Chapter 57H
"Is this order serious?, Surely no one can think that THIS is a good idea Sir?", First Lieutenant Ahmed Muhammad said candidly into his official vox caster pocket phone.
"Given that this is a vox channel that is being *recorded* by the Fleet, I have only the UTMOST respect for the clear *wisdom* of this *excellent* plan.", Commander Arthur Jacobson, Captain of the Iconoclast Destroyer 'Midnight Stalker', replied back carefully in code to subtly indicate his contempt for this insane order.
"Aye aye Sir.", Ahmed said in a tone to convey that he understood the subtle meaning.
"I need you back here Ahmed.", Commander Jacobson said simply, as Ahmed had known that he would.
"Aye Sir, I am not refusing your order but my girls are down here and the Marines are still using them.", Ahmed explained his predicament.
"Sharmaine and Deborah are not going to run away from you if you stop watching them. You know that they are loyal to you. They will still be there waiting for you when you return.", Commander Jacobson said reasonably.
"I guess… Aye aye Sir. I will get up there as soon as I can arrange it, I just need to make sure that my girls have all they need while I'm gone.", Ahmed reluctantly agreed, taking his Captain's point.
Sharmaine and Deborah were good girls and obedient subs, they had never been unhappy being tickle slaves and they had earned his trust. They were sensible grown women who would do him proud, he KNEW that they would not run away from him.
Ahmed put away his vox and cursed to himself, returning his attention to Sharmaine and Deborah tied with ropes to tree trunks in only bikinis where he had been tickling them both before the call.
The girls were absolutely gorgeous things, skinny but curvy and busty at the same time, their young black skin flawless, their faces radiantly beautiful. These girls had been expensive, like women this beautiful and kinky always were. Ahmed had actually had to take out a loan to buy them and he had only paid them off a few years ago. Sharmaine and Deborah were easily the most expensive things Ahmed owned and he had recurring nightmares about them being stolen from him.
The sexy girls looked at Ahmed in concern, having heard enough of the conversation to know what was happening. They looked sexy fine as hell in their ropes and bikinis, Ahmed REALLY didn't want to leave these sexy girls to go back to the ship without them.
Ahmed sighed and untied his two tickle slaves, missing them already when he wasn't even gone yet.
"We will be alright, we know the lock combinations to the tent and our luggage, just leave us some money and we'll be fine.", Deborah said reassuringly, kissing him on the lips fondly.
Ahmed returned the kiss and looked to Sharmaine.
"We won't go anywhere dangerous, we will just chill around the pools and beach and shit. We won't go far from the town when the Marines ain't using us.", Sharmaine promised, also kissing him.
"I HATE that I have to leave you like this. I'm real sorry about this.", Ahmed told his subs sincerely.
"We have been tickled every day for like almost a decade now, ever since we were teenagers you have tickled us for hours almost every damn day. This could be like a holiday, I want to know what it feels like to go a day WITHOUT getting the complete living SHIT tickled out of me!", Sharmaine laughed.
"You are just making me feel worse. It's a crime for you not to be tickled as much as possible.", Ahmed said unhappily, grabbing Sharmaine and squeezing her body to make her laugh and squeal.
Ahmed put his other arm around Deborah and spent a good minute tickling his girls as hard as possible, already missing them so much that he had a lump in his throat. Ahmed had NEVER been separated from his subs before, they were like part of his body or something, this felt like losing an arm or something.
Ahmed didn't have time to waste and he regretfully stopped tickling his tickle slaves, taking them back to the tent and organising both them and his imminent departure.
The tent was already neat thanks to Ahmed being a man who kept everything neat and organised out of personality, with every suitcase neatly packed and ordered, with separate bags for each person. It took no time at all for Ahmed to be ready to leave.
Ahmed gave his girls as much money as he could possibly spare, giving them huge wads of cash and electronic access to one of his bank accounts so that they would want for nothing no matter how long he was away. He didn't even need to tell them to spend the money sensibly, they were grown ass adults and emotionally mature, they wouldn't let him down with this trust.
When the girls were as well cared for as he could manage with everything they could possibly need, Ahmed quickly fucked both Deborah and Sharmaine in intimate farewell, then he sadly called for transportation to take him to the space port.
The girls followed him out of the tent and tent town, getting in the waiting wheeled road transport with him and going all the way to the space port with him to see him off. They clearly didn't want him to go and they were getting real clingy to him in the terminal as he checked in his luggage and got his ticket.
The space port was a simple affair, little more than a single runway and a bombed out terminal building, little more than a ruin with the roof and debris removed from the scorched concrete slab of the original building, with the walls intact in places and portable fences set up to plug the gaps in the walls. Some rain tarpaulins had been set up in places to give shelter from the rain and shade, and all in all it was a simple affair after the bombs.
Local bikini women were visibly sorting the suitcases into tug carts and driving it out to a space shuttle waiting on the runway, where other local women loaded this luggage into a cargo section of the shuttle, as yet other local women used a giant hose to connect the shuttle to a fuel tank on the back of a truck, high performance Helium-3 nuclear fuel by the look of the truck tank.
The shuttle had to wait for a designated time before it could depart, these shuttles arriving and departing at regular times on an air traffic control timetable, and Ahmed was quite early for the next shuttle flight.
With nothing else to do the trio sat in a row of fire blackened metal seats under a tarpaulin and waited.
Sharmaine and Deborah sat to either side of Ahmed and he dutifully squeezed their nearest knee each to tickle them like crazy.
Ahmed smiled as he squeezed their knees in his strong grip, the girls were laughing like crazy and struggling but he had their knees pinned against the seat and they couldn't get away. Sharmaine and Deborah were thrashing about like crazy, twisting their bodies like mental to try to squirm free of his grip on their knees, but Ahmed was stronger than them and easily held them.
Ahmed didn't stop squeezing even after thirty minutes, the two tickle slaves laughing hysterically and all sweaty and sexy fine in their bikinis. Ahmed had a huge lump of sadness in his throat as he tickled his beautiful girls like this, knowing that he would soon be not able to do this for days. Damn it he missed them so much and he wasn't even gone yet.
Far too soon the departure time was approaching and Ahmed reluctantly stopped squeezing their sweaty knees. The girls stopped laughing and started crying, gripping him tightly and all crying and shit, not wanting him to go.
Ahmed felt terrible as he stood to leave, and Sharmaine and Deborah stood too, hugging him tightly and crying heavily.
Ahmed walked slowly to the boarding gate, (literally a crude metal gate now), with Sharmaine and Deborah gripping him tightly and sobbing. Ahmed kissed both of them passionately at the gate, feeling terrible leaving them behind like this, and they refused to let go of him, sobbing that they would miss him.
The girls caused a huge scene as Ahmed regretfully unentangled himself from the weeping women, kissing both of them repeatedly and promising to return, giving both a huge long parting kiss before leaving through the gate without them.
Sharmaine and Deborah held each other tightly and sobbed on the other side of the gate, waving at him pitifully, and Ahmed felt terrible to leave them like this. These girls certainly made Ahmed feel loved and wanted.
Ahmed felt a huge sad lump in his throat as he boarded the space shuttle without them, he had never been away from them in almost a decade, they were his girls, it wasn't right being without them.
Ahmed's sadness transformed into anger as he thought about WHY he was being dragged away from his girls right now. Wendy Sevenson in her infinite laziness had decided to "save time" by letting fucking tyranids loose in the fleet to "dispose" of the carrion faster!
And it wasn't the Nightmare Asylum they were trying this madness on, the Destroyers would be infested first to see if it was "safe"!
The sheer callous lack of shame was what pissed Ahmed off the most, there was no rush forcing the fleet to not simply clean up the slow and safe way, this was just because Wendy was personally lazy!, The bitch wanted to save a bit of paperwork even at the risk of entire ships!
Ahmed seethed with anger all the way to orbit, heartsick for Sharmaine and Deborah and utterly enraged by the priorities of Wendy Sevenson.
The shuttle took Ahmed to a newly constructed orbital lance canon station that was doubling as a space port in the chaos of orbit. Ahmed took his luggage and walked through this modest station to another docking bay that already had crew members from his ship waiting outside for him.
The crewmen saluted their XO First Lieutenant Ahmed Muhammad instantly and he returned the salute. Men took his luggage and he walked with authority through the docking bay, still wearing holiday clothes in the form of swimming shorts, flip flops and a completely bare chest, his attire deliberate to make a statement.
On the other side of the docking bay was the basic humble interior of an Arvus Lighter, an 8 metre long 3 metre wide van-like space craft with a pair of small external engines, a small workhorse that all ships in the fleet carried at least one of to ferry small numbers of passengers and small cargoes between ships. The crew outside the docking bay entered behind Ahmed with his luggage, and the Lighter pilot saluted Ahmed, this Arvus Lighter and its crew all belonging to the Midnight Stalker.
The Arvus Lighter closed its airtight doors and went through an undocking cycle, requesting clearance from space traffic control before departing with the rather irritated XO.
"Did you have a nice holiday Sir?", One of the crew asked Ahmed conversationally.
"It was real nice until this nonsense dragged me away. Did you hear about the shit they have planned?", Ahmed replied candidly.
"We heard about it Sir. What idiocy!", Another crew said openly.
"Be careful saying that in front of the wrong people, but quietly tween us yeah it's nuts, bonkers.", Ahmed quietly confided.
"We aren't really going to do it are we Sir?", yet another crew member asked.
"If the captain gets any choice in the matter then no, but it might not be optional. In that case we do it as smart as possible, ignore any idiotic suggestions about how to do it and do it our way.", Ahmed confided, treating the crew like equals.
"Yeah, definitely do it our way Sir.", the crew agreed, reassured by Ahmed's manner and openness.
"I have only the vaguest fucking idea how we are going to do this safely, so I want as many heads together as possible thinking this through. Forget authority, if anyone has a bright idea don't keep it to yourself. I will tell the Captain it was all my idea if shit goes sideways, but if it goes well I will give full credit to the person who thought of it.", Ahmed said sincerely.
"You always were a damn good officer Sir.", one of the crew members said approvingly.
Ahmed magnanimously brushed off this praise and reiterated for anyone to speak up with ideas.
The crew on the Lighter were uncertain, but they suggested that they run pressurisation tests on every section of the ship before doing anything else, which went without saying really.
The Arvus Lighter flew quickly in the vacuum of space without air resistance and arrived quickly, the familiar elaborate shape of the Iconoclast Destroyer brightly visible in the sunlight through the front window against a backdrop of dark magenta from the Maelstrom warp nebula. The ship was tiny for a warp ship but huge by human scales, over a kilometre in length, with huge cooling radiators jutting off it to make it even bigger. It was an awesome sight to behold.
The Arvus Lighter slowly and carefully nestled into a small nook in the hull designed to hold it, and huge pressure doors closed around the nook as soon as the Lighter was inside, followed by the hiss of air outside as the nook was pressurised.
Ahmed waited for the pressure cycle to complete, and the Lighter doors opened, letting out all the occupants within. Ahmed strolled out in his flip flops to the deck of the Arvus Lighter holding nook, followed by the crew and his luggage, and a second pressure door opened into the ship proper.
Ahmed recoiled and wrinkled his nose at the awful reek of rotting dead bodies, the air in the ship stank like a pit full of decomposing corpses!
Other crew members were assembled in a hallway on the other side of the pressure door, in an honour guard formation with full parade navy uniforms and navy whistles shrilling tunes of salute for the First Officer coming aboard, with full salutes and guns firing blanks in the air and the lot. Ahmed was bare chested in vacation shorts and flip flops on his feet, hardly dressed for this sort of official welcome aboard.
Ahmed humoured this unnecessary display, not wanting to make anyone feel bad for all the effort they had put into this, and he respectfully returned the salutes and marched down the gauntlet of parade and whistles and gunfire with as much dignity as possible, a little thing to make the crew feel appreciated and to keep up their morale.
Ahmed was met at the end of the hallway by a waiting honour guard of voids men in parade uniforms led by a warrant officer, and these men took Ahmed's luggage and escorted him down the corridors of the ship to a waiting elevator, taking him up many floors to the Captain's bridge deck.
First Lieutenant Ahmed Muhammad felt at home as he walked through the bridge where he spent so much of his working life, passing the familiar side passages and side rooms full of tables and chairs and cogitators, seeing the familiar people who manned every instrument station, hearing the familiar sounds. The bridge at least was clean, the clean up having focused first and foremost on this particular deck, and the air didn't stink like a mass grave.
The Captain, Commander Arthur Jacobson, was sitting in his Captain's chair in the middle of the wide front facing bridge observation room, the almost 40 year old Captain dressed in an elaborate military uniform of Night Lord dark blue with decorative features in a variety of other colours, with insignia of rank clearly visible on both his clothes and his navy hat.
Arthur Jacobson was a Commander by rank in the Navy, technically not a Captain, but by tradition the commander of a ship was always addressed as Captain on board his ship. On a bigger ship like a cruiser the captain of the ship would be an actual Captain, but on small ships like Destroyers a Commander one rank below Captain was put in charge, so that the Captain of a cruiser could give direct orders to the Commanders of the Destroyers assigned to escort his or her cruiser in battle.
Outside of the official fleet chain of command Arthur was the captain of the ship for all intents and purposes, having complete command over his ship and all its crew. The rest of the navy officer personnel rarely ever came onboard the Midnight Stalker, it was its own little self contained world that ran its own affairs.
Ahmed saluted his Captain as soon as he was at the appropriate distance to do so, and Captain Jacobson noted Ahmed's casual state of dress with amusement, returning the salute.
"Sorry to cut your vacation short, but you know the rest.", Captain Jacobson opened.
"I know I need to be here Sir, I don't blame YOU for this situation Sir.", Ahmed reassured.
"Wendy Sevenson…", Captain Jacobson said with a sigh of contempt, daring not to complete the sentence and letting the words hang in the air.
"Wendy big tiddy sex tape Sevenson…", Ahmed shared this sentiment.
Captain Jacobson snorted at this.
"Oh those sex tapes.", Captain Jacobson chuckled at a memory.
"They were something special.", Ahmed agreed with a chuckle.
"Well like Wendy in her sex tapes, if we don't do this right then we will all be very comprehensively fucked.", Captain Jacobson returned to topic darkly.
"Yes Sir.", Ahmed agreed seriously.
"I don't want any mistakes with this. I want full pressure tests on every section, I want any holes repaired, I want vulnerable materials moved around. I will delay this as long as possible, but sooner or later I will be ordered to proceed. Before that happens I want this ship and crew to be ready…", Captain Jacobson began his speech.
Ahmed listened dutifully, taking notes of everything, then he liaised with other officers and warrant officers to best organise this shit.
Within two hours a section of the ship was evacuated and sealed with blast doors for a pressure test. Air pumps sucked air out of the test section, immediately resulting in air leaking in from other sections through some hidden leaks in the walls somewhere. The leaks were then located and the section repressurised for a repair of every leak, followed by a second pressure test which held for a moment before an entire wall plate gave way in explosive decompression that rapidly equalised the pressure!
For hours and hours they worked on this one section until it could hold a vacuum without leaking for two hours straight. Then they tested another section, immediately being plagued by yet more leaks!
"At the very least this made us aware of all these wall integrity problems Sir. This would have been REAL bad to find this out during a true hull breach.", Ahmed replied to his Captain at some stage.
"This ship is falling apart from the manpower shortage. If we had the crew then none of these leaks would exist.", Captain Jacobson sighed unhappily.
"Wendy offered to rent some Tzeentch girls who could fix the ship, but the price she wanted was insane.", Ahmed remarked.
"Why didn't you tell me about this earlier?!", Captain Jacobson reacted in disbelief.
"She wanted twenty THOUSAND per MONTH to rent out just ONE of her slave girls Sir. I didn't want to sully your ears with such nonsense.", Ahmed explained.
"That's a bit steep, but if the girl is a tech priestess it might be worth it?", Captain Jacobson suggested.
"Not tech priestesses, just smart girls who know engineering and nuclear physics.", Ahmed explained.
"If they can actually FIX the busted nuclear reactors during that one month then one of these girls might actually be worth that much. We are getting desperate here. I will call her myself and make some inquiries.", Captain Jacobson insisted.
"Very well Sir.", Ahmed replied and continued focusing on the endless pressure tests and repairs.
The work continued for so long that the shifts changed, but Ahmed didn't have time for more than a food break, the entire crew being moved around from section to section as every section except the bridge and reactor decks was pressure tested.
The ship was falling apart, entire walls giving way under explosive decompression, the crew had to weld entire walls back in place with crude bracing girders to add extra strength!, The crew were terrified of even going near the small leaks they found as entire walls could suddenly rip away inside the vacuum pressure sections, and Ahmed had a hell of a time keeping the crew from either mutinying or abandoning their duties in this idiotic madness.
At some point during this stressful activity a nearly naked teenage girl with a slave brand on her shoulder arrived onboard by Arvus Lighter, the girl being sent to Ahmed in one of the starboard missile storage bays where he was directing the removal of all warheads and explosive materials before a pressure test.
The girl was just a late teenager and a tiny little slender thing. She had the multi-ethnic stripy skin of a Tzeentch worshipping native of Stōørølø, every stripe a different skin tone so that she was every race at the same time. Her cute face was so mixed race in bone structure that she had no fixed facial ethnicity, and her long hair seemed to have individual hair strands with every single different hair colour, all mixed together to look weird, the hairs all having different straightness and curvedness and different thickness so that it was just going nuts on her head.
The girl was barefoot and wore only rags without underwear on underneath, the rags so worn and torn through that her breasts were clearly visible through the huge holes in the fabric, with her vagina also bare through a massive tear in the rags. The girl was blushing pinkly on the whiter bits of her face stripes and covering her modesty with her hands and arms, looking mortified with embarrassment.
"This is our new nuclear reactor engineer Sir.", A crewman accompanying the girl introduced.
"Hello and welcome to the ship. I am First Lieutenant Ahmed Muhammad the XO of this ship. Sorry about my unprofessional state of dress, I'm currently dressed like this because I was called in from vacation down on the planet and I haven't found the time to change into my uniform yet.", Ahmed introduced charmingly.
"My state of dress is even worse Sir!, I'm SO sorry!, I am a slave and these rags are all I have!", the girl said in mortified distress.
"You mind if I borrow your jacket rating?, Thanks, here put this on girl until we organise some proper clothes for you.", Ahmed said, borrowing an unnecessary jacket from a crew rating with a shirt under his jacket, helping the girl put on the jacket.
The jacket was man sized and big on the girl, which was perfect as it completely covered her tits and vag and ass when it was buttoned up the full length at the front.
The girl looked extremely grateful for this jacket, thanking the rating profusely so that he smiled and magnanimously told her that it was ok.
"I, my name is Tramzaka Shadowcleaver, I am a slave of Slaanesh Champion Wendy Sevenson, I learn that I have been rented for at least a month to serve on this ship in any way commanded. I, I know that… That sex… That sex might be commanded of me… Please don't… Please be gentle at least… I'm so scared…", The girl introduced tragically.
"If anyone rapes you, you come and tell me about it. You can have CONSENSUAL sex on this ship if you want to, but rape will not be tolerated.", Ahmed said quietly.
Tramzaka nodded with nervous hope, reassured by these words.
"So, you are going to be our newest engineer?", Ahmed opened.
"I think there is a mistake, I don't have any hands on training. I only do line drawing nuclear engineering blueprints on paper for fun!, I could MAYBE be able to DRAW a nuclear reactor ON PAPER, but I couldn't POSSIBLY…", Tramzaka exclaimed in a panic in a way that was admittedly completely adorable.
"Hush hush, don't fret. Even being an engineer only on paper is useful here. Let's talk about what you DO know how to do. Do you understand nuclear physics?", Ahmed soothed, interrupting her panic spiral.
"Well that's a big tent with a lot of things in it. I don't know the really obscure theoretical aspects at the plank scale. I mostly focused on muon interactions and fermions, but I don't KNOW blah blah blah blah, dark matter particle physics, blah blah blah blah quantum mechanics, blah blah hysterical panic about incomprehensible physics blah blah blah!", Tramzaka fretted in an adorable panic attack that Ahmed understood less than half of.
"Muon interactions between fermions is the MOST important factor in nuclear fusion if I remember my physics correctly. Muons transmit the strong force that binds the fusing atoms together to make fusion happen right?", Ahmed interrupted.
"That is not entirely accurate, and you are confusing the strong force with the strong NUCLEAR force, they are actually different because of blah blah blah fundamental forces, blah blah blah quark interactions, blah blah gluons and leptons and bosons blah blah blah…", Tramzaka fretted anxiously.
Ahmed blinked at this.
"But do you know how nuclear fusion works inside a nuclear reactor?", Ahmed pressed.
"Well of course, but…"
"Do you know how a fusion reactor works?"
"Of course but…"
"I really don't see what the problem is.", Ahmed pointed out.
"But I don't have any experience with fixing broken reactors or building new ones with actual parts and labor. I can design a reactor on paper as a hobby but I wouldn't even know what screwdriver to use to actually build it!", Tramzaka fretted.
"You won't be going in alone. I will have you teamed up with the existing engineering crew and they will help you figure out what you don't know.", Ahmed reassured the adorable panic prone nerd girl.
"I, I guess that might work Sir…", Tramzaka hesitantly agreed.
Tramzaka was soon led away by crew to get her clothed in a uniform and introduced to her new work team, and Ahmed continued with the pressure test.
Ahmed eventually found the time to go and check the fusion reactor decks, and found Tramzaka wearing a crew uniform peering inside a pulled apart tokamak reactor, holding a silent Geiger counter nervously to make sure it wasn't radioactive. Tramzaka had a motley collection of taciturn misanthropic male autistics around her in engineering crew uniforms, these creeps being the best and brightest the reactor repair engineering department had left.
Tramzaka was trying to ask questions but the misanthropes had such poor verbal communication skills that they struggled to string a sentence together, looks of pain on their faces as they tried to use words to communicate. Some were so bad that they had to write down their words on a keyboard just to speak because the autism fucked with their verbal communication so much, these people would be unemployable anywhere else.
Tramzaka kept accidentally moving small items like tools a few millimetres out of the place their owner had left them, causing autistic distress as the owners angrily put these items exactly back in place with obsessive compulsive disorder. This shit was really embarrassing.
"I know you have autism but could you please TRY to tell me what caused this?", Tramzaka asked with clear exasperation.
The various autists muttered and mumbled nonsensically, just half formed words and sentences that trailed off before completion.
Tramzaka pulled her head out of the tokamak and noticed Ahmed.
"How's it going?", Ahmed asked Tramzaka conversationally.
"I'm getting really frustrated Sir. I can't get straight answers about anything!, I know sort of why this tokamak is broken but I can't get the team to communicate properly to explain what I don't know.", Tramzaka complained.
"Come on guys. I know it's hard to talk, but remember what I taught you about just saying a few words at a time. Use your keyboards to type what you can't say.", Ahmed encouraged the severely autistic engineers.
The autists softened at his encouraging words and Ahmed went over to help Tramzaka communicate with them very patiently, reminding them to use the keyboards and speaking tricks when they got stuck.
Tramzaka very slowly ascertained that the problem was mostly likely that the tokamak frame itself was slightly deformed, requiring complete reconstruction according to the autists.
"Hang on. What if we just recalibrate the magnetic field to compensate for the deformity?", Tramzaka suggested.
The autists didn't like this time and labor saving solution, being so obsessive compulsive that they would replace something just to make it look symmetrical, but Ahmed pushed for Tramzaka's suggestion to be attempted despite the incoherent angry noises.
With a LOT of deliberate procrastinating and general complaining, the autists put the tokamak back together and deep cleaned it, filling the reactor with hard vacuum followed by fuel gas. Tramzaka then laboriously figured out the software to calibrate the magnetic field, and she set the field to compensate for the slightly dented hardware frame.
The tokamak took a few minutes to first plasmarise the fuel gas and then heat up its plasma fuel to fusion temperature, then the neutron heated heat exchangers purred to life transporting super hot heat exchange fluid off to boil water in a boiler to power a multi gigawatt turbine row. Tramzaka had just fixed the reactor with a simple hack with no expensive new parts at all!
Ahmed congratulated Tramzaka and did his best to keep the peace with the unhappy autists, listening to their muttering and sincerely pretending to care about their butthurt. Ahmed respected all the crew, but there came points where the stuff they had a problem with was just so ridiculous that it was hard to accommodate. He had a reputation for being a great leader who gave a genuine shit about the crew, and he honestly did give a shit, but THIS was such a STUPID thing to get upset about when they had so many other problems.
Ahmed wasted as much time as he could calming down the engineers in a soothing reasonable voice, before excusing himself to attend to other matters. Tramzaka waved shyly as he left, obviously feeling grateful that he had been here.
Ahmed had to admit that this Tzeentch girl was proving herself useful.
***…