gaps in the void shields of the planet, dooming the entire civilian population to a horrific thermonuclear apocalypse.

The planet's defensive lasers fired frantically at the incoming bombs, and did destroy most of them... "Most" being the important detail of note. A small percentage of the giant thermonuclear bombs got through intact, and only ONE of these giant bombs was all it would take to exterminatus the entire surface of the planet.

The local mutant and human citizens of Lavender Furnace screamed in terror, as this cluster of giant bombs exploded with a thousand times more heat than even the furious heat of the day!

The atmosphere on the night side of the planet instantly became a super heated plasma from the heat and energy of the bombs, expanding the atmospheric volume massively through thermal expansion. The upper atmosphere bulged upwards into orbit, the heat energising vast amounts of atmosphere to escape velocity to achieve orbit, and the savage solar winds immediately started gusting on the orbiting gas, blowing it away into outer space and lost forever.

The remaining bulging plasma in the atmosphere deformed outwards across the surface and atmosphere in a rippling bulge, completely liquefying or downright evaporating every solid substance the plasma touched, leaving an expanding circle of brightly glowing liquid lava and molten slag in its wake!

The remaining void shield generators, solar plates and laser batteries liquified instantly in the plasma, and the void shields surrounding the planet collapsed in a spreading ripple, letting ever more of the super heated atmosphere escape in the solar wind in vast gas plumes.

The ripples disappeared over the edges of the night hemisphere, but the steadily growing escaping gas plume showed that the destruction was clearly continuing on the far side. The planet was now a molten inferno of lava and escaping plasma, and none but space marines deep underground would be able to survive long enough for the surface to cool, countless trillions of innocent people were now dead or dying in horrific agony!

The Nightmare Asylum did not even pause in their attack on the enemy ships in the sight of this appalling undeserved genocide, and continued blasting apart and boarding shocked enemy ships during the confusion of the planetary apocalypse.

In the space of 2 minutes over half of the Word Bearer fleet was obliterated or crippled from this savage surprise attack, and the Nightmare Asylum unexpectedly fled back into the warp as the surviving enemy ships became battle ready...

There was tense silence for long moments as the stunned surviving ships scanned everywhere for some sign of the huge battleship, but it was gone...

A warp rift suddenly opened behind the Word Bearer ships, it had just been a short calculated micro jump!

A massive salvo of torpedoes launched from the front of the Nightmare Asylum, and five of them disappeared up the engines of the biggest remaining Word Bearer ship!

The Word Bearer ship, a battle cruiser no less, exploded from the inside as it's massive onboard ammunition magazines detonated from the torpedoes exploding inside this ultimate soft spot!

Hypersonic debris sprayed everywhere, causing rippling patterns in the void shields of the surviving ships, and the Nightmare Asylum rammed into the back of a murder class cruiser.

The 20 kilometre long Nightmare Asylum slammed right through the much smaller 5 kilometre long murder class cruiser with ease, shredding the smaller object apart with it's brutal kinetic energy.

The Nightmare Asylum launched a full broadside of boarding craft full of daemonettes at the nearest intact enemy ship, flooding the doomed ship with over 200 thousand of the rabid vicious rape monsters, and fired a full weapons broadside salvo for good measure to soften them up before the daemonettes arrived.

The violence continued around the Lagrange point, as the Word Bearer fleet fought for their lives against the giant Slaaneshi battleship. The Word Bearers launched boarding parties of their own, but these boarders were met by millions of rabid daemonettes summoned systematically over the past week, and were very quickly killed or worse.

The space violence was brutal and horrifying, but ultimately very short lived. In the space of 10 minutes the Nightmare Asylum was being joined in the battle by newly arriving ships of the surviving allied Night Lord fleet, ships that had been waiting in the warp for this very moment to attack. The remaining ships of the Word Bearers were obliterated in short order, and only two Word Bearer light cruisers managed to escape to the warp and flee the battle.

The Night Lords had won!

***...

A few specially modulated refrigerating laser lance beams snap froze the land directly above the underground city the Night Lord survivors were hiding in, cooling the molten lava down to a subzero temperature solid rock.

What little remained of the atmosphere was still a dangerous high energy plasma, and would take time to shed enough heat to return to a normal gas to let the Night Lords be rescued, so the Nightmare Asylum filled in the time laser cooling the land above as many underground cities as possible, before too much lava could melt it's way into the cities making recovery of the vast stores of metal ingots more difficult.

It took several days for the atmosphere to shed enough heat to return to a gas cool enough for a rescue, and the Nightmare Asylum managed to laser cool the majority of the cities before the lava could fill them up.

They were now rich beyond their wildest dreams!

***...

Inside the darkness of the baroque Sevenson shuttle, Franklin was laughing like a maniac at the destruction of countless trillions of chaos worshippers from the exterminatus.

"HAHAHA! YES YES YES! DIE WORD BEARER SCUM DIE HAHAHA!" Franklin laughed maniacally.

The other Night Lords exchanged glances, slightly amused by Franklin's homicidal sociopathic reaction to this mass genocide of an entire heavily populated planet.

Franklin's father Chaos Lord Luke Sevenson chuckled proudly at his son.

"You did well in your first war son, this war would have been lost in the first day without you and those powers of yours. I am proud of you," Luke rumbled with fatherly affection in his distorted daemonic voice.

"The Emperor is the source of my power Father, and if your men turn and repent then they will have these powers too," Franklin said predictably.

Luke and the Night Lords all exchanged glances, not sure how to respond. The boy had given them all pause with his powers, and some were even actually considering learning more about this Emperor Franklin worshipped.

Franklin resumed his mad laughter after a brief pause, and loudly praised the Emperor for killing these trillions of "heretic scum". The Night Lords humoured Franklin in silence, and said nothing more as their huge baroquely carved metal shuttle continued tearing upwards with savage G force, somewhat weighed down by many tons of precious metal ingots in the cargo hold.

The Sevenson Night Lords were mostly just glad to be safely returning to their sadistic women, they had taken more than a few casualties and the survivors were thankful to have escaped with their lives, and wanted more than anything to just return to the loving whips and embraces of their beautiful dominatrices.

The trip to the Lagrange point took over an hour, complicated by the need to dodge so much new orbital debris from the various space battles of the past weeks, the large debris clouds were extremely hazardous even for an armoured shuttle, and the Nightmare Asylum had been vaporising much of the smaller debris with laser lances. The shuttle was manoeuvring constantly to avoid the trajectories of dangerous floating junk, making the trip especially unpleasant.

After an unendurable flight the shuttle safely entered the protective void shield of the Nightmare Asylum, and docked with a dull "clunk" and hiss of airlocks. The Night Lords eagerly ran onboard as soon as the doors opened, each carrying a gold ingot as a gift for their special female someone.

The Night Lords entered the body choked dark maze, and then paused at the sight of uncountable multitudes of daemonettes passionately raping screaming crippled Word Bearer casualties.

The Night Lords exploded with laughter at the sight and loudly mocked and ridiculed the cursing outraged Word Bearers. The Word Bearers spat fiery hatred at the laughing Night Lords, as well endowed hermaphroditic daemonettes lustfully raped their bare assholes, and the Night Lords mocked them all the harder.

Once it was no longer funny, which took a while, the Night Lords simply left the Word Bearers to their fate, without giving them the mercy of death. The daemonettes would doubtless rape them all to death... Eventually...

The Night Lords continued through the dark maze, pausing only to laugh at sodomised wounded Word Bearers scattered throughout the maze. The Nightmare Asylum had clearly been boarded by many thousands of Word Bearers by the look of all the rape victims, and the daemonettes had clearly outnumbered them very badly in the ensuing combat and completely defeated them.

The Night Lords laughed nastily, and even Franklin had a brief chuckle at the fate of these hated Word Bearers, it was absolutely hilarious to see one's hated foes being so completely and utterly humbled so shamefully! It was about the most humiliating way it was possible to die, buggered to death by hermaphroditic sissies while your enemies laughed at you!

The Night Lords were almost unable to walk from laughing so hard by the time they reached the residential areas of the ship, and triumphantly made their way to the main hall for a huge celebration the girls had planned for their homecoming.

Female cheers erupted as the first of the Night Lords entered the great hall, and the entire Sevenson force entered the room to a cacophony of female voices rejoicing at top volume. Bunting and banners of welcome plastered every wall, a feast was waiting on huge tables, and black leather clad ladies ran to their lovers with tears of joy and relief in their eyes.

Franklin spied his mother Wendy sitting in a wheelchair being pushed by a man he had never seen before, and moved towards her, knowing that his beloved nuns would most likely be with Wendy.

Franklin couldn't see Octavia anywhere, but as he had predicted he found his wonderful nuns standing in a nervous huddle beside Wendy. Franklin thrilled with an especially intense submissive bliss, greatly enhanced due to his lengthy absence from his beloved cruel nuns, and he ran eagerly to his nuns, placing his own carried gold ingot at their feet in ecstatic tribute.

The nuns were on Franklin in an instant, hugging him from all sides and thanking the Emperor for his safe return. Franklin basked in this tight embrace in hypnotic submissive delight, and felt the most blissful he had in all his time since last leaving them.

"Oh Franklin we were so worried about you! We heard that a fell Bloodthirster had kidnapped you!" Sister Mary said emotionally.

"Yes my nun, for over a week I was held by the Bloodthirster Galit of the vile god Khorne. Galit was eventually defeated by the Night Lords with great firepower before he finally died. I am unharmed," Franklin said submissively.

The nuns hugged him all the tighter at these words, and Franklin got a rock hard erection from this contact.

"I want to see my son!" Wendy's voice spoke above the fuss his nuns were making.

The nuns parted to let Wendy's wheelchair be pushed up to Franklin. He immediately noticed that she was scarred all over with words carved into her flesh, the words were badly spelled with terrible grammar but seemed to be listing some of Wendy's many crimes! She looked extremely weak and sickly, apparently unable to get out of the wheelchair.

"What happened to you Mother?!" Franklin asked in shock.

"I killed a Bloodthirster in single combat, I almost died from it. I have been badly injured ever since. Oh and these words were carved into me by Octavia, it's a long story," Wendy said weakly, clearly not strong enough to say much.

"You killed a Bloodthirster!?" Franklin exclaimed in shock.

"She did Franklin, she saved all our lives with selfless bravery. She has been much less sinful of late, we are so proud of the progress she is making," Mother Superior said with gruff pride.

Franklin gasped in astonishment and hopefully asked, "does that mean that she has stopped her wicked lesbian depravity with Octavia?"

"Yes she has Franklin. Octavia died, killed by the Bloodthirster, and Wendy now has this man here as her husband! Wendy has been utterly faithful to her husband and has not lay with a woman since joining with her husband!" Mother Superior said excitedly.

Franklin gasped in delighted amazement! His mother was turning from her wicked ways! It was a miracle!

"Oh mother I am so proud of you! I am however so sorry to hear about Octavia, she had a very kind heart, I know that in your own depraved way you deeply cared about her, in a way I cared deeply about her too, this ship will be a darker place without her compassionate heart in it. I know that it can't have been easy for you. I am glad that you have at least remarried the proper gender this time," Franklin said with deliberate tact and delicacy for her feelings as his own excitement threatened to become rudeness.

"Aw! That is so sweet Franklin! I had no idea you liked me so much!" Wendy's new husband gushed effeminately in a voice far too deep and manly for such a feminine display.

"I, I do not know you yet sir. I am indeed Wendy's son Franklin, who are you?," Franklin asked with awkward politeness.

"Me?, Why I am Octavia silly! When my old body died Hyacinth put my soul in this new body, I am still not used to it," the man said with cheerful stupidity just like Octavia would have said.

Franklin was nonplussed and looked to his nuns for some confirmation or explanation of this bizarre statement.

"Well yes TECHNICALLY Octavia is the soul inside this body, but at least they are now husband and wife rather than their previous blasphemy against marriage! It is a HUGE step in the right direction!" Mother Superior explained defensively.

Franklin nodded in agreement, understanding what she was saying. This was indeed a HUGE step in the right direction for his sinful mother, and one more step on her path to eventual redemption.

This epiphany was then interrupted by an outraged shout from his older brother Augusta, who had apparently also just been told the news about his mother Octavia...

"HYACINTH! What the FUCK did you do to my mum!?"

***...

Hyacinth was more than a little hesitant to go near her big brother Augusta for the next few days after the whole "turning his mother into a man" thing, and so had welcomed the opportunity to be deployed down to Lavender Furnace in a refrigerated space suit for the next few days.

Augusta was absolutely incensed and livid about his mother, and Hyacinth felt more than a little that he was probably perfectly justified to be so annoyed about it!

In truth it was the fault of a lot of people besides just Hyacinth, Wendy and Liling definitely deserved some of the blame, as did Violet for not doing a better job trying to resurrect the old body of Octavia, though in Violet's defence there hadn't been much left to work with.

An identical duplicate of Octavia's old aesthetically perfect body was being grown with painstakingly fine detail by Liling in a cloning vat at the moment, and when it was fully grown Octavia would be back to normal. It just unfortunately took a while even with Liling's preternatural medical skills.

To escape from the embarrassment of having to deal with Augusta after this debacle, Hyacinth had wisely volunteered to go down into the remains of the underground city and work on the construction of a number of warp gates to make travel between the planet and the Nightmare Asylum much easier.

Lavender Furnace had wealth beyond counting, FAR more wealth than they could even fit onboard an entire large fleet (if they had had one)! The cargo holds of the Nightmare Asylum wouldn't hold even 1 percent of all the precious metal ingots available for the taking.

Getting these ingots up TO the cargo holds of the Nightmare Asylum with conventional methods from the bottom of a planetary gravity well was a significant problem however...

It all came down to the accursed Delta V equation, that bane of rocket science that had forever made flying heavy things up to orbit an utter pain in the bottom!

Hyacinth cursed the Delta V equation, just as almost every rocket scientist in history had cursed the blasted thing. It was the reason that conventional surface to orbit rockets usually had to have over half of their launch mass taken up just in fuel. Fusion engines helped a bit, but when you wanted to get multiple millions of tons of heavy gold up to orbit in a finite number of shuttles in a timely fashion, even fusion engines really couldn't escape the limitations of the hated Delta V equation!

If the Nightmare Asylum had been willing to spend months on end and endless shuttle trips, (and burning Slaanesh only knows how much fuel), then it would have been very feasible to harvest the planet's treasures the conventional way. But the Matriarch was already near the end of her patience with the delays in their return, so a faster alternative method was required.

In front of Hyacinth was a huge bolted together ring structure covered in unholy runes of darkest power. The ring had originated on the Nightmare Asylum and been disassembled into a lot of small pieces to fit onboard the shuttle. A gaggle of chaos cultists in space suits had just spent the last two hours bolting together this ring and a few other rings like it, and they were all finally ready for activation.

Hyacinth opened her highly psychic mind to the full power of the warp, and magenta energy crackled around her burned mutated head. Hyacinth squawked out carefully chosen words of power, and the raging energies swirled around in tightly controlled patterns, forming the architecture for this extremely complex spell.

The runes on the nearest ring glowed brighter and brighter as Hyacinth's spell took shape upon it, and Hyacinth shrieked out the unholy words of the spell with growing volume, as she fed steadily more and more power into it.

High up in orbit Hyacinth could sense her sister Violet feeding her own power into an identical ring in the massive cargo hold decks of the Nightmare Asylum, and the two sisters worked their complex spells in unison to connect the two rings together in a warp corridor.

The cargo hold of the Nightmare Asylum had already been airtight from the other sections of the ship, and had already dropped its internal air pressure to match the feeble remaining atmosphere on Lavender Furnace. Violet was wearing a space suit same as Hyacinth, and thousands of space suited crew members were standing by with trucks and loading machinery to enter the corridor as soon as it opened to begin harvesting the gold and other high value ingots.

Hyacinth raced through the rest of the incantations as quickly as her speech impediment would allow her to, flooding raw chaos power into the ring in a kaleidoscope of dazzling colours. Hyacinth squawked out the final word, and the ring blazed into life, opening the warp gate to the Nightmare Asylum.

Hyacinth scooted out of the way as trucks and loaders started driving out of the ring, bright headlights dazzling her. She sat down to one side out of the way, and regained her strength after the taxing psychic ritual.

The ingot depot was rapidly filling with hundreds of large electric powered trucks with bright headlights, and the depot was lit up brilliantly with so many lights on at once. The light reflected off the shiny metal surfaces of many different types of metals, and bounced around everywhere filling a large area of space.

Hyacinth made bird noises of appreciation at the sheer wealth that greeted her eyes, the amounts of precious metals that greeted her eyes were astonishing! Hyacinth then paused, troubled at the thought of all those poor people who had gathered all this wealth in the first place. Stabs of terrible guilt and sorrow filled her heart, those innocent fellow worshippers of chaos hadn't deserved to die, a terrible crime had taken place here!

Hyacinth tried her best not to dwell on these painful thoughts, and got to work activating additional rings to prevent transportation bottlenecks. In the space of an hour she had enough of the rings working to handle the logistics with ease.

Hyacinth then busied herself with the much more comforting task of reactivating the city's cogitator network and downloading every last byte of data it contained, for the benefit of the Library she was still technically in charge of. The people might be dead, but Hyacinth would make sure that their stories and history would go on being told, as some feeble gesture of respect to these innocent souls so cruelly snuffed out.

Lavender Furnace was steeped in ten thousand years of history and legend, and had recorded the events and history of other planets and places within the Eye of Terror. Sevenson psyker women would doubtless have a blissful time for centuries to come pouring over and learning all of this new lore and data. To Hyacinth this recorded information was worth far more than all the gold, indeed she had never wanted to rob this poor planet in the first place!

Hyacinth felt tears running down her face inside her space suit helmet, and was unable to wipe them away. These poor people!

Hyacinth sobbed hoarsely with grief over this genocide her own family members had committed, and was soon feeling so wretchedly guilty that she doubled over and vomited violently inside her space suit helmet, covering the glass with a pool of reeking sick!

Hyacinth wailed uncontrollably with grief, squawking apologies to the trillions of dead. She was one of the few Sevensons who genuinely had a conscience, and the guilt of this terrible evil crime against humanity was tearing her apart inside!

Hyacinth curled up on the floor on her side in the fetal position, ignoring the puddle of sick now soaking her long hair-feathers on one side of her head, and just gibbered and wailed half insane with guilt until a squad of concerned Kilimanjaro chaos cultists in space suits carried her away.

Hyacinth couldn't see through her vomit covered helmet, let alone through her tears, but could sense the friendly concern in the minds of the cultists around her, so she trusted them to carry her without objection.

After a short walk she was loaded into the passenger seat of what was probably a truck, and quickly driven away. A few minutes later she was being carried out of the truck by men, and soon heard the loud hiss of an airlock cycling.

Hyacinths helmet was then removed, and she looked up to see her giant boyfriend Jack gazing at her worriedly.

Jack wiped the vomit away as best he could with a wet rag as Hyacinth sobbed numbly, and she was half aware of being stripped out of her space suit and carried away in his arms...

***...

For many long hours many hundreds of trucks came and went through the rings, loaded up high to near breaking limit with gold and other metals. Many many hundreds of thousands of tons of ingots moved through the rings every single hour, and by the end of the day millions of tons were already safely aboard the ship.

It was unclear exactly how much extra weight the ship could handle, but it was extremely obvious that the bridge crew had decided to find out, and the loads just continued unceasingly.

The Sevenson Night Lords now had more gold than a planetary governor, more gold than they were even sure what to do with, but still they kept loading in more and more, driven to excess by Slaanesh fuelled greed.

The superstructure was creaking quite badly by the end of the second day of loading in the precious metal ingots, and the daemonettes bound into the hull were making unhappy noises from being so badly overloaded.

A chaos fuel tanker from the allied Night Lord fleet arrived on the third day, delivering an entire tank of deuterium fuel to the Nightmare Asylum as had been promised, and the crew eagerly connected a giant fuel hose to the tanker and started pumping in vast amounts of the fuel.

The Nightmare Asylum was now so overloaded by the plunder that the additional mass from the fuel set off screaming alarm sirens. The ship was never designed to contain this much mass, it was a warship not a cargo ship!

The Sevensons responded by dehydrating all the air on the ship and jettisoning the resulting nonessential water to shed tons of mass. They then started finding other dead weight to jettison, including an astonishing 500 tons of maggots and flies!

Dead bodies, dust, rust, broken equipment, books that had digital backups, decorative ornaments that were not irreplaceable or highly sentimental, old clothes that women had been meaning to throw out eventually anyway... Tons and tons of useless mass was jettisoned to reduce weight.

After cleaning out every single nook and cranny of the ship the crew managed to vent enough mass to make the overload alarm sirens only just stop, and the Sevensons reluctantly decided that they could add no further treasure.

The Sevensons said their final goodbyes to their local Night Lord allies in the Eye of Terror on the fifth day, and the engines groaned miserably as they struggled to move the heavy ship into position for a warp jump.

The warp drive struggled furiously as it powered up, and a warp rift opened sluggishly in front of the ship. Wider and wider it yawned, until, with a ponderous lurch, the Nightmare Asylum limped weakly and slowly into the warp, engines barely able to cope with the increased mass.

The Lavender Furnace war was over, but the journey home had only just begun.

***...