Chapter 35(OB)
"This is the Imperial Merchant Fleet vessel Habib's Pride requesting immediate assistance from any Imperium forces! We are under attack by xenos Eldar warships! Need assistance ASAP!" The radio blared.
The message was on a repeating loop on one of the long range frequencies, and just repeated the same message over and over again.
Almost the entire town stood pensively around the radio, and those who weren't glued to the radio were looking up at the sky at the small flashes of strange light up in orbit. Some type of violence was clearly going on up in orbit, but it was impossible to know exactly what was going on up there.
The night had been so normal just an hour ago, the space port had initially announced the imminent arrival of a new shipment of 679 line wives, but less than 5 minutes later all hell had broken loose! The space port announcement had fallen into static, and a brief flick through the frequencies had found the Habib's Pride distress signal.
The distress signal repeated itself every 40 seconds, all other frequencies had nothing informative to add, and most of the planet seemed to be just silently listening to the distress signal.
Jen felt numb with horror for the safety of her sister 679's, and was praying desperately for the Emperor to protect them from harm. Those poor women must be terrified up there!
"Incoming orbital debris!" someone bellowed from outside.
Jen screamed in terror and wrapped her body protectively around Christopher, this was the end!
"Take cover!" Men shouted in alarm.
There was pandemonium as everyone scrambled for cover. The darkness outside lit up with a terrible fast moving light, and seconds later the light outside went dark. For a few seconds absolutely nothing happened, and then an avalanche of noise hit the town, accompanied by terrible shock waves in the ground and a huge kick of air pressure.
It was clearly miles away, so distant that it took the sound some time to arrive, and it was clearly an impact of colossal power. Jen was terrified that ejecta from the impact crater would rain down on them, but the wind was blowing in their favour, and no ejecta struck the town.
Jen was temporarily almost deafened from the sound and the stunning effect of the wall of force, but when her hearing returned, she heard the same repeating message from the Habib's Pride, indicating that the ship still hadn't been destroyed.
"Is everyone ok?! Anyone hurt!?" Seth bellowed urgently.
There was brief hubbub as everyone checked each other throughout the town, and did a roll call to make sure no one was missing. Everyone was fine, with just a few superficial injuries on a few people sustained from scrambling behind cover.
The town then immediately formed some small teams to go inspect the solar panels and power grid for damage, and the rest of the people continued listening to the radio or looking at the sky. Everyone was tense and afraid, if that space debris had hit the ground closer to the town then they would have been annihilated!
Christopher was bawling in Jen's arms, hardly surprising considering the avalanche of noise and shockwaves a few minutes ago, and Jen was almost in tears herself. This was just so horrible. Jen's mind was going crazy imagining worst case scenarios of orbital debris hitting the town directly.
"More debris incoming!" People outside bellowed.
Jen squeaked in dismay and huddled protectively around her baby.
"It's further away! Won't hit near us this time!" The man called out relieved.
Jen wept with relief, she was so helpless here on the ground, there was just no defence that would withstand orbital debris raining down on top of them at hypersonic reentry velocities.
A very distant series of booms could be heard many minutes later as the sounds of distant impacts finally reached them from far over the horizon. The impacts had been a safe distance away. Jen said prayers for the farmers who lived closer to those colossal distant impacts, it would be so horrible for them!
"Bigger flash up in orbit! Something fucking BIG just exploded!" A watchman warned in a bellowing shout.
Jen looked to the radio, but the distress signal was still transmitting, meaning that the Habib's Pride was still intact enough to make radio transmissions. Hopefully it would survive against the horrible Eldar xenos!
"More debris incoming! Fucking RAINING down this time! Take cover!" Watchmen warned.
Jen cowered in terror and hugged her baby tightly as apocalyptic explosions erupted outside, it was so loud that her eardrums burst and she heard nothing at all after that! The sudden lack of sound was more terrifying than the sounds themselves had been, people were shouting but she couldn't hear them! She could at least still feel the terrible vibrations from the shockwaves, it was like an earthquake!
For an unknowable length of time the terrible shockwaves vibrated the ground under her, jarring her bones from the sheer power they carried. Sometimes the shockwaves went silent for stretches of time, before suddenly returning once again. Jen could only cower, and hope that the town was spared.
***...
The next morning Jen was still deaf, as was everyone else as far as she could tell. Now would be a very good time for Dr AA3 to come back...
Jen had inspected enough ears in the town to know what they were dealing with, namely acoustic trauma resulting in eardrum rupture. With proper surgery their hearing could return almost immediately, at least some level of hearing. Without surgery, it would take weeks for the eardrum punctures to heal...
Without the ability to hear sounds, they were all in very serious trouble. They couldn't hear the radio, they could talk into a microphone to send messages, but had no way of knowing if they got a response. They couldn't talk to each other, and communication was extremely limited. Jen was fluent in sign language, but nobody else understood it, making it futile.
The townspeople quickly figured out to carry around stiff square sheets of plastic to write on, using lumps of clay to write words on the squares like a temporary marker, and it allowed very slow and rudimentary communication, just enough to survive.
Suffice to say that Jen had very little idea about anything outside her view from now on, it was just too difficult to communicate much information. She just stayed put in the tent with the baby, without being able to hear him cry she didn't dare let him out of her reach for even a second.
The day went by extremely slowly, in complete and absolute silence. The silence was terrifying, as she had no warning of anything around her. She got lots of frights from Seth and other people touching her from behind to get her attention, and her heart was pounding with adrenaline.
She had no idea what had happened with the space ships in orbit. The debris had stopped raining down sometime before dawn, and no more debris had fallen nearby as far as she knew. She could only assume the worst, that the Habib's Pride had been destroyed, blasted into the debris that had then rained down on the planet. Jen hoped that the poor 679's hadn't suffered when they died.
What Jen did know was that the power grid had "small damage" according to scrawled messages, whatever that means. The crops had "some damage, some destroy", which wasn't very clear either. The town had "0 dead", which was a great blessing, but also had "all deaf".
What this all hinted at was that the farm had been hit by ejecta, and possibly a direct hit on a distant part of the farm as well. The ejecta had damaged or destroyed some of the crops, but other crops had been undamaged. The town had obviously been just outside the zones of destruction, and been extremely lucky not to be hit with impact crater ejecta like chunks of bedrock sent skywards by the impacts. Jen was unsure about what had caused the "small damage" to the power grid, maybe a tiny amount of ejecta had destroyed some solar panels or maybe the shockwaves of air pressure had ripped some panels away?
It was far from a clear picture, but they still had power and air, still had food, and might just survive long enough for their eardrums to heal naturally. It was a start at least.
***...
The days of complete deafness continued without incident, with no hint of any more violence up in orbit. Whatever debris had been up there in orbit, they all seemed to have either found stable orbits or rained down already on the night they all went deaf.
The lack of information about what was going on outside the farm was extremely agitating, the radio could be saying anything right now and they couldn't hear it!
The townspeople made a clay funeral shrine just outside the town dedicated to all the 679 line wives they had ordered. Jen herself even briefly left the tent to pay her respects at this crude clay shrine, crying at the loss of her sister 679 line wives. The men who would have been their husbands all morned for their departed brides at this shrine, laying flowers from crops in front of the monument in little wreaths.
The sense of sadness throughout the town was terrible, and even the hardest men looked terribly sad. The softer men could be seen crying at times, it was just so heartbreaking.
These wives had been loved even though they hadn't arrived, desperately wanted and deeply deeply loved. These men had paid everything they owned to order these wives, and had spent the last two months getting the town as nice as possible to make their new wives comfortable. The men had been debating about what names they should call their wives, had been looking at Jen and fantasising about what their own wives would be like, the excitement and hope had been palpable.
To have them come to orbit only to then be blown up by xenos filth was the bitterest of blows, and the grief felt was very real. A few men had even become suicidal, and had had to be disarmed and tied up for their own safety by concerned friends. Jen had done her best to explain with writing on plastic sheets that Wsuioo would send replacement wives to customers in this situation, as the 679 line wife models came with full automatic replacement warranty against products lost during delivery.
The suicide attempts had so far been stopped by friends before it happened, but it was still a very real possibility that someone might succeed if this black mood didn't improve. It just made a bad situation even worse.
A patch of bare clay beside the funeral shrine had individual little memorials to each lost girl, a graveyard of little plastic tombstones left by each of their future husbands. On each tombstone was written the name the man had chosen for his wife, and the name of the man who had ordered her. Crop flowers were laid in bunches in front of each individual tombstone, put there by grieving men who would have been their husbands, and it was all so pitiful.
The absolute silence made this grief a hundred times worse, the complete absence of comforting words, it was like the silence of the grave, just unendurable.
Jen herself was in mourning for these girls, but the men were starting to show resentful body language whenever they looked at her. Her presence seemed to torment them with a reminder of what they had lost. It made Jen feel like shit.
The days just kept marching by in silence, their ears taking a long time to heal, just day after day of no sounds and grieving people. The silence became both more used to and more oppressive at the same time, and some people were screaming at the top of their lungs, but unable to hear their own screams. The place was going mad.
***...
Some days later Jen was silently suckling her son like usual, when she saw in the corner of her eye the side of the tent vibrating and billowing from some strong wind. Jen looked at it curiously.
She looked around the shed, and noticed fine dust and lightweight objects moving across the floor, the high gravity keeping them from getting far from the floor as some strong air current obviously acted on them.
Jen didn't know what was causing the wind, it was day outside and had been not particularly windy the last time she looked. Jen was still getting the hang of 1D8V-44 weather, it kept surprising her like this, weather was weird sometimes.
Jen shrugged, and returned her attention to her suckling baby.
Less than a minute later the wind seemed to suddenly stop, which was also a bit weird, and Jen was vaguely intrigued by the bizarre weather today.
A movement caught her view and she looked up to see a watchman running inside with a frantic look on his face. Jen looked at him curiously, as did other people in the shed, and he started gesticulating at the sky frantically. He wrote something with clay on his plastic sheet and held it up urgently.
"Blimps" the sheet said in a messy scrawl.
This got everyone's attention, and the shed emptied of everyone except Jen and Christopher. Jen was terribly curious, but couldn't go anywhere to investigate, so had little choice but to wait.
Being deaf was extremely inconvenient. Jen had absolutely no idea what was going on outside, she was completely deaf. The waiting was unbearable.
An eternity later that was probably only 10 minutes in reality, a huge crowd of people entered, with feverish joy and nervousness written on their faces. The happiness on their faces was like nothing Jen had ever seen before, it was almost scary.
The crowd of men blocked her view, and Jen stood up to see. She couldn't see much at first, but did catch a hint of a mass of platinum blonde hair entering the shed through the crowd. Could it be?
The mass of blonde moved in a nervous tight huddle, like a school of fish, huddled as tight as possible as though frightened by so many strange men. The crowd of men pressed up against the infant oxygen tent, and very reluctantly parted against the tent as the mass of platinum blonde hair grew and grew from a steady stream of blonde entering the shed. The men were pushed back by the agitated school of blonde hair, and gradually gave ground. The men blocking her view moved aside as the mass of blonde pressed against the side of the tent, and Jen saw what they were.
A crowd of almost identical copies of Jen pressed up nervously against the side of the tent in a shy huddle. Long shockingly platinum blonde hair hung from every head, white satin wedding dresses clad extremely busty and sexy bodies, transparent air masks covered intoxicatingly beautiful Slavic faces with striking blue eyes and pale perfect skin, long legs, mouthwatering hips, sexually provocative beauty in human form. These were 679 line wife model pedigrees!
The women were so tiny, their slender limbs struggling in this local gravity, pretty little things not designed for high gravity. The air bottles on their backs were almost driving them to their knees from the weight, and only the combined support of the crowd was keeping them up on their feet walking this fast. Jen's own muscular physique from a year of this gravity was a far cry from these graceful little things.
The women noticed Jen immediately as being one of their line, and they gazed at the baby suckling at her breast with interest. They were pointing at the baby and saying something that Jen's deaf ears couldn't hear, but from the look of it they were saying "awww so cute!"
The women tried to talk to Jen verbally, but Jen replied in sign language that she was deaf. These 679 line women had the same education as Jen, and knew sign language fluently, and Jen had a conversation with them.
"We thought you all died in the space battle?" Jen signed.
"We had an Imperial Navy escort frigate protecting us. The xenos ships and the escort frigate blew each other up at the same time. Our ship was the only survivor of the battle," the woman signed in reply.
Jen nodded in relief.
"Why are you deaf?" the women asked in sign language.
"Orbital debris from the space battle hit very close to the town, the sound of the impact caused acoustic trauma to everyone in the town, and ruptured every eardrum. We haven't healed our eardrums yet," Jen signed back.
"Are our husbands deaf?" The women all signed with feverish interest.
Jen sighed. Trust a 679 to want to talk about nothing but their husbands. So self centred!
"Did we offend you?" The women asked intuitively.
"Yes, but you didn't mean to so it's ok. To answer your question yes all your husbands have ruptured eardrums. None of them know sign language and they write on bits of plastic to communicate." Jen replied.
"Sorry for offending you," the women all replied humbly.
The women wanted to keep talking but the press of the crowd displaced them as the shed filled with 679 line wives.
"This is crazy! You won't all fit! Tell Z8C!" Jen signed frantically at all the women who could see her.
The women nodded and started yelling verbally, which Jen couldn't hear, but they were apparently unsuccessful.
Jen squawked in alarm and frantically pressed an emergency air mask over her son's face as a bunch of 679 line wives tried to enter the tent without knowing how to use the airlock. Jen put a mask over her own face as well as the girls opened up the tent to the outside air and just marched inside!
Jen was outraged, but the air mask was keeping her son alive for as long as she could keep it on his face, and the press of girls was too great to evict.
"What in the Emperor's BALLS are you doing in here! This is an infant oxygen tent!" Jen signed enraged.
The girls flinched at such unladylike words from a 679 line wife, and tried to placate Jen.
"Only one of those men is my husband, the other men might take my virtue! I must be pure for my husband alone!" One of the girls replied selfishly.
"So you put my baby's life in danger just so the wrong man doesn't grope you?!" Jen asked in outraged sign language.
"Please let me stay in the tent! There are too many men out there!" The selfish girl replied frantically.
"Who is your husband?" Jen asked crossly.
"A Mr Keith Anderson," the girl said proudly with a romantic smile.
"Good, that means he will stop bugging me to make explosives and can bother you about making TNT instead." Jen snapped crankily.
"My husband likes explosives? What does my husband do?" The selfish girl asked excitedly.
"Your husband works for my husband as a farmhand, but as a hobby he blows holes in the ground with my homemade high explosives. He wants to be a miner and a prospector," Jen explained crossly.
"Then it is my duty to help him. I will make all the explosives my husband desires," the girl signed with a romantic smile on her face.
"Tell me about MY husband!" every other girl in line of sight signed at Jen with feverish excitement.
Jen shook her head in exasperation at how selfish these girls were being, they were all focused on their own desires and being really obnoxious! The tent was wide open and nearly full to bursting, and the entire crowd of 679 line wives were trying to be inside the tent away from the men!
These girls all had an overwhelming desire to imprint on a husband that a male authority figure chose for them. In a normal family dynamic a female 679 line wife model would defer to the male head of their household to tell them who to imprint on, usually a father, grandfather, mafia family boss, or sometimes a brother in the absence of other male authority heads. In the case of those raised on Wsuioo, they would defer to an S99 or an S41 salesman to tell them who to imprint on.
These girls were now 18 or more, and their instincts were going crazy in a frenzy to imprint and become a sexually receptive doormat to their new husband. Jen could almost smell the surge of oestrogen coursing through these girl's bodies, they were awash with hormones and frantic to mate. Their eyes burned with an intense frenzy to imprint, and it was making them selfish and obnoxious.
Every one of them wanted their husband alone to touch them, and would not tolerate any other men touching them. Being in a confined space with this many men was freaking them out, and they were "schooling" like fish to stop the men from touching them. And they had good reason to, as the men seemed to think that they could just grab any girl at random to be their wife, much to the dismay of the girls in question.
As a female 679 herself, Jen was not seen as a threat and was unwillingly being added to the "school" of girls. They all wanted to ask Jen about their new husbands, and liked being in the tent because the men couldn't reach them in here. They seemed to place a lower importance on Jen's baby having a safe place to breathe.
"Do you know who MY husband is?" Jen signed irritatedly.
"No, who is he?" Some of the girls signed.
"My husband is the local drug lord who rules this town and the surrounding lands. Your husbands are all members of his gang and work for him. This baby is the son and heir of my husband's drug gang, and you are putting his life in danger! If my son is harmed then your husbands will answer to my husband!" Jen threatened, deliberately exaggerating how dangerous Seth was.
The girls all looked absolutely horrified, imagining some cruel tyrant of a drug lord disembowelling their new husbands. The girls immediately started pleading for mercy on their new husbands.
"Get out of my tent!" Jen signed angrily.
With a lot of exaggerated threats about what would happen to their new husbands if they didn't leave the tent, Jen managed to evict the entire mass of girls and closed the tent zip after them. It would take almost an hour for the air in the tent to be completely replaced by the hydrolysis unit now, and Jen was not sure if her son would hold still in the air mask even that long! Selfish bitches!
The 679 line wives looked through the tent pleadingly to be allowed back in, as eager men tried to pull random girls from the huddle to be their wives, but Jen ignored the pleading puppy dog eyes. The girls could survive a bit of groping, her son could not survive without the infant oxygen tent.
Jen had grieved for these girls when she thought them dead, but encountering them alive they were obnoxious selfish girls who had just put her son in danger of dying! She had only just met them, and already she had had enough of these girls.
***...