Chapter 29(OB)
Jen grunted as another contraction hit her, childbirth was not a pleasant experience.
"Are you SURE you don't want some heroin for the pain?" Seth offered again for about the twentieth time.
"No, might be a boy, might harm the baby," Jen grimaced in agony.
"What has the gender got to do with it?" Someone asked, but Jen was sick of explaining over and over again that the artificial genes that let Jen shrug off heroin were only active in her GIRL children.
Jen ignored the question and gasped in relief when the latest contraction subsided. Emperor on his throne that HURT!
Jen looked around the crudely repaired infant oxygen tent anxiously, hoping yet again that her home made polymer would keep the holes plugged long term. The tent had been folded up in its box when the shrapnel had hit it, and the fragments had punched through fold after fold before exiting out the back of the box, turning a handful of initial holes into hundreds of holes!
Jen had done her best to repair every single hole with a tough chemical polymer, but her baby's life depended upon these holes remaining airtight for YEARS to come! It was absolutely terrifying to think that the polymer might fail over time, assuming that the kid itself didn't pick out the patches the way toddlers are prone to do!
Jen had tried everything to get a new replacement tent, but the local factory that made them no longer had any staff! The governor had said that he was apparently "looking into the problem" in response to expectant mothers like Jen going crazy with petitioning him over the radio to make infant air tents available for sale again. Jen was out of time now, and this repaired tent would have to do.
The tent was set up in the shed, and was dominating a vast amount of floor area that people had formerly slept on. The displaced people had wanted to simply move inside the tent with Jen and the soon to be born baby, but Seth had told them to sleep out in the plastic town buildings until he found a better solution.
Almost the entire town was currently gawking at her through the transparent tent walls to watch the miracle of birth, and Jen was in too much pain to care right now.
Jen groaned in agony as another contraction hit her, it was like the stomach cramp from HELL! Jen was pale from the pain and fear of pain to come, she was sweating from the pain and strain of these horrible contractions.
Jen held up a finger in warning before Seth could offer her heroin yet again, it was not good for a baby to have someone who wasn't a medical practitioner give you heroin during childbirth. Heroin might slow the baby's respiration immediately after birth and kill the baby! ESPECIALLY if the baby was a boy.
Any daughters Jen had would merely be more 679 line girls, just with Seth providing half of their DNA on their "normal" human chromosomes. Jen however had additional artificial chromosomes to hold her massive amounts of genetic engineering and designer genes.
These additional chromosomes carried all the extra goodies that caused everything from imprinting to immunity to heroin addiction to advanced physiology to make her more resistant to a wide range of diseases and chemicals. The problem was that these additional chromosomes became inactive in male children, rendered inactive by the presence of a Y chromosome.
If Jen knew for a fact that her baby was a girl then it would be perfectly safe to use heroin for pain relief, as girls would easily shrug off the harmful effects of heroin in newborns. But Jen didn't know the gender of the baby, so couldn't take that risk!
Jen had little choice but to endure the agony of childbirth without any pain relief, and it wasn't fun at all!
***...
An appalling length of time later, Jen was just about to give birth. She was naked in preparation and Seth was holding her hand as she puffed in agony.
The entire freaking town was looking expectantly at her vagina, waiting for a baby to come out. They were eager to see the "beautiful miracle of birth", having probably never seen it before, and had absolutely no idea what horror they were about to witness.
Jen was now fully dilated, and had a desperate need to get this baby out of her. The baby was coming out, and coming out right NOW.
Jen's water had already broken many hours ago, but now a very different fluid was shooting out with titanic force. The baby's head was pushing with unstoppable force on Jen's bladder, squeezing out every last drop with terrible pressure! She pissed out in a high strength fountain in front of everyone!
The baby was also putting immense pressure on Jen's... other, major lower opening, and the growing pressure on her large intestines was far greater than the strength of Jen's anus sphincter muscles to resist it! To the horror of the gawking crowd, poo exploded out of Jen's ass like a reeking torrent of filth! It was absolutely disgusting!
With the floor now carpeted with reeking shit and piss, the baby started to squeeze inexorably out of Jen's vagina! A baby was a very very big thing for such a relatively small hole, and it hurt worse than any pain Jen had ever felt! Oh Emperor it HURT!
Jen was in hellish pain, but the baby wouldn't stop coming. The head was only halfway through her vagina, causing the worst agony in the world for every millimetre of progress it made! Jen was in too much pain to even scream, just silently exhaling as the agony wracked her.
Jen pushed with all her might to just end the pain faster, and the head agonisingly moved much faster down her agonised vagina. The large head came all the way out, and the rest of the baby rapidly flopped out after it onto the shit covered tent floor with the aid of the high gravity.
There was a tiny little coughing noise, and then the distinctive sound of a new born baby crying. Jen's nipples immediately began lactating at the sound of the crying, and she gasped with exhaustion from her ordeal.
Seth retrieved the crying, shit smeared, reeking, slimy new born baby from the filthy floor and cradled it in his arms, a look of wonder on his face.
"It's a boy!" Seth said excitedly.
Jen was delighted, but far too exhausted to do more than just lay on the floor. Seth carefully handed the crying baby to Jen after a few moments, and she instinctively put the baby's mouth on one of her nipples. The tiny little mouth closed over the nipple and started suckling.
Jen wrapped her arms protectively around the tiny newborn baby, and cried happy tired tears as she was overwhelmed with emotion. She had created a new person!
The tiny baby still had his umbilical cord attached, the other end of which disappeared inside Jen's vagina. The placenta was still inside Jen, and it would be coming out shortly. The baby was absolutely filthy with shit and birth fluids, he needed a wash, but Jen would wash him very thoroughly later after she regained enough strength to get up.
Jen was completely mesmerised by the tiny little person suckling at her breast, he was such a tiny little thing.
Jen eventually had more contractions to pass out the placenta, and it was done. The umbilical cord fell away from the baby's belly all by itself, and the baby was perfectly healthy.
***...
Jen cooed softly at her tiny baby, trying to soothe him from the sounds of TNT explosions outside as the locals did who knows what with Jen's explosives. The baby didn't like the noise, and was crying.
"Are the demolition works for the cliff almost over?" Jen asked the room in general.
"They finished the new vehicle track in the cliff a few days ago. The boys are using the leftover TNT to look for gold or something in the ground," Joe Plowman informed her with a chuckle.
"I wish they would find a more quiet way of doing that, the poor baby doesn't like the noises. The poor little thing wants to sleep right now but can't with the noise," Jen said worriedly.
"Sure, I will tell them to cut it out, be right back," Joe said and ducked out to tell the men to knock it off with the TNT.
The blasts slowly ceased, and the baby settled in her arms as she cooed softly at him. Jen gazed lovingly at her son in her arms, he looked so much like his father. Seth still hadn't decided on a name yet, so Jen didn't call the baby anything yet.
The sounds of men chatting and a dozen heavy pairs of boots walking over the mud outside filtered into the shed, and the baby stirred slightly from the noise. Jen looked up to see a bunch of very dirty men enter, carrying TNT over their shoulders.
Jen frantically gestured at them to take that high explosive far away from her baby, and they sheepishly took the TNT outside. They returned a minute later without the trinitrotoluene, and Jen sighed in relief.
The men all went up to the sides of the tent and peered intently at the baby. Most of them hadn't seen a baby in 20 years and they were absolutely fascinated by the tiny infant. Some of the men started making noises at the baby, hoping to see it do something more interesting than sleeping. They succeeded only in making the baby cry.
The well meaning men "awwwwed" at the crying baby, and Jen desperately tried to calm the upset baby. He wanted to sleep right now, but noises kept waking him up.
Jen gently urged the men to keep the volume down, whispering that the baby needed a lot of sleep at this early age. The men nodded and dropped their voices to loud whispers.
Jen managed to get the baby to sleep, and put him in the shrapnel holed crib to sleep for a while. The baby slept peacefully.
Jen sighed in relief and turned her attention to the men.
"Thank you for letting him sleep, you are very understanding," Jen thanked them.
"No problem Jen, the TNT was a lot of hard work to use anyway, clearing all the waste rock out of the mine shafts after. Maybe you could make us some hydrofluoric acid to quietly melt a hole in the ground without any work?" One of the men, a self proclaimed prospector named Keith Anderson, asked hopefully.
"Hydrofluoric acid?! Are you out of your mind!" Jen whispered in horror.
"I saw it in a film once. Two drug cooks dissolved a dead body in a bathtub full of hydrofluoric acid in their house. The acid ate through the bottom of the bath and all the way through the floor. It was awesome!" Keith whispered excitedly.
"In their HOUSE?!" Jen whispered in horror at the thought.
"Yeah, but they were ok. They simply patched up the hole and they were fine," Keith whispered cheerfully.
Jen face palmed in dismay at this appalling misinformation about the extremely toxic thing that was hydrofluoric acid.
"Hydrofluoric acid is a deadly poison even without the corrosive effect. It is absolutely toxic to humans and most other life on 1D8V-44, it would kill us all if you just poured it on the ground around the farm! It evaporates into the air and floats around as a vapour, poisoning and corroding everything it touches."
"The people in that film would have dropped dead from hydrogen fluoride poisoning if they stayed in that house without wearing fully enclosed hazmat suits. It is an extremely deadly contact poison that causes cardiac arrest in humans. If you pour it on the ground outside you would poison the soil and groundwater with lethal poison!" Jen humbly insisted in an urgent whisper.
"Ah, ok, how about a nontoxic acid that is as good at melting stuff as hydrofluoric acid?" Keith whispered hopefully.
"Hydrogen Fluoride is classed as a "super-acid" when at 100 percent concentration. ALL super-acids capable of eating holes in the local bedrock are extremely hazardous to humans and most other life forms. The only creatures I have ever heard of that aren't harmed by them are certain types of the xenos tyranids. Pouring these acids on the ground will not end well for the farm!" Jen insisted.
"What about a weaker acid?" Keith asked persistently.
"Depends on how long you are willing to wait, but some of the weaker acids will eventually soften up the local sandstone, turning it back into sand which you still have to dig up out of whatever hole you are making." Jen explained apologetically.
"Well is there any other way I can keep digging without waking up the baby?" Keith asked hopefully.
"How do you even have the time to dig all these holes? What about the farm work?" Jen asked suspiciously.
Keith and the other wannabe miners all looked at their feet sheepishly in obvious guilt. The town gave an equal share of the profits to every person in the town, and there was currently desperate need of them to strip bliss grass from the abandoned farms before the surveillance satellite alerted the sheriffs with no one making sure that the bliss grass remained hidden, but these men were obviously not pulling their weight while other people were hard at work. Jen herself usually worked very hard all day everyday making all the chemicals and running the heroin lab, she had had only her birthday off work, and had worked twice as hard the next day to make up for the lost productivity!
Jen frowned slightly at these men's work ethic.
"If we find gold then it will make up for the lost labor," Keith said trying to justify himself.
"The local bedrock is made of sedimentary sandstone, unless it has some geological features I'm not aware of it is very unlikely to contain economically viable amounts of gold or anything else. The useful elements it does contain can all be gotten from surface stones without needing to dig deep holes. So unless you are digging a water well, water cistern, or underground structure like a bomb shelter, you are wasting everyone's time," Jen said kindly but bluntly.
The men all looked terribly disappointed.
"I'm sorry that the local geography isn't economically viable to mine, but it's been like this for millions of years. The rocks are what they are, I didn't make them be like this," Jen apologised sympathetically.
The men murmured in disappointment and shambled off to get some actual work done.
Jen sighed with relief and whispered instructions to her lab assistants outside the tent as her baby slept. Jen had only just given birth a few days ago, but was still pulling her weight as best as she could from inside the infant oxygen tent, directing the chemical operations that never ended now that the farm had to support so many people and detoxify so much lead contaminated soil.
At the moment they were yet again processing more bliss grass, the heroin production never ceased as they all desperately tried to produce as much as possible while the rivers were still high enough for the cargo boats and grain boats.
The wet season was over, and the catchment area was gradually draining over time, once the excess water drained away in 3 weeks time, the rivers would get low again and would once more be too shallow for the boat merchants to reach this far up river, and the area would be cut off from bulk trade until next wet season.
The next 3 weeks was the only time left to buy and sell from the boat merchants, they had to sell as much heroin as possible now, or wait an entire year to sell anymore. This was the only time available to make actual money, the rest of the year they would be reduced to simply bartering with other local farms for petty items.
Whenever the baby was awake, the lab assistants used the few remaining blenders that hadn't been scrapped during the air wars, for blending up and liquefying as much bliss grass as possible as quickly as possible. Every abandoned farm in the area was having it's untended bliss grass fields stripped away and harvested for the drugs, ignoring the worthless food crop plants that provided cover from orbital surveillance. At least one third of the local population had died in the air wars, and the farms of the dead men now provided free bliss grass to steal, as the dead men wouldn't mind.
This stolen bounty, combined with the huge labor surplus, is what made the Jen's Shed operation so lucrative. Dead or displaced men had laboured hard to sew these fields, and now the Jen's Shed population was reaping the rewards of all that hard work.
Also a contributing factor to the profits was the 100 percent purity of Jen's heroin, and the fact that heroin prices were up right now due to some supply shortages on Terra at the moment, apparently because of fresh Adeptus Arbites crackdown raids on the drug storage safe houses of a lot of Terran drug gangs.
The Terran drug gangs had not been stopped by these raids of their supply stashes, the surviving gang members merely relocating to new safe houses in the endless slums of Terra's hives, and these gangs were now buying huge amounts of new heroin to replace the lost supplies, driving prices through the roof as demand increased and the desperate addicts paid more and more just to get their next hit. Heroin was currently 3 times as expensive as usual on 1D8V-44, and this was a sorely needed blessing to the beleaguered population after so much hardship.
Normally the Adeptus Arbites left drug enforcement to the local police forces of the planets of the Imperium of Man, but on Holy Terra itself they were far more involved in the local law enforcement. If 1D8V-44 was not under suspicion of exporting heroin directly to Holy Terra itself, then the Adeptus Arbites would not be so draconian in their random audits of the local sheriffs, but growing a drug that caused direct and terrible harm to members of the Adeptus Terra itself was considered a capital offence warranting investigation by the terrifying Adeptus Arbites themselves!
The wet season had shielded all the farms in the monsoonal regions of continent one from the view of the orbiting satellite. This protection was now gone, and they all had to be on high alert to keep the crops mixed up enough to fuddle the satellite. With a third of the local farmers dead and so many farms of living men left abandoned, the untended fields of bliss grass were starting to lose their covering crops and show up on the satellite!
The latest radio and boat gossip said that the sheriffs had been mobilised to investigate an ever growing number of farms for positive bliss grass readings, but the sheriffs had had so many alerts from the satellite that it was taking them a long time to investigate every single deserted farm that now showed a positive reading for bliss grass. Too many more hits from the satellite and the horrifying Adeptus Arbites themselves would be alerted to investigate 1D8V-44 as a possible major source of the Terran heroin!
This was NOT the time to have people wasting time blasting holes in the ground! Every single abandoned farm owned by someone still alive had to be completely and utterly stripped of bliss grass before the sheriffs arrived, not even the roots could be left behind. A lot of the people who owned these farms were still alive, and would become wanted outlaws with dead or alive bounties on their heads and facing certain death penalty if the sheriffs found so much as a single bliss grass plant growing on their properties!
The corrupt sheriffs had leaked out which farms were under investigation, and in which order they were being investigated, to give people a chance to remove all traces of illegal drug plants before the sheriffs arrived. Over 100 men had already been convicted by the sheriffs and were now either dead by the sheriffs guns or wanted men on the run who had evaded capture. Jen just hoped that these wretched people on the run had the sense to steal the identity of one of the many unreported dead locals and burn off their own fingerprints with a hot iron.
The local sheriffs were obviously decent men who didn't want to conduct this massive purge of their friends and neighbours. The sheriffs were leaking like a sieve to give as much advanced warning as possible, and were being as slow as they could reasonably get away with, wasting time on every conceivable bit of administrative minutiae and conducting extremely slow investigations of every farm they were sent to. They obviously didn't want to have to do any executions if possible, at least not for something as nonviolent and essential to the local economy as peacefully growing drugs simply for export.
Local scuttlebutt had it that in some regions the local populations of farmers who had access to mechanised shovels were simply digging up the soil and manure completely to get every last root and simply dumping it outside of the property boundaries of the properties under investigation. In other places locals were blocking up the rivers with rocks and sediment to slow down the boats of the sheriffs and buy more time for their neighbours further up river.
The people in the region around Seth's farm had been extremely lucky in that the only farms that had alerted the satellite were the farms of men who were already confirmed dead from the air wars. The bodies of these men had previously been buried in carefully marked graves outside the various towns, but the locals had exhumed the men who appeared on the sheriff's investigation list and put the body of each man on the dead man's own land for the sheriffs to find and confirm dead.
The sheriffs could do nothing to punish a dead man, so the locals were instead predominantly focused on the farms of the living. The sheriffs would not perform any autopsies on these bodies when they found them, and simply write down that they had been killed some time ago as civilian casualties in the war with the eldar.
Jen would feel much more comfortable when all of these abandoned farms were permanently completely stripped of bliss grass. The last thing they needed was anything drawing the gaze of the law to the town!
Jen put these thoughts from her mind with difficulty, having a baby in the mix made her worry even more than usual about threats to safety. Seth's farm was safe from the satellite, it had everything from yap-yap to pine tree seedlings growing in among the bliss grass in crazy tangles of vegetation. They had made absolutely sure of that, as everyone needed this farm as a place of refuge.
Jen focused her mind on what she was doing, and directed the heroin production for maximum purity. The amounts of bliss grass flowing into the shed for processing each hour was absolutely insane, and having to let the baby sleep was extremely difficult for managing it all without making too much noise.
Pretty much everyone, with the exception of some time wasting miners, was now focused completely on the frantic gathering or processing of the bliss grass. People barely found time for even 6 hours sleep each night, there was just too much work to do and too little time left before the rivers got low.
The amount of boat traffic on the rivers was absolutely amazing, as the merchants frantically bought as much heroin as possible while the price remained so high. The temperature had dropped enough to work hard without getting sick, and the entire region was in its main annual harvest season.
This really was one of the worst times of year to have a new born baby to look after. Jen was extremely busy, and needed to use noisy blenders to liquefy vast amounts of bliss grass, but she couldn't even leave the tent because if something happened to the baby it would take many minutes in the airlock to safely reenter the tent!
Newborns were extremely susceptible to dying without constant maternal supervision if anything went wrong. Jen was instinctively reluctant to leave the baby alone in a tent she couldn't quickly reenter, and everyone else was too busy to just stay in the tent with the baby.
Even as Jen watched, another group of crude plastic sleds filled with bulging bliss grass sacks was dragged into the shed by straining men tugging them with nylon ropes. The harvesting was happening so fast and from so many different places that the quad bike alone could no longer handle all the logistics.
A lot of the bliss grass sack contents was simply dirt or other crops hastily dug up with the bliss grass roots, the men using raw speed in substitute for care in what they were doing. They were filling sacks with unprecedented speed, but much of the contents was useless dirt. Jen's lab assistants were then forced to wash away all this dirt before putting the grass in the temperamental blenders, adding to their work loads.
The quad bike arrived a moment later, dragging it's own long line of plastic sleds behind it, engine humming loudly and tyres spinning out in effort from the huge load. The vehicle was badly overworked and was never intended to pull these kind of high loads in this high gravity environment. Jen was worried about what damage this might be doing to the irreplaceable quad bike.
The quad bike already needed a battery change after less than 2 hours, which was insane power use for its high capacity batteries, and the tyres were getting badly worn from spinning out so much to get grip with these heavy loads. The battery was barely changed and all sleds unloaded before every single empty sled was hooked up to the back of the quad bike. The men who had been pulling all sat on the sleds and the badly overworked quad bike dragged the entire line of sleds behind it back to wherever it had come from.
Jen's assistants hurriedly opened the sacks onto the floor and used a bore water hose from a distant wind pump water tank to wash away as much dirt as possible. It was laborious and thankless work. The dirt was flushed out into the town, adding to the thick filth of the place.
The men made a huge pile of partially clean bliss grass and crop material, next to the already existing piles of the stuff from previous deliveries. As soon as the baby woke up again, the blenders would be going crazy liquefying this material, Jen looked at her baby in dismay, hoping that he woke up soon, they had so much work to do but the baby needed so much sleep!
***...
Jen was exhausted as she suckled her baby late that night. The blenders were all whirring loudly, liquefying far bigger loads of bliss grass than their recommended fill points.
They had over a metric ton of plant material backlogged to be blended thanks to the baby, and Jen wasn't sure how they would manage to finish the backlog before the baby needed more sleep!
The last few days since giving birth had been so busy that Jen hadn't even been able to take any maternity leave. She had barely had time to properly bond with her baby, and Seth hadn't even found the time to decide on a name for the baby.
Jen wanted to have time for her baby, she really did, but her absence from work now might cost the farm hundreds of thousands of credits. In 3 weeks time the frenzy to produce heroin as quickly as possible would cease, and Jen could just focus on being a mother.
The tiny little baby suckling at her breast didn't understand any of this, he didn't comprehend how much his mother needed to work or why the noisy blenders had to be running. His whole world at this age revolved around suckling and sleeping. He wanted to be in constant skin on skin contact with his mother at all times, he didn't want all these noises and distractions of his mother's attention.
Jen wanted to just be a mother without these constant demands on her time. He was such a cute little thing, a soft tiny little thing, so fragile and precious. He had the dark hair of his father, and some of his father's facial features, but he was also unquestionably half 679 line pedigree, with the distinctive sculpted face and facial symmetry of a 679 line.
Jen cherished the little time she got to spend actually focused on her baby, she had intensely strong mothering instincts and desired to just focus on her baby this early after giving birth.
The baby clearly didn't like the noise of the blenders, but he was too busy suckling to cry at the moment. Jen didn't like the noise of the blenders either to be honest, they were giving her tired mind a headache from the extremely loud electric motors and blending actions. Bits of dirt and sand in among the plant matter screamed in the blenders as the high speed blades ground against them, making quite an appalling racket!
Jen didn't even have time to just focus on her baby as the blenders whirred, as there was always other chemical reactions to direct even now. With potentially millions of credits to be made from these short term elevated prices, they could not afford to delay in the chemical reactions, they had to make as much as possible as quickly as possible.
The baby finished suckling all too soon, and then started crying because of the noise of the blenders. Jen looked at the men manning the blenders.
"We can't afford to stop now, have over a Terran metric ton of grass to blend. I'm sorry but we need a little longer," one of the lab assistants said apologetically.
Jen was unhappy but nodded in understanding, and did her best to soothe her crying infant as the blenders screamed, the pile awaiting blending was indeed intimidatingly large, and more arrived every hour to add to it.
On the plus side, they were all making a fortune, and the harder they worked, the more they earned. Hopefully they would make enough money in the next 3 weeks for absolutely everyone in the town of Jen's Shed to afford to order their own 679 line wife. If they managed that then it would all be worth it.
Please Emperor, let the town make enough for everyone to have 50 thousand credits! PLEASE!
***...
The coming weeks upset the baby a lot, but the heroin production was now peaking at slightly over 100 kilograms Terran weight of pure heroin per day. The blenders screamed 12 hours a day, which made the baby scream too, and the money was flowing in faster than they could count it.
Jen had by now used home made plastic to make a mountain of crude lab equipment like buckets and other containers for the chemical reactions, and the drug lab now operated on an industrial scale at all times. Jen now relied once more on only sleeping in short naps to keep the lab working around the clock, and only the sleep needs of the baby restricted the use of the blenders to a mere 12 hours a day.
They still hadn't named the baby, they just didn't have the time. Seth was not even coming home to sleep, as the stripping operations took him and the others ever further afield. Jen's plastic had been used to make crude replacement boat masts, and the remaining sailboats were being used to bring the harvests to the farm.
Jen felt so sorry for the poor little baby, but at least he would inherit a LOT of money in later life. The child would be rich, the first born son of a fledging minor drug lord, and heir to a multimillion credit organised crime syndicate. The baby might not be happy now, but he would be VERY HAPPY in the years to come.
***...