Chapter 19(OB)
The rain eventually stopped that night, and Jen and Seth gathered up as much food and water as they could fit in the quad bike trailer. They brought the blanket, the sheet, clothes, the half charged second quad bike battery, and everything else they could think of. They locked the dark house and drove off into the freezing cold darkness.
Jen was shivering terribly in the trailer of the quad bike, completely covered by the blanket for extra warmth. She couldn't see with the blanket over her head, and simply held on tight as the trailer randomly crashed about over bumps and dips.
Despite the blanket, she was getting numb from cold. The air outside was sub zero, and the fast moving quad bike was causing atmospheric drag like a powerful wind, making the blanket billow and sucking out every last little joule of heat!
Jen thankfully had perfectly healthy lungs and a good immune system, very thankfully, as she clearly now had hypothermia! She was young and very healthy, so was unlikely to get deadly pneumonia the way Seth had gotten. A small mercy that might make the difference between life and death.
Jen was far more concerned about getting frostbite in her fingers and toes! She could feel only numbness in her extremities!
Jen was shivering with all her might, but it wasn't making a difference! Such terrible cold! She didn't know if meeting Seth had just been a dream! Maybe she was still in the cold room!
Jen was just starting to babble half insanely when the bike slowed down, and the terrible cold wind slowed with it. She was not even sure what was real anymore, didn't know if she was Jen or still J3N.
She heard noises, but her brain could not process what they meant, then the quad bike moved a very short distance, and the air got stiller. A creak that might have been hinges closing then sounded, and the air became wonderfully still.
Jen's blanket was lifted up, and she screamed as the tiny heat trapped under it escaped! She had a shaking fit, filled with blind panic, and heard a man's voice speaking, but couldn't process. Impossibly strong hands grabbed hold of her and pulled her against something so hot that it felt like fire!
Jen screamed as she was held firmly against a red hot iron! It was the size of a man, but it was so hot that she was being cooked! Jen struggled frantically but powerful arms held her against a red hot iron statue of a man!
"Easy Jen, easy! It's just my bare chest! I know it feels hot, but it's just normal body temperature," a male voice reassured her.
Jen was being burned alive by this terrible heat! It was a blazing hot inferno of heat! She struggled desperately but couldn't escape! She was being TORTURED with FIRE!
Jen could only weep as she was kept locked in this fiery embrace, an eternity of burning torment that just went on and on. She could only scream.
***...
Jen shivered weakly in Seth's arms an hour later. She was warmed up once more, and Seth's body heat no longer felt like fire. She had terrible hypothermia, but Seth had saved her life.
Jen was once more in her right mind, but felt sick and miserable. Seth's body heat was the only thing maintaining her own core temperature, and their bare chests were held firmly together, wrapped tightly in the blanket.
They were now in one of the storage sheds on the farm. This particular shed contained hundreds of full air bottles of all shapes and sizes, as well as a hydrolysis unit and an air compressor. There was easily a weeks worth of air in these bottles, more than enough to last until it got sunny again.
It was currently pitch dark inside the shed, but Seth had a hand held electric lamp that he turned on whenever he wanted to see something. They were each hooked up to a separate very large air bottle, the ones Seth had used for the party, and laying on top of sacks of something firm but soft, wrapped in each other's arms under the blanket.
Jen and Seth both wore flannelette button up shirts, but had the fronts unbuttoned to maintain skin on skin contact. Jen was wearing a far too big pare of Seth's trousers, and far too big socks, and Seth was dressed likewise.
Seth had set up something behind both of their backs to hold their chests together the entire night, and had set up a similar object to act as a pillow for them.
Jen felt terribly weak and sick, just awful. The hypothermia had nearly killed her, she felt like shit.
"How you feel now?" Seth asked in the dark.
"I feel like I will survive the night now, but I feel so bad, so sick and weak. I have never felt so wretched," Jen moaned in discomfort.
"Get some sleep, you need to recover your strength," Seth told her.
"Yes husband," Jen said and forced herself to drift off to sleep.
***...
Jen felt a lot better when she awoke in the morning, an entire sleep of Seth's body heat had done wonders for her recovery. It was sunny through the cracks in the shed door, and the solar farms would already be beginning to recharge the batteries throughout the farm.
"Feeling better this morning?" Seth asked when he noticed she was awake.
"I am amazed by how much better I feel. I'm very hungry, but otherwise I feel almost better, maybe a tad sore from the ordeal yesterday, but not so much that I can't do stuff today," Jen said happily.
"Are you warm enough to break contact yet?" Seth asked.
Jen tested the air with a warm hand. It was chilly but not deadly levels of cold for a 679 line woman.
"It's warm enough for me to be safe," Jen confirmed.
"Good, I've been busting for a piss all night," Seth said gratefully.
Seth hurriedly got up and opened the shed door slightly. He didn't even go outside, just peed out the door and then closed the door again. Jen giggled, and then realised that she needed to pee too.
Jen daintily peed in a bucket, using some soap, and water from a flask, to clean herself up.
"Unless you can somehow make more soap, you really should go easy on the soap. We are almost out now," Seth told her.
"I can make soap, but it would use a lot of the very limited supply of chemicals you have left. I could perhaps turn some of the wheat into new chemical precursors," Jen offered.
"You can turn wheat into soap?" Seth asked.
"Yes husband, but it would take a lot of time. I would also need your chemistry set equipment to do it. Do you want me to make more soap?" Jen asked.
"My chemistry set you say? Um, as long as it is all put back as it was after and doesn't take more than a week," Seth allowed.
"Yes husband, I will need a sack of wheat, your gin still, and a few days." Jen agreed.
"The still as well? Ok, guess I'm not using it right now anyway. Feel free to use it," Seth allowed.
Jen agreed and then got some bread to eat.
After eating and drinking, Jen returned to where she had been sleeping. She was surprised to see that the pair of them had been sleeping on top of sacks of cement powder.
Jen looked at the sacks curiously. They completely lacked the information required by law for exported sacks of goods, merely said CEMENT in crudely printed blocky letters on the plastic sacks, with no further information whatsoever.
"How did the merchants import this cement to 1D8V-44? It's illegal to not include the correct product information on interplanetary exports," Jen asked curiously.
"Not imported. That big industrial area north of the space port has a big ass cement factory, it was one of the first factories the original smugglers who settled the planet set up," Seth said.
"They make cement here? How can they without limestone deposits?" Jen asked.
"How do you know there aren't limestone deposits here?" Seth asked.
"Because this planet has no shells, it's dead. Limestone is the fossilised remains of shells on the sea floor," Jen explained.
"Um, well I don't know much about rocks to be honest. But I do know that there are quarries just north of that big industrial area, that's why it's on the north side. I don't know enough about rocks to say exactly what they dig up, but I know that they get cement from it somehow," Seth told her.
Jen shrugged. Cement was easiest to make from limestone, but calcium was common in a lot of rocks without fossils involved, it would just be more difficult to extract it in quantity, but certainly not impossible.
"I'm still a little surprised that they don't have any other words except "cement" on the bag. Not even a company logo?" Jen asked.
"I guess they don't need to. There is only the one factory on the planet that makes it, just need to say that it's cement. The original smugglers had to make the cement factory to make those ramps in the space port before the imperium conquered the place. They had a terrible time dragging the shuttles and boosters out of the bays before they had ramps," Seth said.
"How did they get them out of the water?" Jen asked.
"Dragged them up the shore with enormous difficulty. Took like 2 thousand guys with ropes and pulleys to drag them out the hard way one at a time on the shores. They got so sick of it that they set up a cement factory and built the ramps. They started with just one short ramp, but then built others, and extended them over time." Seth explained.
"Is cement expensive here?" Jen asked.
"Not really, like 30 credits a bag? Something like that. It's not cheap enough to just waste, but not all that expensive for how useful it is. Can't get far in life without concrete, no other way to get level floors to build sheds and houses on." Seth explained
Jen nodded, that made sense. Given all the mucking around involved in making cement without limestone, 30 credits a bag was actually pretty reasonable.
"So the planet has cement and steel made locally from local minerals. Do they make anything else? For that matter, where do they mine the local iron?" Jen asked.
"Most of the iron mines are on continent 2, a few smaller mines are scattered around continent 1, but the real mother loads are all on continent 2, big big deposits of iron," Seth said.
"Anything else mined on 1D8V-44?" Jen asked.
"A few small mines for other stuff, but not on the same scale. Some farmers find gold and other swell stuff on their lands and happily dig it up and sell it. Other metals get smelted besides steel, especially aluminium, also lead for making cheap batteries. Zinc for galvanising, one factory makes copper stuff like wire." Seth began.
"Plastics and chemicals are also made locally, cardboard and paper is made from some of the agricultural waste from the woodier types of crops. Glass is made, especially for fibreglass but also for stuff like bottles. Just all sorts of stuff."
"But they need more workers. Heaps more workers. It limits what they can do," Seth finished.
"Can't the factories just import people from the slums of Terra?" Jen asked.
"I think it's too expensive for how much work they get from each worker they import. It takes months to get a man from Terra to here by merchant ship, and the factory would have to pay for all the food and air and space on the ship the worker consumes. Cost me thousands of credits to get here from Terra myself," Seth explained.
"But they didn't mind importing Terran women?" Jen asked.
"That's different. They didn't import those women to "work", they were horny as hell and wanted sons. Men will pay a lot of money for that," Seth chuckled.
"Indeed," Jen giggled with a wink.
"Ha, yeah you definitely are worth what I paid. My balls have been empty ever since I got you," Seth chuckled humorously.
"Not empty enough, you still haven't had sex with me this morning," Jen purred provocatively.
"Damn, worth every last credit. Worth it all!" Seth exclaimed in awe and approached her.
***...
"Ok, it's midday now, and has been sunny all day. The batteries will have quite a bit of charge by now." Seth said a few hours later.
"Can we use the hydrolysis room now?" Jen asked.
"First things first I am going to refill every single empty bottle on the entire farm. Only once that's done will I consider moving back home. I want you to stay here all day, I will decide what to do later today," Seth told her.
"Yes husband," Jen said obediently.
Seth gave her a spare key to the shed she was in, and locked her in the shed for her own safety. He then drove off back to the house to refill all the emergency air bottles.
Jen was warm enough today with the sun shining on this corrugated iron shed, quite comfortable in fact.
She got to work cleaning the shed, just because doing chores was her default activity when left alone inside a building. It was a farm shed, it didn't need to be surgically clean, but Jen just couldn't help herself.
Jen then found that most of what she was sweeping up was cement powder, which Seth probably wanted to keep, and was forced to stop lest any be lost. She instead settled for dusting and polishing all the air bottles.
"Made on 1D8V-44," Jen read on one of the air bottles. ALL the air bottles were made on 1D8V-44.
Jen was slightly concerned that her life was depending on the less than perfect local workmanship. The bottles were all shapes and sizes, but all were made of local steel, had excessively large ugly airtight welds sealing the bits together, and had ugly but functional gas taps on the top of them. Cheap imported pressure gauges, the sort that cost only a credit each and come in boxes of 1000, had been added to each air bottle to show how full they were. It was very crude but apparently effective.
Jen could perfectly imagine some heavily understaffed factory slapping these tanks together by the thousands, just one guy with an arc welder would be needed to slap this together from parts.
Jen had now been on 1D8V-44 long enough to get used to the general level of crudeness that predominated here. Just concrete, steel, fibreglass, and crude workmanship.
It was apparently expensive to import stuff from other planets. Meat, higher technology, and of course women, were imported because that was the only way to get it. Manure was also imported, but only because it came from Holy Terra and even farmers like Seth were superstitious enough to buy it. Chemical fertiliser made by local industry would probably work just as good as the overpriced manure, but imperial citizens were prone to heavy superstition, and nothing else carried the same blessing as something from Terra itself.
The locals would import stuff if it absolutely could not be obtained locally, but wherever possible they seemed to prefer the far cheaper alternative of using locally produced stuff.
This actually made perfect sense to Jen. It was pragmatic, prudent, and saved money.
You could get by pretty well with just steel, concrete, fibreglass, plastic and perspex. Houses and sheds could be built, boats and ships could be made, things could get done. Electric motors, GPS devices, radios and light bulbs might still need to be imported, but once you imported those bits, making the rest of a tugboat from local steel was easy.
The buildings might not be insulated, you might have to breathe through an air mask, you might have to poo in a bucket, but humans could survive these things. Once Jen got some proper arctic winter clothes, she would be fine. Everything was adequate for life no matter how basic.
By imperium standards it wasn't even that far off the norm. The imperial economy was not doing well after ten thousand years of war. A lot of factories and resources that could have been spent on civilians were instead spent on the military.
The endless wars sucked in almost everything the exhausted economies could squeeze out. A lot of things were apparently hard to get these days, a lot of people had to simply make do with simpler and more low tech options to problems.
A husband and wife living in an uninsulated corrugated iron building with a bare concrete floor was something that could be found all over the imperium. A lot didn't even have a concrete floor, and a lot more would have to share said house with their entire extended family.
Jen and Seth were actually part of the richest 1 percent of the imperial population, 99 percent of people had far far FAR less than Jen and Seth had! The Renwick's owned their own land, most did not. The Renwick's made over a credit a day, most did not. The Renwick's might have problems, but by imperial citizen standards the Renwick's lived princely lives indeed!
***...