The Violet Rose Society Pt 03

The Real Agenda and Musings of the Past.

Prince Elian Augustin, originally fourth in line to inherit and oversee the 'prestigious' Augustin shipyards, a massive collection of docks and maintenance facilities around a large asteroid called 'The Novias Magastus', stood silently outside the transit carriage that bought him to his laboratory.

He stood still for a moment, looking all around him. It was at times like this that he came to realise just how massive the Genoxia truly was.

The 14km long vessel was mostly inhabited by servitors, all of the essential maintenance, repairs and production needed was done completely without intervention by a human being. It had to be, there was just under 300 people on a ship that could technically house several million.

It was mostly empty.

A massive chunk of metal, propelled through the warp by a science that even he couldn't begin to understand himself, a secret that was always jealously guarded, by the Imperium, and anyone else who could do it.

Without the transit network than ran throughout the ship, it would have taken him the best part of a full day just to navigate through the maze of decks, back chutes and emergency ladders just to get where he was now.

The main dome, and the central palace where he and Farro's now lived, was just over a kilometre from where he was, and the ships main bridge, where the navigators slumbered and lived their solitary and cocooned lives. Was even further away.

He hadn't been to the bridge since they had entered the warp, according to his wrist interface, the ship had the realspace equivalent of three weeks before the Genoxia would 'surface' to its destination, a brown dwarf star system with the simple numerical designation of 41176-12UC.

The 'UC' meaning uncharted, no Imperial or Gamenite vessel had visited it yet. The overwhelming majority of stars in the galaxy had those two letters at the end of their string of numbers.

He looked up above him, the decks seemed to stack on top of each other into infinity, and the low light and utter silence bought a melancholy feeling over him. Looking back down, he realised there was now no going back to his old life ever again.

'I miss my brothers smelly hound Rendevere! That mangy mongrel would fill this place up with noise in no time!'

He shook himself out of it. Focusing back onto his task as he approached the sealed entrance.

It wasn't located in the areas that were modified by his late father's shipwrights, so this place was the original Ymiri architecture. He didn't know what it was once used for, probably yet more storage for minerals, but its large space and abundance of what was their (more advanced) equivalent of cognitator interfaces, meant it was ideal for the forbidden act he was about to commit.

The door opened and he slowly walked over to the now completed central work area, the servitors had done exactly as was specified for once, and he was pleased with all the equipment and technology present.

He turned to the main space where the vitae chambers where, a technology that allowed embryo's to fully develop and be birthed without the need of a mother to carry to term.

Farro's thought that this whole venture was just about sex. For the society it was, and the Prince did enjoy the access to the Ymiri women.

But it was what he was going to do here that was the reason for stealing this ship, for turning on his family oaths and becoming what amounted to an outlaw.

He was going to nurture members of the Gamenite bloodline free from the withering,once and for all, and he needed a controlled and isolated population to do it.

The men all provided their seed samples when they came onboard, each of the Ymiri women had some eggs extracted when they were sedated and finally, he had some unfertilized eggs and partially developed embryos with the withering to compare genetic templates to.

He was going to use the societies seed to fertilize the Ymiri female eggs, then develop the embryo's sequentially in the vitae chambers, discarding the failures and using successful ones as generational stepping stones, until all traces of the foul malformation was gone.

The Withering worked by attacking the second X chromosome. Causing damage to the developing fetus during the very early stages of development. It was a hereditary disease in which the symptoms only manifested in females, causing the bones to slowly become brittle and the aging process to go haywire. Because of this, all of the Gamenite bloodlines women where incredibly frail, prone to illness and eventually dying without constant medical supervision throughout their lives.

The bloodlines historicae suspected that the original 'vector' had been introduced into the water supply of his ancestors homeworld. Done by agents of the High Lord Vandire, House Gamen, as it was known then, had the capability to easily move survivors offworld, so the Fraternis Militia had covertly introduced the original pathogen into their worlds drinking water, in order to ensure that anyone who escaped the pogrom itself would still suffer and die over time.

It spread through the whole population within a few years, as the planet only had sparse water reserves to begin with, and the population had to share from the same source or import offworld.

Lying dormant as they fled across light years, harassed by Fraternis Militia forces and opportunistic Xenos, The Gamenites and a large population of other Imperial Refugees from many other worlds eventually found their way to the very tip of the northeastern frontier.

It was in this place that they found themselves in a tiny corner of what was once called the Terosian Consortium, long dead ancient humans, killed by the ravages of the long night, or maybe some other unknown force. The Terosians had great foresight however, whatever calamity had befell them, they knew that it would eventually destroy them completely. Thus rather than try and save a few of themselves, they organically 'manufactured' an entire descendant population to inherit their old systems and offworld infrastructures to carry on after them.

They created the Ymiri.

Its suspected that the enslaved ones within the small number of systems that the Gamenites managed to wrest control of, represent only a small fraction of the total number, that all across the old Consortiums ancient sphere of influence, semi nomadic populations of the abhuman bio constructs live and fight to survive a cruel galaxy.

They are human, mostly, it would take a particularly zealous stance on human purity for servants of the Imperium to declare them otherwise, but their ancestry was still artificial.

That artificiality was exactly why they could potentially be used to cure the Withering, Their entire Genetic template was 'assembled' strand by strand, like a master builder laying a masonry foundation of some great edifice. Their only actual link to the rest of the human race was the information the Terosians had on their advanced 'computers'.

It meant that they were largely free of all the damage wrought by generations of careless genetic tinkering during the age of technology and afterward. Free of the taints inflicted by weapons too horrific to even comprehend.

Free at least for now. They were still human, and despite the augments and alterations they have, they can still produce viable offspring with other human populations. There was always a danger that the withering could jump both to them and the base imperials that accompanied the Gamenites on their exodus.

It was apparently for this reason that the matrinovae, the families self proclaimed 'heritage police' had forbidden ever breeding outside of the bloodlines, as the social effects of the withering took hold however, they also tried to outlaw any kind of intimate relations outside altogether, and they had been partially successful at least with isolating and preventing relations with the rest of the 'mongrel' Imperial populace.

But they couldn't pull it off with the Ymiri, by that time their enslavement had already become well established, and the strangely alluring attractiveness of the abhumans meant that sex was always going to be a motivation to keep them in bondage, thus the venomous matriarchs of the families were prevented from passing that prohibition by an alliance of influential slaver guilds and the Gamenites powerful male members.

Thus it was that man and woman within Gamenite society, became symbiotic adversaries. They needed each other to have descendants, but the diseases symptoms and the wandering desires of the bloodlines men drove a venomous wedge between the sexes.

Nonetheless, it was still prohibited to bear mixed children with them, and that was just what Prince Elian was about to do. Which was why he could not just flee with the ship outright. He had to arrange that little charade with the warehouse modules, to make them at least suspect that the ship was lost in an accident rather than actually stolen.

Prince Elian finished activating and booting up the last of the labs equipment, a cursory check indicated that everything was ready, he set to work doing the first invitriae fertilisations. It was going to be a long few hours, and he hoped that Farro's could handle things while he was busy.