Chapter 24Forge
Zeta the peddlitute put down her arc welder and lifted up her tinted welding face shield, admiring her hard work. Zeta Mansion was now a little bit closer to being fit for a baby to live in.
Zeta had spent much of the last few days making the air in her home more safe for an infant, specifically trying to weld up all the gaps to make the structure airtight and installing crude air ducting throughout the ceiling for an air scrubbing machine to ventilate the home. For her troubles so far she had air tightened approximately 15 percent of the home and completed sheet metal air ducting to maybe the three smallest rooms and a bit of hallway, she still had many more days of work to go.
The crude scrap metal building interior currently looked a bit like a house of horrors, with smoked servitor carcasses and organs hanging from hooks on the end of chains hanging from the ceiling, the place resembling an abattoir. Zeta pushed past the dangling smoked cadavers, going to check on the baby.
The mother servitor was as naked and disturbing as ever, all blank faced and deeply creepy, holding her tiny baby in her brutal metal arms. It gave Zeta a slight chill every time she saw the fragile helpless baby in the arms of this feral industrial machine, those metal arms had industrial rated electric servos that could flip over an automobile much less kill a baby.
The mother servitor was, (according to herself), a factory nut boxer by mono task programming, but physically she was a common model nonspecialised servitor with versatile bionic hands that could do a wide range of tasks. Ferrous Prime made these sorts of servitors by the billions and sent them all over the place to do many different mono tasks besides just nut boxing. This versatility made her much more dangerous than her harmless nut boxing occupation would suggest, it didn't require huge feats of strength to be a nut boxer but her versatile bionics were CAPABLE of huge feats of strength because of the other heavy labor tasks her model sometimes did. Those metal arms had the strength of a carjack but with all the speed of a flesh arm.
The servitor was a high powered industrial machine, holding a fragile little baby in machine arms designed to manipulate and manhandle hundreds of kilograms of steel. It set Zeta's teeth on edge slightly to see a human baby being held by literally factory servo arms.
"Burt-tatatata-tatata-tatatatatata." The mother servitor emitted a burst of audio binary clicks.
Zeta had to think for a moment to remember her poor grasp of the binary servitor language.
"Subject Wah… Action… Subject Wah, action wah sound, action ceased, time 34 minutes ago?" Zeta fumbled to translate.
"Burt-tata."
That was a "yes", so the baby had been crying earlier but had then stopped.
Zeta checked on the baby. Wah was looking extremely content and comfortable in her mother's metal arms, staring at nothing in particular the way very small babies do.
Wah briefly glanced at Zeta, but it was obvious from her body language that Wah preferred to keep being held by her mother. Wah seemed distrustful of anyone who wasn't her mother, having a singular bond with her mother that was completely understandable for an infant.
Zeta checked and then changed Wah's nappy, the mother servitor tolerated this so long as she kept holding Wah during the entire procedure (which made it harder). Zeta was annoyed but completed the procedure for the sake of the baby.
The servitor herself was much cleaner than in the past after Zeta had bathed the reluctant uncooperative thing, the servitor was hard to bathe and kept escaping the procedure, Zeta had to physically chase her and herd her back into the bathing area like some really stupid livestock. Zeta bathed the servitor (and Wah) at least once a day if she could, the servitor was (quasi) toilet trained (to squat in only certain places when she needed to go), but couldn't wipe herself, requiring Zeta to wash her anus every time she did a shit. It wasn't a pleasant task.
Some medical grade servitors were very hygienic to a fault, but the factory servitors were gross, they simply got routinely hosed down with some chemical fluid like carbonic acid or something in the factory to clean away their filth. There was a specialist type of servitor whose job it was to clean up the other servitor's like this, it was all very unpleasant and disgusting.
Zeta left the mother and baby and washed her hands with soap and water. Zeta had no shortage of water, her mansion had an electric bore pump outside that pumped up carbonic acid into a tank from underground deposits, the smallest drop of water added to the tank would then decompose any amount of this carbonic acid into more water, the carbon dioxide byproduct was carefully vented away into an air current in a nearby tunnel through a series of vent pipes.
Zeta Mansion was in a very good location to avoid discovery by the Skitarii whilst still being relatively close to the working mine, it was not quite halfway between the mine and the surface, in an old exhausted mine cavern that had been abandoned for hundreds of years. The cavern had once held the "town" of Menial accommodation hab unit demountables long ago in history and had had a decent amount of ancient scrap metal and garbage left behind, most of which had been used to construct Zeta Mansion along with other scrap metal she had found in other tunnels and caverns.
The site had already been picked clean by archaeotech hunters centuries before Zeta arrived, meaning that Skitarii and tech priests were very unlikely to explore here again, giving some security. Most importantly of all as the former site of a town it still had a town grade power box connected to the mains power, giving Zeta Mansion ample power. The surface nuclear fusion reactor power stations produced easily enough power to cope with the little Zeta stole, as long as she wasn't too greedy and was very careful how she drew power the grid operators (or worse the Lexmechanic) wouldn't even notice the power drain, writing the loss off as transmission losses in ancient wiring and other completely normal and innocent incidental power losses.
The biggest protection the location had was the sheer enormous size of the maze of tunnels under the factory cluster after over 10 thousand years of heavy mining, the labyrinth of tunnels was sanity defyingly large, so big that you could search it for years without randomly encountering Zeta Mansion if you didn't know where to look.
Ironically the Adeptus Mechanicus did know nearly the exact volume of all the tunnels and caverns using an ancient hack developed by the Greek mathematician Archimedes, namely that the volume of any irregular solid object can be precisely measured by immersing said object in a known quantity of fluid and measuring how the fluid level changes. The atmosphere of Ferrous Prime was a gas and therefore acted like a fluid, and thousands of years worth of precise atmospheric data existed, as the tunnels had been dug out the empty space had been occupied by the atmosphere, slightly lowering the amount of atmosphere remaining above the surface.
The resulting volume was approximately a giga-crapload, which was like a gigantic crapload of volume only a billion times bigger than a crapload. (Admittedly a very scientific unit of measurement). The estimated volume of tunnels and caverns in all parts of the planet combined was insanely large, and getting bigger every time a new bit of iron ore was dug out and eventually exported off planet.
The immense volume of the tunnels globally might be known with scientific precision, but the exact layout and contents of any one specific section of the globe spanning catacombs was much less precisely known. The Menials in ages past had documented their digs in ancient digital reports that were still present in the immense data cores of the Ferrous Prime computer records, but Menials were also known to bullshit records when it suited them or to make errors, to dig slightly in the wrong direction or to otherwise mess up in some way. Individually these incorrect entries were minor but collectively over ten thousand years they could add up to make a complete pigs breakfast of resulting maps of the tunnels.
It was for this reason that archaeotech could still occasionally be found in some places in the catacombs despite thousands of years of archaeotech prospectors searching for it, because the maps were frequently off and old machines or supplies got lost in the tunnels by stupid logistical servitors of millennia past. Some tunnels were not documented by lazy past Menials who dug them and got subsequently mistaken for other tunnels on maps, leading to considerable confusion and more than a few corpses of people who never found their way back out again and starved or dehydrated to death.
The wise didn't go looking in the dark old places in these exhausted levels, even the Skitarii didn't patrol through endless tunnels in the vain hope of randomly encountering a peddlitute hideout. Zeta knew the way to her home because she had secret landmarks to look for that blended in with the surroundings, and she had taught her former clients to follow these landmarks to find her for sex after she had personally shown them the way. The Skitarii did not know the way.
There were of course *worse* things than lowly Skitarii mine guard hyspasists lurking in these endless dark tunnels, in the dark could be discovered mechanical horrors so horrible and terrifying that it frayed the sanity of one's mind to even think about them. But the huge labyrinth was a powerful defence against running into *them* as well, in this endless maze of dark tunnels was an army of monstrous terrors lurking somewhere, waiting for prey to cross their path.
The globe spanning labyrinth of tunnels was the best place on Ferrous Prime to hide if you didn't want to be found, and on a forge world this included entities far more dangerous than humble nat born peddlitutes. Every year literally millions of servitors went feral and those that survived more than a few hours usually ended up down here, hungry for human flesh and energy. Worse than the feral servitors were the heavily armed human gangs of nat born men. Worse than the gangs were the "fallen Skitarii" or "dark Skitarii", Skitarii who had gone rogue or renegade or traitor or just plain nuts, a single one of these metal psychos could rip apart an armed gang in seconds unless they were exceptionally quick shots. But even WORSE than the renegade Skitarii, worse than all the other things combined were the "hereteks", fallen tech priests.
On the rare occasions when tech priests fell from grace they could be unimaginably dangerous. To flee the retribution of their own unfallen kind they would typically take refuge down in the deepest darkest parts of the labyrinth of catacombs and mines, and in these dark places they would set up secret laboratories to conduct their unnatural experiments on machines and flesh. In these twisted laboratories were created unholy mechanical monstrosities far worse than any Skitarii, and many of these experiments were subsequently set loose in the tunnels to haunt the nightmares of anyone unfortunate enough to encounter one and live.
Zeta had seen some of these horrors in the dark and survived. She had seen the infamous "metal shark of the lake" in a gigantic flooded cavern, the shark had snapped at her from the water (formerly carbonic acid until the blood of past victims had catalysed the carbonic acid into water). Zeta had been wise enough to stay away from the water when the shark struck and had just avoided being bitten by a few feet. The shark had been a horrific and gigantic thing, her laspistol hadn't even damaged it, it was the size of a bus and the lake it inhabited was deep.
Even worse than the shark had been "the multiple bits of Decimal the Deranged", who had actually TALKED to Zeta in a supremely terrifying conversation, telling her about its creator known only as "The Abuser". The multiple bits of Decimal the Deranged had been a metal toothed horror beyond description, with Dissociative Identity Disorder (multiple personality disorder), the different "bits" were different personalities that changed at random, one moment nice and friendly and the next moment screaming in your face and threatening to kill you. The gigantic metal monstrosity was not hostile (depending upon what bit was in control at a given moment), but it was really fucking creepy and Zeta did everything she could to avoid it.
Other monsters were around, Zeta could sometimes hear them screaming in the darkness in the deep tunnels. Sometimes they would chase her down a tunnel with huge snapping metal jaws and glowing red eyes if she ventured into their territory, she had only survived by outrunning servitors she had with her, the servitors getting bitten in half.
Nowadays Zeta avoided the deep tunnels where the monsters lurked, her home was far away from the monster tunnels and on a different level. She had very deliberately set up her home in a safe area that wasn't near the horrors. She didn't like to think about them.
Zeta went to her kitchen after changing Wah's nappy, she took a smoked hunk of human servitor ribs and cut the meat from between the bones with an improvised knife. Zeta tasted a sliver of meat and grimaced at the foul taste of human flesh smoked with black engine oil smoke, it tasted bitter and burnt!
Zeta had little choice but to keep eating this meat, it was her staple food now. She ate more with a grimace, she also gave some to the mother servitor who ate it with a blank facial expression.
Zeta resumed welding for a while, making slow steady progress.
Later Zeta was lying on her bed with the mother servitor lying down beside Zeta. The baby Wah lay in the middle between them on the bed, the mother servitor very calm and starting to trust Zeta now after days of hospitality.
The air was slightly cleaner from the partial progress in air sealing the house, it was a very comfortable temperature at this depth underground, constantly a pleasant temperature that never changed underground. The lights to the room were dimmed right down but not completely dark, all was quiet and still.
"We make a beautiful family, people might think we're married to see us now." Zeta chuckled.
"Burt-tatata" the mother servitor replied in a harsh repetitive burst of binary clicks.
"Syntax error." Zeta translated with a sigh, the servitor sure was stupid.
"I really need some intelligent adult company, I will go mad with just you for company. I might go visit some of the other criminals soon just to get some social connection." Zeta said seriously.
The mother servitor had nothing intelligent to say in reply, not understanding the sentence.
Zeta sighed to herself and agreed with herself, she really needed to get an intelligent conversation soon or she would go mad.
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