Chapter 7Forge
(Note thanks for the kind review misterfishy (I love the picture of the bear eating a salmon by the way), it really made my day to read that. Sorry for not replying, I am having trouble with the app I use to view this website in pc mode on my phone, it keeps freezing up. I'm not sure if the problem is the app or the website itself. Anyway thank you for your kind words.)
(Additional note about why I took a hiatus from writing my usual story to write this. I got recently selected for jury duty for the court case from hell, I'm talking the most black hearted child rape case. For 6 weeks I have been on a jury listening to graphic details including (but not limited to) such lines as "after raping me then dad force fed me the contents of his condom". Also having a five year old show the court on a teddy rabbit where daddy touched her (and then she grabbed the teddy rabbit on the leg and "tugged" on the leg energetically to show how she gave her daddy a hand job) was just pitiful to watch. I wasn't even one of the victims but I have vicarious trauma just from the horror of sitting through 6 goddamn weeks of the most fucked up child rape testimony imaginable. That's why I took a hiatus from writing the Octavia story, I just can't deal with writing any sort of sex stuff at the moment. And in case you are wondering yes, we found that daughter fucker guilty of every goddamn count, (double digit numbers of rape charges), Australia doesn't have the death penalty but he will still spend the rest of his life in jail and then if there is any afterlife he will burn in hell. When I feel a bit less mentally violated I will return to my usual writings but please give me time, I'm really not in a good place mentally right now.)
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Up on the heavily radioactive surface of the Forge World Ferrous Prime it was raining carbonic acid yet again, the wind was howling and lightning split the storm darkened sky with bolts of blindingly bright blue white light. Ferrous Prime was a Forge World of the Rad-Saturated variety, and it was the only Forge World in the ork ravaged Pax Sector of Segmentum Tempestus in the galactic south.
The surface of Ferrous Prime was a twisted badlands hell scape of grey black industrial slag and grey brown smog dust, this detritus of industry piled up in huge hills by massive smoke belching dump trucks with huge acid stained filthy black tires that crunched over the ruined ground, heedlessly dumping unwanted slag from the smelters and refineries anywhere and everywhere close to the industrial sites.
The torrential rains of carbonic acid pelted down on these hills of ash and slag, the burning acid cutting deep ravines and canyons into the soft hills, creating short lived badlands that were quickly buried under yet more slag and ash and dust as quickly as the rain could erode it away.
The stinking winds howled across these rain lashed industrial badlands, the wind brown with smog and pollution. Strange blue glows danced in the wind as radioactive filth in the air coruscated everything with high energy radioactive particles, the carbon dioxide in the smoggy air actively absorbing proton radiation and converting into new carbonic acid with blue glows of high energy photons.
The drenching acid ran down the bad land gullies and ravines, carrying dissolved filth in a froth of bubbling surface scum, the streams combining together into bigger and bigger streams, eventually flowing into huge canyons cut into the industrial sediment, the carbonic acid completely black by this point with so much filth dissolved into the acidic fluid.
For miles this black scummy carbonic acid meandered through twisting canyons far out into the great ash and slag wastes, becoming a mighty river that then flowed into a mighty lake of grimy carbonic acid.
The lake was vast and steaming with heat, and so silted up with industrial sediment dropped from the stilling fluid that the lake was exceedingly shallow. The lake didn't end per say, it just continued to get shallower and shallower until the carbonic acid disappeared under the distant very flat vast desert of ash wastes, the carbonic acid gradually seeping into the "water table" under the endless industrial ashes.
This lake was not the only one, Ferrous Prime had many such lakes of acidic filth, but this particular lake was the closest to Factory 888B and served a very important purpose.
Situated close to the shore of this carbonic acid lake was a vast complex of many different nuclear reactors running on many different types of nuclear fuel, with many huge inlet and outlet channels drawing carbonic acid in and out from the lake as a heat sink to cool their huge heat exchangers. The very air here crackled with radioactive emissions, the reactor cores liberally venting out a wide variety of radioactive waste gases into the air without so much as a smokestack to disburse it.
Easily the single biggest of these reactors was a gigantic metal monstrosity that dwarfed the other smaller reactors with less advanced fuels, this gargantuan reactor building surrounded by grimy old helium tanks feeding helium 4 gas into its monstrous reactor core to produce a nuclear fusion reaction using the legendary triple alpha process, one of the most high octane types of nuclear fusion reactions in existence that could only be achieved in the largest and most advanced fusion reactors like this hulking metal monstrosity.
This one huge reactor produced over a terawatt hour of electrical power each and every hour, sometimes throttling up to multiple terawatt hours during times of especially high power demand, setting the lake steaming to near boiling temperature from so much dumped heat. This reactor fused two helium 4 nuclei (alpha particles) together to form a highly unstable Beryllium 8 nuclei, and then required a third helium 4 nuclei (alpha particle) to very quickly fuse with the Beryllium 8 atom before it could decay back into two alpha particles, the fusion of a helium 4 nuclei with a Beryllium 8 nuclei producing radioactively stable Carbon 12 as well as an enormous amount of heat in the form of gamma rays, the heat used to boil steam in a conventional steam turbine to spin an electrical generator.
But as well as heat this reactor also vented huge amounts of reactor exhaust gases, mostly harmless carbon 12 but also a not inconsiderable amount of unburnt helium 4 alpha particles and more than a little Beryllium-8 gas amongst the exhaust gases, as mentioned a hugely radioactively unstable Beryllium isotope that almost instantly decayed into a tempest of coruscating high energy alpha particle radiation.
The Geiger counters were never silent around this nuclear reactor, the crackle so loud and relentless that it was like a deafening scream. A single breath of unfiltered air here was radioactive certain death from the thick storm of charged alpha particles ionising the delicate human lung tissue, the atoms of lung cells losing their electrons, destroying the covalent bonds that hold molecules together so that lung cells simply lysis and fall to bits. Blood and other fluid was quick to seep through these gaps in the ionised lung membranes, filling the lungs with blood until the unfortunate human drowned in their own blood and interstitial fluids.
As hellish and devastating as this rad soaked installation was it was absolutely essential. In the rad flooded haze could be seen massive and mighty rows of super high capacity power lines, electric arcs sparking occasionally between the wires in the radioactive air.
The flow of electricity was immense as it followed these pollution stained wires for miles, eventually feeding into grimy substations and huge current converters and transformers, feeding power into the hungry energy grid of the various local factories and other industrial facilities.
Along a twisted maze of grimy old wires the electrons traveled in all directions throughout factory 888B, with billions of electrons spurning the factory to instead travel down down down, down old wires into the deep dark mines and catacombs beneath the factory. Currently some of these electrons from the huge distant triple alpha process nuclear reactor were travelling down a small wire and into the leg of a servitor, recharging her battery power cells.
The servitor was blank faced and creepy looking, her physically beautiful young adult face and lean naked body appeared to be the equivalent of very early twenties in physical age, she was physically sexually attractive in the most physical animal sense, but this youthful sex appeal only added to the creepy wrongness of this cyborg.
She sat very still on a filthy rock strewn tunnel floor next to an electrical box with a commandeered power cord plugged into her left bionic leg, the wiring surgically implanted in her back sharing this power between all four of her bionic limbs. In her arms she held the naked and filthy baby Subject Wah, who was currently sleeping peacefully in the metal arms of her cyborg mother.
The naked servitor was filthy all over her completely naked torso and head and bare neck, her naturally pale skin hidden under a thick grey coating of thick dust. Under her metal arms were tufts of pale blonde armpit hair that had never once been shaved, this hair fragrant with unwashed female body odour in a way that would stink if anything at all could be smelled in this oppressively dusty polluted air. Around and above her urinary system opening was another tuft of short blonde curly hair, never shaved in her life and smelling quite strongly from lack of personal hygiene.
The servitor had full and very beautiful breasts, but slightly saggy from never ever wearing a bra in her life. Her slender waist was likewise very attractive, with soft small lean abdominal muscles and a perfectly straight posture programmed into her behavioural protocols for maximum efficiency. She was certainly not ugly despite her poor hygiene and mechanical limbs and lack of grooming.
What made this servitor so creepy was her completely blank face and mindless eyes. She lacked the micro expressions that a young woman typically had, her eyes were more glazed over than someone with severe borderline personality disorder, her face was more blank than someone with severe autism, but she had neither of these psychiatric conditions. Had she not been lobotomised she would be a perfectly normal beautiful young woman with a full rich vibrant life of possibilities ahead of her. Instead she had been robbed of all her potential and turned into this semi-mindless slave.
To see such a woman reduced to this state was horrifying to behold, to look into her dim uncomprehending eyes and to see almost nothing looking back, but cruelly not quite nothing. There was some tiny dim ember of a soul looking back from those blank glazed eyes, not enough to give intelligence but just enough for the servitor to suffer, to feel a faint haunting feeling that something was terribly wrong with her.
Some monster of a man had seen this hollow shell of a beautiful young woman, ungroomed and unhygienic, hairy and unwashed and stinking, and he had found the only way possible to degrade her body and mind even more than it had been already, by raping this helpless woman. The servitor was a factory tool and tools deserved the respect of their wielder. It was a depraved tradesman indeed who would have sex with his work tools, it was deeply disrespectful to the sacred machine that was the factory to inseminate one of its biomechanical parts in this manner.
The servitor of course understood none of this. She had been distressed by her rape but she didn't understand it. She didn't know how her own reproductive system worked and she had been completely surprised when she gave birth to Subject Wah. The servitor didn't know the link between being raped and the creation of Subject Wah, she wasn't sure what exactly Subject Wah even was, but she had the maternal instincts of motherhood hardwired into the most reptilian part of her adult human female brain that had not been touched by her partial lobotomy, instinctively motivating her to nurture and care for her baby like any female mammal would.
The servitor wanted to care for Subject Wah but she didn't know what she was supposed to do. One of the female menials had informed the servitor that Subject Wah shouldn't be recharged with electricity, the servitor was uncertain but had calmly accepted this advice without emotion.
Subject Wah was an enigma, Subject Wah didn't seem to want to do anything but sleep and suck on the servitor's chest mounds. Subject Wah barely moved even when awake, Subject Wah reacted loudly with coughing and sneezing and Wah sounds when nutrient powder was put in her mouth. Subject Wah was very mysterious.
The servitor absentmindedly turned to look at the stolen metal crate of powdered nutrient paste sitting on the ground next to her, she placed a metal hand inside out of view from her seated position, vaguely detecting the sensation of resistance with the dull senses of the filthy steel bionic that was wired directly into her nervous system. The servitor raised her hand to scoop out a very small handful of powdered corn and soy and synthetic nutrients, putting this handful to her mouth to eat.
The powdered nutrients formed a paste in her saliva and her tongue tasted the revolting half nauseating taste of lowest quality grade Agri World produce from the planet Septicus-Agrius, the last surviving Agri World in the Pax sector of Segmentum Tempestus. The paste was incredibly bitter with the residual nitrogen rich chemicals from the artificial fertiliser dumps of Septicus-Agrius indelibly soaking the pallid grains and withered beans at the time of harvest, the food processing factories performing only the most rudimentary of detoxification chem scrubbings of the produce to render it just safe enough for human consumption.
The servitor didn't react to the foulness of her food, for she had never known any other type of food. Servitors were so low ranking and expendable that the tech priests of Ferrous Prime had always fed them the cheapest food they possibly could. Even before the orks stole the other better Agri Worlds the tech priests of Ferrous Prime had exclusively purchased the cheap and nasty food of Septicus-Agrius to feed their servitors as cheaply as possible, Septicus-Agrius specialised in cheap slave food for those with no choice in what they eat.
Across the Pax Sector the entire Sector population was now forced to eat this same bitter slave food, and even this was heavily rationed. Food riots were raging in the starving hive cities and habitation blocks of many planets in the sector and people killed in these deadly riots were fed into "corpse starch" factories to be butchered, detoxified, processed, cooked and canned in metal meat cans, the cans distributed sparingly to try to ease the famine with the meat of the dead. The corpse starch was never enough and heavily armed bands of "corpse collectors" stalked through the dark corners of the hives to pick off beggars and homeless and other marginalised people to add "fresh meat" to the factories.
The Imperial Guard recruitment offices in the starving hive cities were inundated with miles long lines of desperate hungry people trying desperately to enlist in return for guaranteed infantry food rations. The Imperial Navy and Merchant Navy likewise had their recruitment offices inundated with a deluge of desperate people trying to enlist. Millions were accepted into the Imperial Guard to fight against the orks, but millions more were turned away for some health problems, the Guard did not want to waste precious food on sickly emaciated men too weak to fight, these truly destitute rejects were utterly damned if even the Imperial Guard wouldn't take them.
The servitor knew none of this as she ate her precious priceless stolen food, eating with mindless contentment the vile disgusting food.
The servitor finished eating and inspected her surroundings. She was in a dark tunnel near the active mine face, the tunnel freshly blasted and filled with loose stones of iron ore awaiting extraction with a motorised shovel. The servitor had not been here long and had not planned to be here in her random wanderings, she simply wandered the tunnels at random and stole any electricity she could find when she needed it.
Light around a corner in the tunnel disturbed the servitor and she turned her head to squint at a pair of huge headlights, hearing the rumble of an engine and the crunch of stones under fat tyres but unable to see anything in the glare of the twin lights.
The vehicle ignored the servitor and simply moved around her in the width of the tunnel, it dropped a huge mechanical shovel and drove past her, scooping up the loose iron ore rocks that covered the tunnel floor. As the headlights passed her the servitor could make out the side of a large mechanical shovel earthmoving vehicle with large synthetic rubber tyres, the vehicle piloted by a blank faced female servitor who was wired directly into the vehicle.
The vehicle filled its shovel with rocks at a huge freshly blasted pile of rocks further down the tunnel, then reversed back with a beeping sound, narrowly missing the servitor and her food crate. The servitor was unbothered to be nearly run over and she continued to sit next to the power box on the tunnel wall.
The mechanical shovel made many trips to scoop out the iron ore rubble from the tunnel, taking the full shovel loads away to presumably some drop off location like an ore conveyor belt or a helical ore auger. The servitor's battery fully recharged just as the shovel finished scooping out the tunnel, she unplugged her leg and put away the cable.
The servitor held the sleeping Subject Wah and stood up, she grabbed her crate of food with one hand and walked out of the tunnel, the crate sliding behind her with a metallic screech of metal on rough stone. The screeching metal awoke Subject Wah, making her blink and cry.
(Subject Wah) (interrogative why) (action Wah noise)? The servitor asked in a burst of audio binary from a small speaker system surgically implanted inserted deep inside her respiratory trachea.
Subject Wah kept crying and the servitor just kept walking after this brief pause.
The servitor dragged her crate of food noisily around a corner and came face to face with a fellow female servitor who was walking into the tunnel. The two servitors paused.
The second female servitor looked very similar to the first, naked and blonde haired, filthy with dust and all four of her limbs replaced with metal bionics. The main difference between the two was that the second servitor had one metal arm replaced with an enormous metal rock drill, presumably used for drilling the holes in the rock for mining explosive charges.
The second servitor emitted a burst of audio binary.
(Subject Servitor) (subset female) (state in the way) (action move out of) (location the way).
The first servitor with the baby replied.
(Subject this servitor) (subset female) (action moving) (location out of way of) (Subject Drill Servitor) (Subset female).
The servitor with the baby moved to one side, dragging her crate of food with her. The drill servitor silently continued walking into the tunnel, soon followed by the loud sound of rock being drilled.
Subject Wah was still crying but the servitor ignored her Wah noises, continuing to walk down the tunnel. The tunnel joined another tunnel at a junction ahead, and the servitor entered this junction to find a dimly lit gallery tunnel with many side tunnels to other mine workings, the gallery tunnel walls were studded with occasional dim electric lights attached to lines of cables along the upper right wall, the tunnel itself sparsely populated by a few mindless servitors walking into various side tunnels on their own mono task business.
The servitor had a full battery and a food crate. The only thing she lacked was water to drink. The servitor therefore moved in a random direction down the galley in the hopes of finding some water to drink.
The air was smoggy and dusty but thankfully not (too) radioactive down in this mine, the ventilation system being rad filtered to remove the worst nasties from the air outside. The factory had likewise been rad filtered to stop the servitors all dropping dead, it was essential with the rad soaked outside air of Ferrous Prime.
The air was not only rad filtered but was also oxygen enriched in this mine, with the slight ozone stench of artificial oxygen actively added to the air supply to prevent anoxia in this heavily polluted mine. All the enclosed buildings and tunnels on Ferrous Prime required the addition of artificial oxygen as photosynthesis just wasn't a thing on the rad sterilised surface of this toxic planet. The air would have run out of oxygen long ago if not for massive atmospheric processing factories that used chemical processes to produce vast quantities of oxygen synthetically.
The servitor dragged her crate down the tunnel for hundreds of meters, passing blank faced fellow servitors who ignored her. Subject Wah stopped crying and fell asleep from the soporific motion of being carried, the servitor continued marching relentlessly with the crate loudly scraping behind her.
She turned a corner in the gallery and encountered a squad of four Skitarii soldiers holding laser based rifles, these soldiers all male and all marching down the galley tunnel on some military business of their own.
The servitor was too stupid to attempt to flee and she just kept marching mindlessly down the tunnel, intent on walking past the Skitarii soldiers. The soldiers spared the servitor a brief glance, but they were men so they didn't notice the silent sleeping Subject Wah, too busy looking at the servitor's bare breasts and vagina. One of the Skitarii soldiers pinched her bare fleshy bottom with a chuckle as she walked past.
"The flesh is weak. Stop sexually assaulting the servitor." The Skitarii who ranked highest in the four man fire team admonished the one who had pinched the servitor's bottom.
"Yes sir. What is she even doing with that busted looking crate anyway?" The offending soldier replied.
"She's obviously taking a damaged crate away to recycling, leave her alone." The fire team leader snapped.
"Yes sir, that is logical sir."
The four Skitarii continued on their way, the servitor herself too confused to react to the sensation of her bottom being pinched, blissfully unaware of just how lucky she had been that they hadn't been suspicious. She just continued walking down the gallery.
She randomly left the dimly lit gallery at a dark side tunnel on the right, her mind locked brain having no specific destination in mind. The new dark tunnel was deserted and dusty, from the lack of recent footprints in the dust it was obviously not in use for some considerable time. The servitor followed this abandoned tunnel regardless, finding little but dust and old exhausted mine works.
The tunnel led into a vast maze of completely abandoned tunnels and chambers, with little but the occasional rusty metal piece of junk to be found here. The servitor explored so deeply into this maze that she eventually came out of it into a completely different low traffic gallery tunnel, walking down this gallery past the occasional oblivious servitor walking around on their own business.
The servitor took another random side tunnel and entered a chamber filled with a large amalgamation of large metal water tanks and fluid pumps all connected together by pipes and power cables. Soft white work lights filled this chamber with dim gentle light, creating shadowy alcoves throughout the complex mess of pipes and tanks and machines and support girders. Servitors wandering around walkways all over this complex installation, all mono tasked to operate and maintain whatever this thing was.
The servitor held Subject Wah tightly and dragged her crate noisily behind her, she walked into the chamber and began randomly exploring the shadowy underside of the huge installation of tanks and pipes, finding many noisy water pumps vibrating as they pumped fluid of some sort.
The servitor randomly encountered another servitor walking in the opposite direction under the installation. The pair of servitors paused.
(Servitor) (subset male) (action provide) (subject water) (subset drinkable) (preposition to) (subject this servitor) (subset female).
The male servitor paused at this binary command. Then replied with a burst of binary clicks.
(Servitor) (subset female) (action follow) (subject this servitor) (subset male).
The female servitor held Subject Wah tightly and followed as the male servitor led the way through the installation. The male servitor was naked just like the female servitor and he had the trunk like stump of a severed small hairy penis and no testicles, the male servitors were castrated and emasculated on Ferrous Prime to make them less aggressive and to avoid getting dangly bits caught in machinery.
The two servitors were semi mindless and quite amazingly stupid, the female dragging her crate behind her as she followed the male.
The male servitor led the female servitor to a huge open pool of frothing grey water that smelled quite awful.
(Subject sewerage) (subset grey water) (state radiation sterilised) (state technically safe) (preposition to) (action drink).
"Technically safe to drink" was good enough for the stupid female servitor. She parked her crate of food out of the way nearby and she walked to a ladder that descended down into the metal sided pool of frothing sewer water.
The servitor contentedly climbed down into the reeking water with Subject Wah and had a much needed drink. The water tasted indescribably bad but it was radiation sterilised, the microbes from the sewerage were rad fried and dead, however the dead remains of these microbes was not pleasant to imbibe. The servitor was too stupid to have any hesitation in drinking herself full with this vile water.
The servitor was currently standing in neck deep grey water, with the crying Subject Wah also submerged to the neck. The servitor was filthy with dust and she decided that she needed a bath. Subject Wah could also do with a good clean.
The servitor felt peaceful contentment as she liberally washed her tiny baby in partially filtered sewage, massaging the grey froth into her baby's hair and soaking away the caked dust and baby faeces in the vile water.
The servitor felt wonderful pleasure as she soaked and scrubbed her own dusty body in the filthy water, she even submerged her entire head several times to soak the grit and dust out of her hair. The dust grey was soon replaced with a slight hint of poo brown, but this didn't bother the servitor.
For an entire hour she washed herself and her baby in the reeking frothy grey water, removing almost all of the dust from both their bodies. The servitor eventually climbed out holding Subject Wah, both of them now dust free (but reeking like a sewer.
It was a step in the right direction, (sort of).
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