As always, this story was not made with any AI help. No ChatGPT, no Deepseek, no nothing.
Second, this story has futanari as well as interspecies...arguably. I mean, when neanderthals and homo sapien sapiens banged I would still classify that as interspecies, so there you go.
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Time was a nebulous thing where the Warp was concerned.
It wasn't to say that it wasn't a nebulous thing in real space, too, if you didn't live at the same speed that other people did.
But only with the Warp could one accidentally get somewhere before one left.
The Theseus, to be fair, had never experienced any accidental time traveling, and the ancient chrono-protocols that it practiced were largely as orthodox as the rest of the Imperium. But while the sheer possibility would always be an ever-present worry, such absurd feats of time displacement were so rare as to be massive outliers.
Regina, at least, had never experienced anything like that in a long life of traveling to battlefields. And, in the last four months that she had been traveling with The Theseus, the only notable chronological feat that she'd experienced was turning 38 years old.
But four months could still be a long time, depending on how you lived them.
Four months, for example, were long enough for the Vagabond Class transport to have made a few trips around the Sub-Sector. Being a rather ancient, but mostly forgotten, sub-sector of an ancient, but obscure, sector in Segmentum Solar, the light of the Astronomican was warmly omnipresent here, and the inhabitable systems within rather close together.
It was a rather stark contrast to Regina's life, as being from a planet that had lain close to the Eye of Terror, Captains and ships that were not careful to a fault were those that made the bulk of ghost stories in Cadia. But in here, so within the Emperor's Holy Light, the jumps could be long and the consistency of speed could be fast. So it was, even an ex-charter transport without the hope of ever gaining a Navigator for itself like the Theseus could freely cover fantastic distances.
But sadly, this was one of the only bits of good fortune that Regina'd had.
"Medical samples reviewed," a mechanical thing that could have been one of Regina's servitors said in monotone. It wasn't that it couldn't express human emotion; Regina knew it to be a mouthy bastard in other circumstances. But whenever it was merely fulfilling its job, it tended to default to cold, disinterested professionalism.
Regina could think of worse things for her Techpriest to be.
"Ogryn maintain consistent reads in the face of ample feed and fluid, so biostasis can be ruled out," it continued, "Given this one's data on Ogryn is out of date by several millenia, there are few things I am confident in concluding. But at this stage, it would be safe to conclude that this is merely their natural optimal state of being."
"So...they are all healthy?" Regina asked.
"That is what this one stated, yes," it affirmed.
"Emperor be praised, something went right!" Regina rolled her eyes. Sarcasm was unbefitting of an officer, but she was a Colonel now.
She could afford it.
The mechanical being's "eyes" adjusted to study her. "This one supposes the successful crossbreeding of one of the auxilia might lead an uninitiated such as you to think them acceptable."
Regina almost choked at that.
"But believe me, Colonel," the oranged-robed machine priest assured her, "Fecundity is not the same as adaptability. Thus, our suspicions, optimistic as they were, had to be confirmed."
Looking out the window of her office, what used to be the biggest control station for the cranes of the Theseus bottom-most hull, Regina thought that she could almost see Wam out there with the rest of the girls.
The ugliest of all her Ogryn was engorging with her seed.
"Quite the incredible thing, all the same, to see the degraded Ogryn genome rehabilitated in this way," the machine being mused.
Regina grew testy, "We can stop talking about this subject now, Dietrich."
"As you wish," Dietrich shrugged, "Though my files on the subject are yours to freely peruse if you like."
There was not a single inch of the Imperium that possessed any advanced technology that the Techpriests of Mars were not somehow, in some way, involved in. Even a subsector as forgotten as the one they were in would not be able to function without them.
But their particular state of existence here was anything but the usual. In the end, had it been, Regina might well not have been able to get the help she now had.
The sub-sectors that the Theseus could safely travel to, the ones that refugees from Joss' Pearl had so far shown up in, had no true Forgeworlds nearby. Planets where the Admech had set up shop? Yes, there were a few, but the true factory worlds of the Sector lay quite a while away from where the Theseus could easily travel.
That wasn't to say that they couldn't have if they needed to. Indeed, loyalty to the Imperium made any notions "easy" or " hard" immaterial in the face of duty. But luckily for them, there were many immigratory fleets of tech priests that gave patronage to these systems. They would show up, collect materials and prospective personnel from the sub-sectors, and shunt both into huge Factory Cathedrals. In exchange, they would divvy out finished products and technology wherever they made their rounds.
It was an inferior alternative to having access to an actual Forge World in almost every way except the one that mattered the most to Regina at the present: They were willing to attend to her immediate needs without much preamble.
Dietrich, the head of her regiment's techpriests, was himself from one of these Factory Ships. The Theseus had been fortunate enough to run across them in one of the first systems they had visited in these systems. He and his space-bound ilk were an Emperor-blessing because, despite the fact that the Administratum tried to handle most issues pertaining to military acquisitions, that always left a lot of holes that a skillful Colonel had to fill on their own.
And her current arrangement was essentially one big administrative hole that she had to fill on her own.
Usually, Regina would have a full staff to handle the byzantine corridors of red tape that the Administratum had, but all she had for that was fracking Ogryn to do the job. Which was to say, it couldn't be done.
It got to the point that, before running across the Mettle of Metal, the Factory Cathedral that Deitrich hailed from, Regina had for one insane second simply considered turning all her girls into a Regiment of naked pugilists!
"Great," Regina said and actually meant it. Then she spoke over her shoulder, "Set pen to paper, and ready to dispense."
A servitor with the emblem of Regina's new Regiment sewn into its chest, she had reporpused the heraldry of the Theseus for military uses after all, stiffened and produced a roll of parchment with its still human arm.
A pen hung from the mechanical contraption that was its other hand, and ink pots readily appeared where its fingers would be.
"Quadruple test passed in as many months. Regiment declared healthy. Expansion of it, adoptive or...natural still ongoing." Regina rumbled what should have been the job of her secretary, if she had one.
"Tests to continue for the next few years to avoid any dereliction of duty and..." the shambling organic machine kept up with her, scribbling down all her notes. Regina had it write down the minute improvements that she'd managed to generate and the daily statuses that she'd just managed to confirm.
Writing servitors that could transcribe her words to paper helped a great deal, and she WAS thankful to Captain Arlong, the Captain of the Theseus, for making them available for her service.
