April 29th at 10:15am
SCENE 34
The sabotage began the way all irreversible things begin: with small, deliberate deviations administered under the precise instructions of Adept LIV, her mechadendrites buried in the room’s cogitator. Nothing happened at first, but then the system responded with a dry mechanical sound: capacitors burned and consoles flashed red as servomotors screeched to a halt.
-Ref 1- The spirits of the machines curse this violation.
As if summoned by the mech-adept, the door slid aside and a spider-like servitor entered the room. Its occuloglobes rotated and fixed on the surprised group as it moved in without acknowledging them further. Hunched and heavy, its pale skin was stretched between blackened maintenance plates. It plugged into the sabotaged panel with a wet click and began running a diagnostic routine, while its limbs started correcting the damage, slowly reversing the sabotage as if rejecting the very concept of interruption. Tanathos lifted his weapon, targeting the fixxer servitor’s head.
-Ref 1- This servitor is linked to the inner sphere of this place
╙►Consequence 1- Destruction would trigger a response
LIV connected to the servitor’s mainframe while it was occupied; her left eye began to twitch. After a couple of minutes, the servitor went limp and collapsed to the floor.
-Ref 1- The instructions and recordings of this unit have been migrated to my memory log.
╙►Addenda 1- The inner log reveals an emission of binary code to an inconclusive location within this facility.
╙►Addenda 2- It contains clearance level Alpha for all areas of this installation.
Bryce understood immediately that they were no longer hidden. She pointed at the huge plated door.
-Open it.

The locks released with a deep grinding sound that felt disturbingly organic. The seam widened, and warm air spilled out, carrying a smell too sweet to be natural: rot that had not yet become death, mixed with ammonia, milk, and blood.
Beyond the door was not a room. It was a production line made of flesh.

The light cut in, and the chamber seemed to stare back. Row after row of bloated rat-mutant bodies hung in harnesses like obscene fruit on iron trellises, stripped of fur and dignity. Their limbs were bound at fixed angles so tightly their muscles could not even spasm freely. Their bellies were distended beyond anatomy, stretched until the skin turned translucent in places, revealing pulsing veins and slow internal movement that was not digestion but forced gestation. Tubes ran into their throats, their abdomens, puncture sites that should have killed them but instead kept them alive. Their mouths were held open by metal gags, and feeding lines throbbed with a steady rhythm, pumping nourishment like fuel into an engine. The air was thick with heat and moisture, every surface glistening as if the chamber itself sweated alongside its prisoners.

The sound was worse than the sight. It was not screaming, as drugged and subdued as they were they could not scream. It was breathing… hundreds of tiny mutants clinging to the swollen and bloodied nipples of the breeding mothers, their mouths sucking corrupted milk dense with a mephitic chemical stench, unwilling and unable to stop. Their throats layered together in ragged, wet rhythms, punctuated by silenced whimpers that died in the tubing. It was the faint clatter of restraints shifting, the soft slap of flesh against harness padding, and the constant drip of fluids into drainage channels.

Servitors moved between the rows on ceiling rails and floor tracks with their thin multi-limbs like arthropods and their instruments polished by use. They did not hurry, as nothing here required urgency.

One of them, in an agonizing need of maintenance, leaned over one of the white brood-mothers as newborns spilled onto a metal tray in a wet, almost continuous stream of biological production. With cold mechanical precision, it examined each infant as it arrived, routing most into an enormous grinding unit in the center of the room that swallowed them, reducing their forms instantly into a brown paste. Only one was set aside and placed among the writhing mass of feeding infants, where she bit and latched onto a nipple.

The servitor moved on without distinction or sentiment, stopping at another containment bay where dozens of human child-sized cubs were restrained in staggered rows and force-fed a brown paste. It stood motionless for a fraction of a cycle before shutting down the feeding circuit of two of them. A heavy stun discharge dropped them into partial paralysis, and the servitor dragged both onto the adjacent processing rail with mechanical efficiency.

There, four different models of medic-servitors with integrated blades and extraction tools opened the lower abdominal and pelvic areas in a single guided sequence designed for access rather than preservation. Internal structures were exposed and immediately indexed by secondary sensors, which located a paired glandular structure. Micro-clamps isolated and severed them extracting them with a wet, suctioning sound in a clean mechanical motion. The opened bodies were then unceremoniously deposited back into the central grinding unit, which swallowed them whole, finally silencing their whimpers and reducing them into slurry for reintegration into the system’s endless, indifferent production loop. The glands were left on the conveyor belt, disappearing through a slot in the thick wall toward the processing room.

Adept LIV projected the data onto the retinal display of her occulobe as discrete operational statements:
-Ref 1- Redefining parameters according to logs in the local gnoosphere
╙► Artificially accelerated gestation cycles
╙► Forced maturation of fetuses and infants
╙► Continuous extraction loop active across multiple containment strata
╙► Heminal subjects classified as production vectors
╙► Male outputs routed to immediate biomass reduction systems
╙► Female outputs retained for growth and harvest of glandular structures
╙► Processing chain confirmed as closed-loop system with 98.7% material reintegration
╙► Glandular structures identified as primary biochemical source for P1-10 compound synthesis
╙► System logic: consistent

Commissar Bryce emptied her stomach onto the muddied floor as she had never done in her life before, her body trying (and failing) to expel even the memory of the scene before her. She lifted her head, gagging for air, then retched again, harsher this time. Her entire frame convulsed as she braced a hand against the wall and clutched at Thanatos, gripping his armor with both hands as if it were the only solid thing left. The filters of his military-grade mask swallowed the stench, and the dark visor muted the worst of what lay beyond the door.
-…Furth