A/N: Patreons and Ko-Fiers(I still don’t know what to call yall) voted for SR. So I guess we’re back?
Scavenged Restoration
Chapter 87
-VB-
Azia grimaced as the flames lashed out like a snake at her before it was quickly reined in by the heart of the fire.
“Okay -!” her manager’s voice rang out from the intercom unit built into her reflective suit. “ -and pour!”
She grunted and growled as she and three others pushed against the wheels to turn the back-up pouring mechanism and got the machine to spill the molten aluminum into the mold below.
“And let go!”
Knowing better than to just “let go,” she and her coworkers all slowly let the wheel turn back against their bracing muscles before they finally stepped away.
She gasped for air as she stumbled away from the wheel while a fresh team of four stepped up to take her place while she took her five minute break, which wasn’t from work but from the exhausting process they just had to go through.
As she and her team got far away enough from the furnaces, they pulled their reflective helmets off and took a deep breath of the warm air that waxed and waned in heat with the flow of the molten metal closer to the furnace.
“Of all facking times for the parts to fail!” someone hissed out.
She groaned. “Don’t complain. You’ll get me to spend more energy than I have,” she grumbled back as she plopped down on the bench close to the temporary resting area. Next to her team’s bench was the next team in line to push that giant wheel.
But without that wheel, she also wouldn’t have a job right now after the latest shitfuckery that the local noble governors did. Whatever it was that they did, they crashed the planet’s economy, and the Chancellor’s auditors were going over everything with a comb. Already, two nobles had been executed for corruption while ten more sat inside prisons.
She used to be a gardener for one of those nobles, but not the ones with green thumbs but the ones that had to haul all sorts of gaudy decorations and exotic plants from this place to that place to suit the mood of the noble that day.
Well, that noble got executed. She was there when it happened.
It wasn’t … well, it would be rude to say satisfying but it sure as hell made her feel good to see that fat fucker’s brains splatter the white grass lawn he’d changed six different times in just a month because those grass weren’t meant for this world!
The Maskirovka didn’t even spare her a glance before moving on.
But now, she was without a job, and if it hadn’t been for one of the machines in her brother’s refinery breaking, then she would have been jobless. As it was, her brother was on the other side of the factory doing whatever it was that engineers did.
But this wheel.
This wheel was a product of her planet’s ancestors doing what they could in harder times to keep the machines working when the parts broke down and they didn’t have the capacity to make those parts.
And unlike her ancestors (her parents and grandparents, really) who would have had to sweat like pigs like she was doing now, she would only hold this job for another three months while the necessary part was getting shipped to them from Victoria II.
Should she be happy that times were good that she didn’t need to sweat for eight hours a day or be upset that she would be jobless again?
Had this been any other factory, the managers might have shut this line down because there were multiple furnaces. So what if one line of furnace was inactive?
But no.
Everyone knew that the aluminum refined in this factory was owned by the state, not a profiteering company. These aluminum went straight into warship manufacturing.
Was that obvious? No. Did anyone tell her that? Through whispers and rumors, yes.
So this factory needed to run at 100% capacity to ensure the survival of the Capellan Confederation, and she was happy to be part of that. Instead of catering to dipshit nobles flaunting the wealth they never had to sweat to get, she got to sweat and know that her work, however menial, was acting as one more brick, one more line of mortar, and one more hand that kept the confederation safe.
No, not just the confederation.
The whole Inner Sphere!
She heard about the loss of one of the cruiser warships. She didn’t know what a cruiser was or whatever, but it was a warship that died fighting the good fight against periphery barbarians that wanted to rampage across the Inner Sphere. And part of keeping them from rampaging was keeping them divided, which …
Honestly, she learned it along with the rest of her family in the monthly public information readouts about the Clans and their way of life and how inferior they were (divided internally just like the Free Worlds League and the Lyran Commonwealth!), but she didn’t really care about the details.
Azia knew that her work was doing good work out there, and that was good enough for her.
-VB-
Just because everything was getting better did not mean that the percentage of idiots, evil, and corrupt men and women changed that much.
It was simply part of human nature that someone will decide they want more for themselves than everyone else. Someone who will look at the needs of society and scoff. People who will happily take more than their fair share.
The reason did matter.
And once the reason was discovered, the judgement could be carried out.
“Hold her still,” he hissed to the orderlies.
The elderly woman currently on the operating table screamed and begged in her own filth, but everyone who worked in this facility ignored her.
This place, the Lab, was a place of condemnation. Regular murderers and rapists didn’t sent here. Regular embezzlers and insider traders didn’t even have the Lab as a consideration for their destination. It took a special kind of person to be considered “irredeemable” by the Chancellor.
By the fucking Chancellor who once stood before a man condemned to death and gave him a chance.
It took a special kind of fucker to be consigned to the Lab.
And as pitiful and pathetic as this old woman looked, she was once the head of a child slaving ring. Had it stopped there, then she might have been jailed in a normal prison. Or just shot, owing to her age.
But no.
She sold the children of the confederation to pirates, Leaguers, and Fedrats. She kept sick videos. She happily sold information vital to the confederation to traitors and enemies of the people. She collaborated with other similarly damned bastards and bitches that engineered the latest artificial famine. Because they owned stocks on a multiplanetary farming megacorporation.
She had been in a position of power where she should have been taking care of the people, but instead chose to take advantage of them in the worst ways possible.
She wasn’t even a servitor.
She was a Nameless.
“You should be honored that the Chancellor’s Botanists has found a use for your old body,” he grunted out between her screams as the orderlies strapped her down. “I hear that this particular concoction uses a very slow neurotoxin to keep you awake while their latest attempt at an anti-aging formula takes effect.” He paused as he walked away. He pulled out a syringe and a vial. He withdrew the contents of the vial with the syringe, changed the needle, and turned back to her. “Right, sorry, I should explain myself. It’s a retroviral formula that acts very quickly, but the Botanists haven’t gotten it quite right. It causes a lot of cancer very quickly, very boisterously,” he narrated as the orderlies stuffed her mouth shut, but she still tried to scream through it. “Very unfortunate, yes? The Botanists were so happy when they found this virus, you know? They were so sure that they could finally be of service to the Chancellor in a creative manner instead of all of the destructive things they kept finding. Like that brain eating bacteria that used chemicals to keep its victim awake permanently. They were so ashamed of themselves for having found it… they still kept it, though.”
He leaned forward, and despite being strapped down, the old woman tried to squirm away from him.
“Fortunately for you, the Botanists did make improvements on the anti-aging formula since its discovery. Indeed! In its original form, the virus permanently locks you out of your body. You stay awake as your body reverses aging. Apparently, something about how the virus initially went about repairing the DNA in the brain's neurons causes that kind of effect. Something about the ‘desync’ in the brain becoming permanent between the voluntary motor controls and the rest of the brain. Instead of becoming trapped in your own body, you get to become a bloated mass of a hundred different cancers, which the Botanists will use to find better adjustments! Even in your suffering, you get to contribute to the confederation! Isn’t that grand?”
Then he pressed the syringe needle into her arm and squeezed down on the plunger. He pulled away and looked down at the slightly hyperventilating old woman.
“I hope you suffer as much as you made those children suffer.”
Then he turned around and left the room with the orderlies. What was going to happen next would create such a mess that he wouldn’t dare to stay in there even with a hazmat suit. It wasn’t about being safe from the bodily fluids but the act of allowing the contents to splatter on his person, you know? Morbidly disgusting!
“Ah, Doctor Sanchez.”
He paused and turned to the speaker.
And he smiled.
“Ah! Agent Tu. What can I do for the Hand of the Chancellor?” he asked.
The Lab was a Maskirovka facility through and through.
The short agent nodded in greeting. “I was hoping to get a brief update on Project COIL.”
Ah, yes. That was the gaudy name for the anti-aging virus.
“Well, it no longer traps someone in their own body.”
“And…?”
“The current formula turns the body into a mass of cancer.”
The agent frowned. “I see. Can you improve on it or is it a dead end?”
“It can improve. Don’t worry, agent. But as I told you from the start, we won’t know exactly how good it will be or how impactful it will be compared to its side effects.”
“I understand. But anything that keeps the Chancellor on the throne for longer is a project we will keep funding.”
Sanchez smirked. “All for the chancellor, yes?”
“All for the chancellor and the confederation.”
“... You know, I never got to ask this before. I was scared before, you understand?”
The agent tilted her head. It was an invitation to speak.
“Is this project the will of the chancellor… or the Maskirovka?”
Were they acting under orders or independently?
The agent untilted her head, didn’t speak, and left.
“I see,” he hummed as he too walked away. It was best he no longer asked that kind of a question. He hummed as he pulled out his Lab phone and checked for what was next on his schedule. “Oohhh! The Mani Mani should be flowering soon. Can’t miss that!”
He ran toward the lab that housed the flowering plant.
After all, who wouldn’t want to look at a flowering fungus that made the soil richer by breaking down metal alloys?