Chapter 2(OB)
J3N kept out of the way as men with forklifts removed piles of manure pallets from the cargo hold. The pallets were being transferred to a surface-to-orbit bulk carrier shuttle of some sort, whatever it was it was a horribly ugly shuttle design, just awful to look at through the port side observation windows.
The Habib's Pride was currently orbiting the Imperial Agri World of EW-TD-68/5-Q-Epsilon, selling manure to the superstitious local farmers. EW-TD-68/5-Q-Epsilon was not a well known place, completely unremarkable apart from being located on this minor shipping lane. J3N knew that the planet grew mixed agricultural products, but didn't know much else about the place.
Habib's Pride was still not arrived at 1D8V-44 to deliver J3N. Habib's Pride was stopping at every planet along it's assigned shipping lane, spending a few days at each stop to unload cargo and haggle with local merchants over prices. J3N was getting agitated by the delays in meeting her new husband, but she could do nothing about it.
J3N took refuge in a small alcove to keep out of the way of the forklifts, trying her best to keep her mass produced simple white wedding dress clean. J3N's pedigree did not produce unpleasant body odour, neither did she produce much oil in her skin and hair, which greatly decreased how dirty the dress got. She was bred to be extremely fastidious about her personal hygiene, and could not stand to look dirty. The wedding dress was the only outfit she owned.
J3N fussed over her dress in the alcove, making sure it stayed clean and undamaged.
Ever the pragmatists, the Wsuian fashion designers who had designed this wedding dress had had practicality in mind. It was made of extremely cheap white satin, but used a much more durable weave pattern and increased thread thickness to make it surprisingly tough against damage. The hem was knee length rather than an unwieldy dragging train, and the design was elegant enough for a wedding yet practical enough to wear in every day life after the wedding.
J3N rearranged her sexy white lace bridal lingerie bra, another extremely durable item of attire with both long term pragmatism and sexiness going into the design. On her feet were elegant white sandals, cheap materials masquerading perfectly to look expensive enough for a fancy wedding. She unfortunately had no panties, only the chastity belt, it would be up to her husband to provide her with underwear bottoms.
J3N checked her completely hairless skin for imperfections. The 679 line was bred without any unwanted body hair, neither pubic or otherwise. Apart from eyelashes, eyebrows and the hair on her scalp, J3N had not a follicle of hair on her entire body. Buyers paid more for hairless women, it was such a popularly requested upgrade that it now came as standard on almost all lines.
J3N was a standard model 679 line wife pedigree, the baseline model without the expensive optional extras. She had the fully functional reproductive system of the 679 line, deliberately fertile to bear children for her husband, unlike the sterilised prostitute pedigrees. Almost unprecedented for a Wsuian woman, J3N would actually get to have children naturally and raise them herself!
J3N felt blessed by the Emperor for all of the amazing privileges she was being given. It was all so completely astonishing!
***...
Habib's Pride eventually left EW-TD-68/5-Q-Epsilon. It continued on its way along this minor shipping lane, traveling ever further out into the sticks.
The Agri Worlds got increasingly remote, gradually giving way to agriculture heavy Frontier Worlds. Then these Frontier Worlds became less developed and more wild affairs, steadily heading deeper into newly tamed wilderness space. The Imperium might contain a million worlds, but the galaxy contained over one hundred BILLION stars, most of which had planets. In the face of this vast expanse, the Imperium presence was less than one percent of the known galaxy.
J3N was currently still quite close to Terra in galactic terms, on a map of the galaxy she and Terra were currently like neighbours, two dots very close together. But that was just because the galaxy was so HUGE. In reality J3N was desperately far from both Terra and Wsuioo, which were themselves desperately far away from each other.
Rogue Traders and pirates, smugglers and lost ships, continually discovered and colonised any floating rock that could support life. The Imperial authorities then gradually became aware of these unauthorised settlements, and sent forces to conquer them into the Imperium fold. These places were usually categorised as official imperium frontier worlds and tacked onto any nearby shipping lane that passed them.
The shipping lanes became crazy zigzags as a result of this policy, and new merchant charters were created to cope with the logistical chaos this caused. Frontier worlds were vulnerable to invasion by xenos and heretics, frequently disappearing overnight, which only added to the delays and confusion.
Over time, frontier worlds that survived long enough would gradually develop into Agri worlds or civilised worlds, depending on the local geography and population density. The Adeptus Terra usually preferred Agri Worlds where possible, finding food exports more valuable than large population centres in such isolated areas, and in this region in particular the frontier worlds were developing towards Agri World status to take advantage of the lucrative shipping lanes that sold food to Holy Terra itself.
The cargo hold emptied of more and more manure over time, revealing the true SIZE of the entire cargo hold. It was at least a kilometre long it seemed! J3N had dutifully stayed in her own area of the hold and not been exploring. She now saw farm machinery, weapons, and all sorts of other manufactured items mixed in among the manure pallets, all apparently destined to be sold to the frontier worlds.
The planets got more and more wild, until finally J3N was informed that they had arrived at 1D8V-44!
***...
J3N felt dizzy as the bulky cargo shuttle shook violently, shaking energetically about as it entered the atmosphere of 1D8V-44. It really was not a comfortable journey, and the smell of all the manure did not help either.
The rugged shuttle craft juddered terribly, engines screaming, as it battled the brutal local gravity to remain airborne with such a heavy cargo. The shuttle came down too fast for comfort into the water of a sheltered bay, and J3N screamed thinking they had crashed.
The crew of the shuttle did not seem alarmed at all, and after a few moments, J3N noticed that the shuttle was floating just below the surface of the water.
The shuttle floated about for a few minutes, and J3N could see into the sea water through the windows. The water looked dead, sterile even. No fish or other animals, but also no signs of algae or other marine plant life. The water was as clear and sterile as a glass of boiled tap water.
J3N felt terribly heavy in this shuttle down on the surface. Her limbs and head weighed more than they should and the motions of her body was all subtly wrong, with the weight increased but the inertial mass the same. 1D8V-44 was a "super-earth" terrestrial planet, bigger and heavier than Terra or Wsuioo, a planet with relatively high gravity. J3N currently felt like she weighed a billion tons!
J3N heard the sound of a boat motor approaching, and soon saw the underside of some sort of tugboat, two of them in fact. She then heard the thump of boots on the roof of the shuttle. She couldn't see what was happening, but it seemed like they were probably attaching ropes to harness points in the roof of the shuttle.
After a brief delay, the sounds of boots vanished. The pair of tug boats then gunned their engines and, with a sudden lurch, the shuttle pulled behind them in the water.
The shuttle cockpit window could be seen from the rear cargo hold where J3N was, giving her a good view ahead. The water ahead was empty for some distance. The shuttle itself was a rather large thing, bigger than the tugboats even, and progress was slow.
Eventually some sort of gentle concrete ramp with well scratched metal guiding rails appeared ahead in the gloom of the clear water. The ramp was easily wide enough for the shuttle, but still out in deep water, deep enough on each side of the ramp for the tugboats to sail in the water on either side.
The crew in the cockpit spent a long time radioing the tugboats, taking several manoeuvring attempts to have the front of the shuttle aimed properly at the ramp. The tugboats then pulled the shuttle slowly forward, gradually dragging the shuttle up the gentle slope of the concrete ramp.
The waterline dipped below the cockpit window, and J3N got her first proper glimpse of the surface of 1D8V-44.
The shuttle was crawling its way up an extremely long ramp out in the middle of a massive bay. This ramp was not the only ramp, rows of them ran parallel to their own ramp. Most of these ramps had shuttles being dragged along them by pairs of tugboats. It was clearly a very crude set up, but was still large enough in scale to be considered a proper space port capable of receiving hundreds of shuttles each day.
The ramp eventually seemed to get level far ahead, using an extremely long gentle slope to get the shuttles fully up above the water before flattening out. Looking at shuttles that arrived a few minutes before them on other ramps, it looked like the tugboats towing ropes were removed by dock hands once the shuttles were completely on the flat level surface, and a long cable attached to a winch on the land pulled the shuttles the rest of the way.
The shuttles all had wheels, which must have deployed earlier when they were still floating around in the bay, and the long flat ramp platforms had metal guard rails to keep the shuttles from falling off the platforms.
The bay was absolutely huge, but was dead, all bare rock and bare sand. No plants, no animals, no life. On closer inspection the dock hands were all clearly wearing air masks and carrying the air they breathed in backpack gas bottles. The atmosphere was not breathable!
The more she looked around, the more obvious it became. The sky was completely the wrong colour, not the blue sky of an oxygen rich atmosphere. Prominent warning signs on poles either side of the ramp platforms said:
DANGER, ANOXIC ATMOSPHERE. Portable breathing equipment MUST be worn at all times. Local O2 levels (less than) 1 percent.
Great, J3N thought, just GREAT!
The shuttle gradually made it's way along the ramp platform, parting ways with the tugboats and being tugged in turn by a motorised cable winch on land past the end of the platform. The land slowly creeped closer taking shape as a vast flat expanse of perfectly levelled bedrock.
The vast flat area extended for miles, with booster rockets standing in the distance to return the shuttles to orbit later. A separate seawater bay on the far side of this levelled ground had specialised ramps, with recovered booster rockets being dragged out of the sea, similar to how the shuttle did. Even as she watched, half a dozen shuttles took off for orbit with the aid of booster rockets to get past the extra high local gravity.
Her shuttle eventually reached the open ground, and the winch was unhooked. What looked suspiciously like an electric farm tractor was then hooked onto the front of the shuttle, and the shuttle was towed away to a crude aircraft hangar.
The hangar did little more than protect the shuttle from rain and the elements, certainly nothing like an airtight enclosure. It didn't even have doors, and certainly wouldn't let J3N leave this shuttle alive without an air mask. The hangar was just one of hundreds, arranged in rows on this vast flat level expanse.
It did not take a genius to figure out that this huge flat space and adjoining bay ramp platforms was a space port for the planet. Given that 1D8V-44 was a wild frontier world, this was most likely the ONLY space port on the planet. The shuttles and booster rockets were obviously imported from the more industrialised worlds of the Imperium, everything else looked like it was locally produced. Crude but effective.
The hangar was already piled high with bags of manure from an earlier shuttle, apparently just unloaded with a forklift without any sort of airlock. An electric forklift was already sitting by waiting to unload the holy manure of Terra.
The crew put on portable air masks, and gave J3N a mask and backpack air bottle for her to use. It weighed a TON in this high gravity, but with great effort she managed to secure it to her back and stand up with it. She was shown how to operate the air flow, and put the mask over her nose and mouth, breathing normally through her mask. The crew then cut the oxygen supply to the cabin.
The crew members had apparently already been gradually adjusting the cabin pressure over the last twenty minutes to match the slightly high local air pressure, to avoid compression related health problems, and simply spent a few minutes performing a complete unlocking cycle and swinging open all the doors to the outside.
J3N weakly stepped out of the shuttle, struggling with the weight of the backpack air bottle in this high gravity. No one was waiting to receive her in the hangar, apparently the shuttles just using whichever hangar was free at the time, and J3N looked around disappointedly.
Everyone she could see were all busy unloading shuttles or other self explanatory tasks, she certainly couldn't see anyone who looked free enough to ask directions. The shuttle crew merely got out to stretch their legs before returning to the shuttle, but they were kind enough to point her towards a cluster of corrugated iron buildings, saying that it was the space port admin centre.
J3N thanked the crew and staggered very slowly towards the admin centre, barely able to walk with this heavy air bottle. The locals all had huge muscles from living in this gravity for a long time, and even walked around lugging objects that would be heavy in normal gravity! They weren't ogryns, nothing like that, just normal men with big muscles.
J3N hoped that the admin centre was oxygenated, she was sick of lugging around this heavy bottle. Surely it would be, the massive staff of a space port administration centre would need to work in an oxygenated environment, the administratum would refuse to work in any other conditions!
J3N creaked open a corrugated metal door with stiff hinges, labeled ADMIN CENTRE in stencilled spray paint, and entered the building hopefully. Inside she found no oxygen, no excessive staff of administration adepts, just 20 local guys with oxygen masks. The men were extremely busy, radioing people constantly and typing stuff on battered looking old computers. They barely spared her a glance, just far too busy in the middle of something important.
J3N respectfully took a seat on a creaky visitors bench, and waited for the men to finish the obviously important thing they were doing. Eventually one of them found the time to ask her what she wanted.
"I'm J3N-4T7-RT1-9U5-H65-7..." J3N began.
"Emperor's tits lady! Give the short hand version!" The man exclaimed.
"I'm a Wsuian slave woman, I just arrived with the other cargo and was told to go to the admin centre," J3N explained fearfully.
"Ah, got ya. Just sit tight and the local Wsuian salesman will be over soon to collect you." The man told her.
J3N nodded and sat as instructed.
Maybe twenty minutes later, just as J3N was given a new replacement air bottle by the admin centre workers, a Wsuian man, clearly of the S41 salesman pedigree, entered the room.
"Hello J3N I am Z8C. Show me your seals." The man said in the Wsuian common slave language.
J3N lifted up her dress skirt without question, showing her chastity belt with the seals intact. Z8C pulled a barcode scanner from his belt and used a handheld computer device to process that he had received delivery. J3N obediently stood in silence as Z8C spent several minutes typing on his device.
"This way J3N, I will take you to your new owner." Z8C told her.
Too be continued.